Korea is dying. Please keep watching
Courtesy of ajs1980518
The more successful Korea becomes, the more valuable its cultural depiction of itself as a failed society becomes. The country has become extraordinarily successful at exporting a fantasy of its own failure. And it learned from the best; it just flipped the narrative.
"Dead-End Job," starring Lee Jae-wook, comes out later this month. Netflix describes it as “A man drowning in debt gets a mysterious gig that pays 50 times the minimum wage ... as long as he never reveals what happens at work.”
From all the trailers it looks like another Squid Game-esque dystopia fantasy. It portrays Korean society as a brutal and unforgiving land, inflicted with a spiritual poison that slowly eats at the soul of all those who live here. That poison is often understood as the result of the compressed modernity Korea achieved — going from fields and rice to luxury air-conditioners and high-end coffee in just over two decades. This is seen as a Faustian bargain. A deal with the devil. And while the sowing may have been enjoyable for some time, here comes the reaping.
International social media has of course already responded to this. People describe the country and the people as fundamentally afflicted; pathologically ill; doomed for extinction. And if you don’t believe them, just look at the dramas and movies the country produces.
Unfortunately, what the armchair sociologists with either bible verses or anime characters in their twitter profiles haven’t realized is that Korea’s greatest exports in the 21st century don’t just include a whole host of men playing as androgynous single Ken dolls to fill the niche left by Backstreet Boys and Take That; it also includes a wonderful K-dystopia myth.
America sold a dream and got rich and powerful doing it. People all over the globe lapped up this image of white people, a house with a white picket fence, a dog running in the yard, and someone called Brad holding a beer while he smiles and talks about his daughter’s prom dress. And then, you actually look at many parts of the country and you realize, “Hey. That’s not what I saw in the movies!”
Korea, a country influenced by Washington in so many ways it becomes complicated even to narrate, was once the junior partner. It was the poster child for this manufactured dream during the Cold War. Be like us, get you some democracy and capitalism, and all this baseball and hot dogs will be yours, too. And Seoul did that. And then it did it some more. And kept going. Until it passed way beyond what America has achieved.
Seoul’s public transport system, sending 10 million people safely around the city every day, with clean toilets, quiet carriages and relatively cheap tickets, would probably not last six months in the States. Its education, with kids performing at levels that make all the semi-conductors and artificial intelligence possible, means the people here know what’s going on.
The health system works so well people go to the hospital an outrageous amount — whenever something slightly troubles them, they queue up and see what host of pills, lotions, creams and liquids they’ll be taking next. That probably explains why the people here also have higher life expectancy than those in the U.S. And they don’t just live longer — Koreans live about 72.5 healthy years, compared to 63.9 years for Americans, meaning Americans spend more years managing chronic illness or disability. I must confess the first time I saw the advertisements on American TV that promote all their new drugs and then list the side effects at the end, I thought it was a parody.
And then there’s the safety. Many of my American students tell me they’re still not quite used to the fact that they can walk around this place late at night and not have to worry. That they are even allowed to go out at night is a shock to some of them. In Korea, you can generally leave your belongings on a coffee shop table — and I mean expensive stuff like laptops, notepads and all sorts of digital products I don’t really know the names of — and nobody is going to take it. You’ll find tables everywhere filled with people’s personal belongings and the owner nowhere in sight — vaping, in the restroom, or simply just gone elsewhere and wanting to keep that table. It’s positively mind-blowing how safe they keep society here.
But, this place is competitive. You’ve got to work hard. You’ve got to follow the rules. You’ll be "nunchi-ed" hard if you start causing a commotion on the subway. They’ll kick you out of the country if you start using the place as your own TikTok creator background in a way that disturbs other people. You can do most things you want here on the condition that you don’t disturb other people. Koreans love it — I mean they absolutely love it — when someone humbly, calmly and silently carries out the "presence" they have chosen until the very end. This is how you get that Korean respect. One of the messages here that filters through society, but admittedly is not always heard, is “Life is not just for oneself.” There are other people here and they are important.
And so Korea has done something really interesting. They have begun to export the opposite of what they have created. Rather than try to convince the world that their trains work, the bus stops have Wi-Fi and heated seats, the toilets squirt water up your bum, the teachers are respected, the playgrounds are clean and filled with free exercise equipment, the food is full of vegetables and you can walk around the place in relative peace, they flipped it around.
They said this place sucks. We’re all dying. All eating instant noodles from packets; none of us is dating; there are monsters in the cupboards; devils under the bed. We’re slipping into the abyss because we built too much too quickly. It’s all fake. Don’t do what we did. Stay behind. Stay with your 1950s infrastructure. Don’t try to impose social values. It doesn’t work. Look at our dramas. Be warned!
And they put that in 4K. Get some of the most beautiful people you’ve ever seen to star in it. Get a team of creatives who are part of the community that now win Oscars, Grammys and Nobel Prizes to create it. Use their technology to put it on all the world’s streaming platforms. And make an obscene amount of money from it. Instead of selling the world the American dream, they decided to offer the Korean hell. And it worked incredibly.
So well, in fact, that while the global internet erupts into fevered analysis of how corrupted the society is here, the actual Korean people just wake up early, go for a run, drink ice-americano, and live pretty normal lives in a safe country. They exist believing that the healthcare system will hopefully look after their parents, and knowing that if the presidents mess up, they’ll be sent to jail. They’ll probably get some botox or double-eyelid surgery after lunch, study something in the evening, and spend their night on YouTube, ordering stuff that will arrive the next day and be perfectly safe outside their door for however long they leave it there.
But yeah, don’t forget Korea is dying please. That’s the product making this place rich at the moment.