Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.
How many Olive Youngs can there be in Seoul?
By Jason Lim
It's fascinating how familiarity can blind you to the obvious that only comes to light when you see the same thing through the perspective of someone seeing it for the first time. That was the case in Seoul last week when I visited and stayed at a high-end Gangnam hotel for a week with two of my colleagues from work. These folks were not unfamiliar with big cities. One of them lives in New York, and the other in Arlington, Virginia, often touted as one of the best cities to live in America. So, they were as cosmopolitan as anyone else you will typically find in the United States.
Nevertheless, they were absolutely overwhelmed by Gangnam. What's fascinating is what they were overwhelmed by. They were overwhelmed by two things mainly.
First was the sheer assault on the senses that the bling glitz of Gangnam inflicted on them ceaselessly as we made our way from the hotel to COEX, where our meeting took place. Granted, we mostly traveled by Seoul's subway, and the underground in Seoul tends to be one giant, connected shopping mall. Even with that, however, the sheer number of shops selling everything from food, clothing, makeup (How many Olive Young shops are there in Seoul anyways?) and everything else under the sun was overwhelming because there was no visual reprieve from retail shops in your line of sight. You almost feel like you are swimming underwater and want to pop up to take a quick breath, but the surface of the water is ever-receding, and there is literally no opportunity for your senses to take a breather.
I know that we don't have to really notice everything; let all these shops recede into the mental background. However, for the first-time visitor with the senses attuned to take in everything new around them, the sensory information overload is real. Walking in Gangnam is like "doomscrolling" through the gaudiest and loudest reels on social media without the ability to put down your phone. It's fascinating, addictive and exhausting at the same time. The sheer immensity of the consumption culture in Gangnam will overpower your awareness.
Second, they experienced a form of decision paralysis. When the options are ubiquitous and infinite, how do you choose to buy anything from anywhere? At this point, rational selection based on comparison shopping of options is not possible — our cognitive bandwidth is woefully inadequate to handle the processing required to weigh the pros and cons of retail infinity. I mean, how do you determine where to go for lunch when there are literally a hundred restaurants lining the shopping mall corridor or the alleyway? How do you know which facial masks to buy when the whole wall is nothing but different types of face masks? How do you even choose which dessert to sample when there are chocolate and cake stores as far as the eyes can see running along the entirety of the bus station, merging seamlessly into a department store?
Witnessing my colleague's befuddlement made me realize that I am only able to make my way through Seoul without going insane because I have already developed a subconscious pattern of likes and dislikes that severely filters the information that rises to my consciousness and curates the continuum of choices that I have to make on an everyday basis. In other words, I have a cognitive pattern of biases and preconceptions about my environment when I come to Seoul that allows me to function. If I had to truly take in the full spectrum of information and make fresh decisions based on some calculations, I would time out. When seen from this perspective, familiarity is the process by which we impose a mental pattern on our environment that allows us to make automatic decisions subconsciously without having to think through them all the time. It's essential to survival.
Surrounded by such prodigious excess also got me thinking that excess can be as threatening to our mental and physical health as scarcity. In fact, we have evolved to deal with the lack of something. If we lack food, our bodies can automatically adjust to deal with the smaller food intake. If we lack shelter, we have developed community-based coping mechanisms to keep ourselves safe. However, are we really equipped to deal with the excess? By looking at our obesity rate, we know that our bodies are not. What about our mental capacity? Can our cognitive bandwidth handle such an abundance of things and information without getting hurt? The skyrocketing rates of depression and suicides in young Koreans might give us a hint.
This whole thing reminds of the story of the frog in a pot of slowly boiling water. You don't know you are under threat until it's too late if you are immersed within that threat. Do Seoulites really know what they have gotten themselves into? Feeling warm yet?
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect The Korea Times’ editorial stance.