The right to be alone and the right to not to be abandoned

Shin Go-eun200

Korea has become remarkably good at making daily life convenient. Food delivery arrives within minutes. Parcels arrive almost before we order. Banking, hospital appointments, shopping and government documents can all be handled on a phone.

This convenience is one achievement of Korean urban life, yet in one of the world’s most digitally connected societies, a person can pass through an entire day without speaking to anyone.

That is why Seoul’s effort to treat loneliness as a public issue deserves attention. Loneliness should not be dismissed as a personal weakness, a family failure or a private matter that individuals must solve alone. In today’s Korea, it has become part of the social condition itself.

In 2024, South Korea had 8.045 million single-person households, accounting for 36.1 percent of all households. Living alone is no longer unusual. It has become one of the country’s most common ways of life.

There are many reasons for this change: late marriage, not marrying at all, divorce, aging, migration for work or study, high housing costs and changing ideas about family and independence. But living alone does not automatically mean being lonely. For many people, solitude is a form of freedom. An independent life should not be treated as a failed life.

The real problem is not living alone. The problem is becoming invisible.

It begins when a person becomes ill and no one knows. It deepens when someone loses work, health, family or confidence and has nowhere to turn. It becomes dangerous when a person disappears from ordinary social contact for weeks or months and no one notices. The danger is not solitude itself, but abandonment.

The most tragic expression of this abandonment is solitary death, known in Korea as "godoksa." In 2024, Korea recorded 3,924 solitary deaths, a 7.2 percent increase from the previous year. The number is shocking, but it cannot fully explain the human reality behind it. Before a solitary death, there is often a long period of silence.

People rarely vanish from society in a single day. Isolation usually grows slowly. Illness, unemployment, bereavement, debt, shame and broken relationships can accumulate. A person may stop answering calls, avoid neighbors or lose the habit of asking for help. By the time society rediscovers that person, it may already be too late.

Policies responding to loneliness are therefore necessary. A humane society cannot celebrate personal freedom while ignoring those quietly falling out of social life. Welfare systems, local communities, counseling services, neighborhood networks and public institutions all have a role to play.

At the same time, there is a line that should not be crossed. Care must not become surveillance.

In the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, public institutions can identify some signs of risk more easily than before. With proper safeguards and consent, unusual changes in utility use or repeated failure to respond to welfare checks may help local authorities reach people who need urgent support.

But good intentions do not remove the need for privacy.

A person who lives alone should not automatically become a policy target. Some people are quiet because they are isolated; others are quiet because they simply value privacy. We must be able to tell the difference.

What Korea needs is care without intrusion and connection without surveillance.

A warm society is not one that knows everything about its citizens. It is one in which people can ask for help without shame, receive support without losing dignity and live alone without being abandoned.

Innovation does not only mean faster apps, smarter platforms or more data. Sometimes innovation means knowing where technology should stop. Human beings are not merely data points, risk scores or welfare cases. They are citizens with private lives, emotional needs and the right to both independence and care.

Korea has shown the world what rapid modernization and digital transformation can look like. Now it faces a harder question: Can a highly digital society also remain deeply human?

In the AI era, the right to privacy and the right to care should not stand on opposite sides. Korea’s task is to protect both. People should have the right to be alone — but they should never be left so alone that no one notices when they are gone.

Shin Go-eun is an associate professor at Vietnam National University.