Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.
Fabulous (not) in Seoul
By Jason Lim
I always found the hundredth monkey phenomenon interesting. It's this theory that there is a critical tipping point (i.e. 100th monkey) that would trigger a new behavior or idea that would spread almost instantaneously throughout the population. It also reminds me of the popular saying that Korea has a “Pot Characteristic.” No, I don't mean the green stuff that you smoke. It means that the Korean public opinion heats up quickly, just like a cooking pot does, only to cool down just as quickly. In other words, it speaks to the tendency of Korea to collectively jump on a trend or issue really quickly and then move on en masse to the next hot thing without lingering too long.
Why should that be? Well, it's actually not that difficult to see why when you live in Seoul for a while: everyone lives on top of one another and is largely visible to everyone else.
The combination of post-Korean War demographics, rapid industrialization, geography and historical trends all conspired to create an incredible concentration of people, power, wealth and everything else in Seoul. For decades, anyone with ambition, hope and vision for the future would move to Seoul to try their luck. This is where you had to be in order to be anyone. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that Korea is literally the Republic of Seoul.
Today, about half of Korea's 50 million population live in the larger Seoul Metropolitan area. Whatever demographic category you might belong to ― rich, poor, young, old, straight, gay, Korean, non-Korean ― you are likely to live in Seoul and see one another every day both professionally and personally. I don't mean that a young college kid fresh off the boat from rural Korea would be in the same social circles as a Seoul-native, privileged white-collar bank executive. What I do mean, however, is that there is a good possibility that they would at least encounter one another or be aware of each other in some ways ― not as individuals, per se, but as different, delineated but partially overlapping groups. In other words, they would at least be visible to each other due to the sheer concentration of the population in Seoul.
In fact, when I used to live in Seoul in the late 1990s, the one thing that struck me was how people from vastly different socioeconomic classes occupied the same spaces, albeit fleetingly. There was definitely more cross-pollination than I had experienced growing up in New York City in the 1980s.
I went to a top private high school in New York growing up. Although I wasn't one of them, I was friends with the rich Manhattan and Hamptons crowd. I definitely wasn't in the in-crowd to be sure (I mean, my nickname was Long Duk-dong after Sixteen Candles came out), but I wasn't totally shut out of privileged access either. However, I never saw Donald Trump or his kids. I never got to glimpse the truly privileged lives of the wealthy. They were invisible to me and many others like me. There definitely was a wall ― unspoken, invisible but very high and very real ― that marked the boundary between the wealthy and everybody else. I literally couldn't see what their lives were like, which means that I had no target or any jealously or envy that was in my face all the time. In today's lingo, there was no cause for me to feel an acute and constant sense of relative poverty because I had no one to compare myself to.
But in Seoul, everybody sees everyone else every day. You are constantly surrounded by those that you have to gauge yourself against. Many of them are far richer than you can ever hope to be. The concentrated density of your existence sears the perceived reality of everyone else's fabulousness into your senses. This periscope visibility and inescapable proximity of Seoul really drives this velocity of trends, fashion, topics and the next hot thing. And you can't keep up. In fact, it's impossible to keep up.
And then focus the artificial and amplified lens of social media on this. You're now an ant with a magnifying glass held by a cruel god training a hot beam of unbearable light on your back. It's Instagram hell come true. You feel as if you're sharing your apartment with hundreds of Instagram influencers. This is what living in Seoul feels like for many young people.
Elders tells us that you are not supposed to do this. That you have to walk your own path. Then again, trite admonitions warning you to define self-worth based on some intrinsic value is hollow when our own evolutionary psychology drives us to constantly measure our own status and security in relative terms against others. Others who are constantly in your face. Others who are far more fabulous than you are.
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.