By Choi Sung-jin
In 2005, Flinders University in Australia released an interesting result of research after tracing the lives of 1,447 elderly people for 10 years.
It showed, among other things, that people with many friends tended to live longer, but that merely maintaining good relationships with family members had almost no effects on longevity. Aged people belonging to groups with close friendships had a mortality rate 22 percent lower than those who were only with their families.
“Friends tended to prolong people’ lives not only by exerting positive influences on their behavior, such as smoking, drinking and eating habits, but also by helping them get over difficult times,” the report said.
The research provides many lessons related to Korean society and its many social problems, experts say. The increase in the number of people who are isolated from others and who have few friends to talk to could cause problems not only in their quality of life but within the groups and communities to which they belong, they add.
“Such isolation, along with rising depression, the world’s highest suicide rate and a growing crime rate, can drastically weaken social solidarity,” said Professor Koo Hye-ran of Seoul National University. Actually, many of the parents who have recently shocked Korea by horribly abusing their children were leading lives isolated from their relatives and neighbors.
Sociologists have long found the reasons for destroyed human relationships in the changes in social structures and living conditions. More specificall, they cite such factors as urbanization, industrialization, individualism, nuclear families and the popularized use of the Internet.
Korean children are exposed to almost all of these risks, they say.
“The children who live with busy parents who are endlessly shuttling them between school and private academies could grow up without learning social skills because they have little time to communicate with their mothers and fathers and play with friends,” said Choi Hae-yeon, a psychologist and professor. “These children, who only watch TV and play on-line games in their spare time, tend to become grown-ups who show obsessive and other erratic behaviors in relationships with others.”
The fact that an increasing number of them are from families with only one child aggravates the problem, as they don’t have opportunities to form relationships with siblings, which serve as important social assets later, she added.
When they do have friends, these friends tend to be more like rivals rather than allies in this society of limitless competition, especially among younger generations, the experts said.
“People in their 20s realize that each one of them has to make his or her own living eventually, which in part explains why a growing number of college students and young office workers tend to eat and drink alone,” said Professor Yoo Myeong-soon of the Seoul National University Graduate School of Public Health. “They spend most of their time strengthening their individual competitiveness rather than forming human relationships.”
However, life requires cooperation as well as competition with others, she said, adding that increasing the number of boarding schools can be one way of teaching many in this generation of young people how to share and interact with others.