The view from the Maple Bridge is one of the best in the city. At night, S's glittering skyline stretches across the horizon, standing as proof of how far South Korea has really come. But for many young Koreans, this picturesque view was the last thing they ever saw.
The bright lights of the city contrast with the darkness of the Han River. Its strong cold currents promised an escape from the high pressure world above. Because of its accessibility and location, Mapo Bridge has gained a dark reputation as a fed spot for jumpers.
As South Korea's mental health crisis worsened in the early 2010s, Samsung was hired to try and reverse the rising number of casualties on the bridge. And their solution was rebranding to the bridge of life with a set of LED signs running along each side of the bridge's railings. Written on these signs was a series of optimistic slogans and pictures of happy families.
But as you can imagine, this only had the opposite effect of what Samsung intended. And in the year after they were added in 2013, incidents on the bridge increased by over 400%. Shortly afterwards, the scheme was scrapped, replaced by more conventional physical barriers.
A much higher fence was then put along with CCTV and pressure sensors to alert rescue workers. Multiple phones were installed across the length of the bridge with direct links to crisis hotlines. While casualties did eventually fall, not all of these measures worked as intended.
As shown by the Career Heralds interview with one potential jumper on a similar bridge, referred to as aid to protect her identity, the 19-year-old woman was just moments away from jumping before she was held back by a passer by before trying to jump. She had used one of the crisis phones, but strong wind stopped her from hearing the person on the other side. In a conversation afterwards, the passer by who had just saved her life asked the girl why she had done what she did.
Quote, "Your mother would have been so sad. " as she said. A then responded, "My mother and I don't get along.
She told me, "You're good for nothing. " And this brief exchange shined a light on what could be the root of the problem, something which slogans and guardrails have failed to deal with. South Korea's young people should have inherited the benefits of South Korea's economic miracle.
The country pulled itself up from tragedy and poverty to become one of the world's richest nations, both financially and culturally. But that promised utopia has been turned upside down with the lowest birth rates in the world. political chaos, cultural division, and crushing inequality.
Life is getting harder and harder for young South Koreans every day. But the biggest pressure on them is how brutally competitive education has become in the country. You see, day-to-day life for the average South Korean high school student is eyewateringly long and stressful.
Let's just have a look. If you're a Korean student, your school will most likely start at 8:00 a. m.
sharp, meaning you'll have to get up far before then. So, let's say if you're living in Su, you can expect to spend over an hour traveling to school. Add in the rest of the morning routine and the tightest you can start is 6:30.
Once you arrive, lessons begin and you'll be working until the end of the day with just a short break for lunch. While most kids have some friends in these classes, they can't ever let their guard down either. As if you're in the system, the competitive nature of your education system pits you against every other kid.
Whether it's meddling parents, teachers, or just the way the tests are graded, it's all set up for you to create harsh rivalries, especially at the top. And as you get older as a student, these rivalries will get even more intense as the end draws closer. Finally, you'll finish school around 4:30.
But you'd be mistaken if you thought that was anywhere close to the end, as you might only just have enough time to make some instant noodles for dinner as you then head for your extra classes in night school, or otherwise known as hagwan. As you arrive, this will be even more intense and strict than just your regular school. Every hour you spend, it has to be paid for.
Every minute is an investment from your family. Your entire parents' life savings often hang in the balance. And the pressure is insanely immense.
To put into perspective, lower income families spend nearly as much on private education as they do on food. So, it's obviously a lot of pressure to have on your shoulders. And then finally, between 8 and 10 p.
m. or sometimes even later, Hagwan lessons end and your school day is finally over. But of course, that's only if you forget about homework.
One of the most important things of all here. Now, you'd be forgiven for thinking there just isn't enough time for that. How could schools ever expect kids to get this done?
Well, the answer is that most of them don't really. It's incredibly common for parents to do at least some of these assignments for their children. The kids unlucky enough to have parents who are too busy just have even more work on their plates.
And with that hourong commute, kids might be getting back at about 11:00 p. m. or sometimes even later.
