Why Korean youth give up
Like wildfire, a set of buzzwords is spreading rapidly among the people. The more accurate a buzzword describes a situation, the greater empathy it creates among the public and the faster it spreads.
A case in point is the word “sampo generation.” Directly translated, sampo means “three abandonments,” referring to three things Korean youth should give up to subsist — relationship, marriage, and childbirth. It has become a phrase that accurately shows the despair and hopelessness of young Koreans.
Korean youth live in an era of despair. These youngsters are a generation in which giving up is a natural trend with the word “healing” becoming what everyone desires. This phenomenon happens not because Korean youth are weak and shaken easily but because Korean society puts all blame on individuals without much contemplation on social justice and responsibility.
Although there are many important reasons for the despair of the youth in Korea, the most important factor is that society foists forced freedom and false hope on them. Phrases such as “everything will be okay” and “you can make it” were on every billboard on the streets. This phenomenon not only depicts the urgency of Korean society’s illness regarding social and mental welfare but also shows the fundamental reason for Korean youth having to give up on everything.
The phrase “you can do it” has a stronger sense of coercion even than the phrase “you must do it.”’ In the former, the subjects are individuals, and responsibility falls heavily on them. Whereas people can resist external coercion, they can hardly resist against themselves. In this forced freedom where we are tricked into thinking that we have all the possibilities, failure becomes unbearable as it becomes the individual’s fault.
The same goes for the phrase “everything will be okay.” As we fall into thinking we live in a perfect system where everything should be okay, failure becomes an individual problem. Under this false freedom and systematically created hope, human beings have no choice but to blame themselves and feel all the burdens are their fault.
To break free from this vicious chain of despair, Korean youth must know how to get angry. First, anger always has a subject and an object. Second, anger generates action. To understand problems and solve them, it is important to analyze the object (or the reason) and the subject (the consequence) of the problem.
Also, as despair generates passivity, it not only brings younger generations down but dampens the national economy. Youth is meant to dream and fight for the dream. It is not the role of youth to curl up in the corner of the room and whimper. They have to fight for what they want and stand up and state what they feel is right. By learning to get angry appropriately, Korean youth can be the owners of their lives again. The writer is a senior majoring in English literature and linguistics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Write to fistn@naver.com.