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| Courtesy of Alice Yamamura |
By David Tizzard
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Thus we are shown an image of the world in which all feminists are militant, all young men incels, all Christians bigots, and all rich people evil. A modern fairy tale of sorts. When written like this, it becomes clear that such blanket characterizations are unfair, untrue, yet widespread. For many, they remain the dominant grand narrative.
Yet diversity remains a prevalent of many, if not all, human societies. The Chinese Communist Party and its billion plus inhabitants contain multitudes. A society as ethnically homogenous as Korea proclaims itself to be has cleavages throughout, evidenced by the devastating intrastate violence it has carried out on its own people during the 20th century and the political divide which has stagnated any meaningful progress of late.
And amidst this turbulence sits the nation's youth. The lead actors of countless documentaries and reports detailing their hardships, struggles, and growing sense of ennui. They are often lambasted for a lack of patriotism and decreasing awareness of "jeong" while, at the same time, coming to the own realizations that their world and their prospects are less glamorous than those presented to the previous generations. A "perma-crisis" and a slowly cancelled future seems more likely than "les trente glorieuses" which characterized the heyday of their parents.
The MZ generation, itself a category somewhat unique to Korea, exists in the popular imagination as either decadent champions of the hedonism encapsulated by "goblin mode" or tireless slaves to the grind depicted by "gatsaeng" (the God life). Both of these neologisms point to a splinter of reality. There are certainly those who have fully embraced the pajama aesthetic, spending their days in a monster-fueled Netflix stupor. COVID, dwindling economic prospects, hyper-individualism, and breakneck technological advancements encourage them to delve and dig deeper and deeper into their one-room dens.
Conversely, there are those awake at dawn. Pushing their biorhythms by embracing the sun before social media, replacing energy drinks with almonds and avocados, forgoing Wednesday, studying relentlessly. Rejecting modernity, embracing tradition.
These two divergent and polarizing depictions of the nation's youth exist simultaneously. They are hashtags, headlines, and keywords in academic articles. Yet when one speaks to the youth here, an often more complex picture emerges. They are neither goblins nor gods. Not drugged up and tuned out nor flat-out at the library. They're somewhere in between. Captured by a state of flux: an ever morphing MBTI. They study and skunk. Crush and cower. Influenced and aware of these hashtags yet embracing neither of them fully.
Complex depictions won't get much traction because they don't communicate easily across the medium of social media, which in turn rejects this reality for not providing the appropriate financial incentives or requisite retweets. Furthermore, the reality is rejected by many because it simply doesn't conform to the existing simply narrative we have constructed in our heads. Yet the fault is ours, not theirs. Ultimately, we have failed to understand them because we are too engrossed in ourselves.
And if this is true of us as it is about the youth of Korea, imagine what we could also be misunderstanding about the feminists, the communists, the Christians, the men, and the person sat next to us on the subway. More likely they are neither goblins nor gods but somewhere in between. A beautiful contradictory mess of a human being.
Dr. David A. Tizzard (datizzard@swu.ac.kr) has a Ph.D. in Korean Studies and lectures at Seoul Women's University and Hanyang University. He is a social/cultural commentator and musician who has lived in Korea for nearly two decades. He is also the host of the Korea Deconstructed podcast, which can be found online. The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.
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