Then they've got to somehow get sleep as quickly as possible despite the fact that they've been sitting still and staring at books and screens all day with incredible stress. And if you don't fall asleep, you'll barely get 6 hours of sleep before school happens all over again. A recent survey showed that young South Korean students are suffering from lag of sleep and more than half of students chose study as a reason of their sleep deprivation.
Especially high school students average 6 hours and 3 minutes which is about an hour and 15 minutes less than the US high school students sleep amount. This is a silent killer and one of the worst physical aspects of this whole system. One of the strange things right now with the recent Tik Tok ban is that you can go to any data brokers's website and buy anyone's data just for a few bucks and it's completely legal.
These giant big companies with poor security are getting hacked every day and your personal information is being sold on the dark web. So spammers, scammers, and identity thieves can target you and they face zero repercussions from it. And the problem isn't with banning Tik Tok, but it's that if they can do this, why don't they protect you from these similar practices as it's on us to protect ourselves?
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That will be enough time for Aura to find out if any of your personal data is exposed. The sleep deprivation is no joke. Studies have shown that this will impair teens development while making it harder for them to resist their own impulses, which is not a good mix when their life demands so much discipline and hard work for them.
or whilst an entire culture bases your worth on how well you rise up in this education system. So then what is all of this building up to? Well, after years and years of these long days you're doing, the end goal is a good score in the final exam, the SESAT.
This 8-hour marathon is mostly a test of memorization. With harsh time limits and some of the hardest questions in the world all mixed in, just like most of the tests our students have been taking throughout their time in school, the final result is decided by how their score compares to the average. It means everyone is always competing with each other.
The reward for making the top percentile is massive. A coveted spot at the top seal university. The big companies that dominate South Korean society like Samsung and Hyandai almost exclusively hire from them.
One of these jobs will give you and your family access to a good wage, a good reputation, and a higher place in Korea's hierarchical society. Of course, at these jobs, you'll probably work even longer hours, but that is the best outcome. Failure for these kids who can't afford a redo is almost a dead end.
It means the shame of disappointing your family, your culture, and your country. And then a choice between destitution or a lifetime of hard menial labor. You can see the effects of all of this pressure just by watching interviews with students from just after they've taken the exam.
One described the feeling of ending it like being let go after being tied up for a long [Music] time. Others scream as they let out all the pent up emotions they've had to contain for years. Most are just relieved, looking forward to a brief period of life that isn't all about studying or working.
However, for those kids thinking they didn't do as well as they could have, other emotions are flowing through their heads. These interviews are great for accessing young people's personal experiences, but this small collection fails to illustrate just how widespread and deadly young mental health problems have become for South Korea. For years, it's been the leading cause for loss of life in South Koreans under 40.
South Korea also has the highest rate for any OECD country, a collection of developed economies like the UK, the US, and Australia. While academic stress is a major part of this, it definitely isn't the whole story. Lots of countries and cultures put the same kinds of pressures on their young people.
Maybe not to the exact same extent, but it doesn't work as a full explanation, as we still haven't revealed why South Korea's young people are so much worse off than the rest of the developed world. Instead, social media use stands out as a likely suspect as South Korea also leads the world in both internet coverage and download speeds as over 97% of the country is interconnected online. Social media use is also somehow much higher than in Western countries as 92% of South Koreans now use social media in some way with the average user spending over an hour on it every day.
The landscape is quite different, however, a mixture between the Chinese model and Western apps. Like in China, nearly everyone uses domestically made app which offers a mixture of different uses and services. Korea's version is called Cacao Talk.
But unlike China, the market was far more open for Western apps to take hold. And of these, Instagram was by far the most successful with over 60% of Korean social media users having an active account. And it's also taken control of the youth market.
Despite being less popular with the overall population, young people spend nearly twice as much time on Instagram compared to cacao talk. Its popularity does make sense. South Korea is a very image-dominated culture.
South Korea, just like China, because of their shared Confucian heritage, puts a bunch of focus on reputation and saving face. The image you put forward to your friends and community means everything because acting against cultural norms reflects poorly on you and your family. And this isn't necessarily a negative thing.
A brief stroll through most Western cities proves some people could definitely use a bit of shame sometimes. But regardless, the harsh competition we mentioned before has its roots in this kind of culture. Instagram is the ultimate image focused platform has played incredibly well into this culture.
It has spiral things out of control, popularizing the promotion of complete fantasy life for everyone else to see. Airbrushing and filters that were once reserved for beauty magazines have spread to every part of the online world. It's being pushed forward by the entertainment industry, which has always looked for any way to chase perfection and unrealistic standards.
And this shift in culture is epitomized by the rise of so-called virtual influences in South Korea. Even with all the filters, makeup, and surgery, regular influencers and models still weren't perfect enough for marketing teams. So, they just turned to completely artificial people to advertise their products.
O Rosie was the first of these corporate creations. Permanently 21, she popped up on South Korean Instagram in 2020 to fill whatever advertising niche she was required to. The benefits for these companies were endless as she never gets tired, never refuses a job, doesn't need training, never acts out in public, and never asks for a payriseise.
Sometimes she appears on her own. Other times, her mathematically perfect head is stuck on the top of real human models. In the following 3 months, hundreds of different virtual influencers just like her came onto the scene.
They created virtual actors, musicians, and even whole K-pop bands. Any celebrity niche you could name could be filled. And these virtual influencers are now slowly making their way across the ocean.
As of late March 2025, H&M have begun using virtual models in their advertising. By superimposing AI images of the models on top of pictures of real people, they can easily attain these inhuman levels of perfection. South Korea is at the forefront of this very dark revolution and is having awful effects on its young people.
Something that's an omen for the West and regular people dealing with the body image problems this causes often fall through the cracks. But it's telling that even the most beautiful and famous celebrities can also fall victim to the same types of negative thoughts. The K-pop industry blends the worst parts of South Korean competitive pressure with the negative effects of its body image culture.
Sulie was just one of the many men and women pushed into this industry at a young age and molded into a K-pop icon. Now, at first, her career seemed like a classic success story. Trained from a young age when her K-pop group FX released their first single and album, they immediately shot up to the top of the charts.
Before the rise of BTS, they were the most internationally recognizable K-pop band in the world. But unlike most K-pop stars, she challenged the constant demand for perfection. She would often post pictures on social media without any makeup, challenging the beauty standards of the time.
She would even openly talk about subjects that are taboo in South Korean culture, like mental health or even romance. This brought her wave after wave of unrelenting hate comments, personal insults, and death threats. And after a period of depression relating to the constant abuse, she sadly took her own life.
Singer and actress Hi, a former member of the K-pop girl band FX was found dead Monday afternoon. Si had been harassed by malicious online comments throughout her career and had openly spoke about her experiences on cyber bullying. Police said in a statement that the 25-year-old had been suffering from severe depression and how for now they suspect she may have taken her own life.
In the wake of a passing, South Korea then implemented strict laws and cyber bullying, allowing anyone to report it and enabling law enforcement to expose people's real names if they ever leave hate comments. But the systemic issues that led to this tragedy remained. And it's no wonder with such a massive focus on your outward image, the people are willing to do anything to match the insane beauty standards.
So, it's not really a shock that South Korea is the plastic surgery capital of the world. The industry is literally worth over $1. 7 billion and is predicted to grow to over $5 billion by 2032.
Truly showing how normalized plastic surgery has now become in South Korean culture. You obviously don't need it at all, both of you, but would you ever consider having surgery done yourself? Most of the time in South Korea, people get surgery to try and look more naturally beautiful.
For years, beauty standards have aimed at this idea characterized by features like a V-shaped chin, pale skin, small nose, large eyes, and a clear complexion. Never mind that lots of these things aren't all that common in Korean people to begin with. Eyelids are a common cause of tension for people concerned they don't match this standard.
The so-called double eyelid surgery is now one of the most common in Korea to replicate this feature. It's often given to young women by their parents as a graduation present. In an interview, one anonymous woman talked about how this had happened to her and how she had felt pressured by her family to get the surgery.
Quote, "I was satisfied with my own appearance, but my mom and grandmother seemed unhappy with how I looked before I had the surgery. I was pushed to feel grateful that my parents could afford the surgery cost, even though I never asked them for it. And if family pressure wasn't enough, these surgeries are often pushed by advertisements and influencers as well.
Posters and billboards show before and after images promising that they can make you beautiful in the eyes of society as well. Unfortunately, the rise of Instagram filters, airbrushing, and AI enhancements will only push plastic surgery further. As the beauty standard becomes even more artificial, the result of plastic surgery will only get closer to matching this look.
The results are just lots of people left worrying about how they look more than anything else. Like narcissists from legend, they miss out on life because they can't see beyond their own reflection. And we've only just scratched the surface of the amount of pressure on South Korean society and especially on their young people.
It's especially bad because lots of these costs and societal factors have determined the birth rate. But the Kim need help. They've just applied for a recently introduced government child rearing grant.
The grant of€500 to700 per month for 2 years is the latest attempt to address South Korea's growing demographic crisis. Many blame the low birth rate on the high cost of living, which has soared in recent years. The culture around education and the cost associated with it mean that people are less likely to have children.
It's just too expensive, especially recently with the crushing rise in the cost of living. And as South Korean society has gotten more focused on appearances and moved further into the virtual world, it's also ruined the relationship and dating scene. But standards are sky-high because of social media.
People are more anxious than ever as everyone just works so much they never have real time for themselves. And the result of all of this is the lowest birth rate in the world and it's going to be putting even more pressure on the few people that are left. They're not just facing all of these problems, but they're also facing the prospect of supporting a massive generation of elderly people in the near future.
And as millions of people leave the workforce and need full-time care or financial support, there aren't going to be enough young people to shoulder the societal burden. All of this pressure has understandably led to a lot of societal division. South Korea has lots of Western ideas, brands and influences, but most people still adhere to strict gender roles and traditional values.
However, today women are increasingly rebelling against them. The 4B movement has been gaining traction for years, and it promotes women completely cutting themselves off from men by saying no to kids, marriage, intercourse, or even dating. Meanwhile, there's also been a huge backlash against all of this happening.
Remember the Mapo Bridge from all the way back at the beginning? Well, one of the most high-profile cases where someone lost their life after jumping was based on this. An activist protesting against the changing social landscape threw himself off the bridge as a stunt, apparently assuming he would survive and swim to the shore.
But despite having a very high average success rate at saving people, rescue workers took three days to find his body. And it doesn't matter where you personally stand on these issues. The fact remains that gender is just one of the many divisions that has actually crept into South Korean society.
Age, income, social status, appearance, they're all being used to keep South Korea divided. With all of these long-term problems, you have to wonder why it's all been allowed to continue uninterrupted. Well, the answer actually reveals itself when you uncover the final piece of the puzzle.
Who is benefiting from all of this? Ever since the dictatorship ended and even a bit before, the real power in South Korea has rested with the cho. These family-owned conglomerates are nearly all of South Korea, and they can get away with anything.
We've seen their sinister influence throughout the story, like Samsung's dystopian signs on the map bridge. But everything that's damaged society has been a benefit to them. Take the academic competition.
You've got millions of people competing and putting money into this exam to get into the top universities. And the end goal after all of this is a stable job at a table like Samsung or Handai. It's a system that indoctrinates people for a lifetime of work, filtering out everyone who can't deal with the hardest problems in 12-hour days.
The image-based culture also helps them. It keeps people occupied and concerned with other things. People's eyes will be on themselves or on the entertainment industry, never on what's really going on.
The virtual world is just another level to this. And it also stokes the fires of social division as well. That helps them keep fighting over each other rather than the chables or their control over politics and life in general.
In many ways, South Korea represents the future. Technology, entertainment, and culture. It seems like they're racing ahead.
But all of the problems we've discussed are also becoming more prevalent here as well. Competition over earning a good living and image focused culture and falling birth rates are all hitting the west right now. This is what happens to a society when it's left in the hands of a few and designed to serve their interests.
And it's why South Korea is both a dystopia and a warning to the West.
