Suicide in Korea
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
The death by suicide of a K-Pop star named Moonbin from the group Astro made headlines recently. Reference was made to other Korean stars who have taken their own lives. Of course, we should bare in mind all the other K-Pop and K-movie stars that haven’t taken their lives – the vast majority. But celebrity suicides make good news.
Becoming a K-Pop star is certainly an arduous business, as I learned from watching a video about the girl group Black Pink. Here they are in action:
What a different model for pop music stardom to the one that developed in the 1950s and 1960s in the West! Think of the haphazard way in which The Beatles honed their skills, or Bob Dylan, or David Bowie. In South Korea a specific business model originally designed to sell products has been very successfully adapted to human beings.
A potential young future K-Pop star is removed from normal life in order to be groomed for the job. The video tried to show that the four grils from Black Pink were actually quite ordinary - just like you and me. Without the sexy get-up they did actually look very ordinary looking. Two of the girls said that what they most regretted is that they had missed out on the memories possessed by ’normal’ young people. Obviously, they have memories, but these would certainly not be anything like those of their un-groomed peers. In other words, in becoming stars they were radically removed from the intimacy of the social group of their peers, which is why they seem so obsessively bound to the other members of Black Pink. They are all these poor youngsters have – apart, from their record company employees - and, of course, the millions of adoring fans. This is obviously not by any stretch of the imagination any basis for a healthy life for a young person. It’s actually remarkable that not more of these stars commit suicide! In fact, perhaps the bosses of the music studios should be accused of psychological abuse.
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The article on the BBC website about the stars suicide also noted that South Korea has a worryingly high suicide rate, and that it’s growing amongst young Koreans. Statistics from 2019 show that South Korea is Number 2 after the Russian Federation in rates of suicide amongst developed nation, and that suicide is something that afflicts men disproportionately:
This is what the rates of suicide looks like globally. Note the fact that in some countries suicide is still illegal, so we can’t trust the stats from these countries.
Albert Camus wrote that suicide was an especially significant problem for modern humanity because, unlike our ancestors, we confront the fundamental meaninglessness of existence – what Camus termed the ‘absurd’. He said this in the early 1940s, during a world war and from the incongruous setting of the French ‘Département’ of Algeria, but much of what he had to say still very much remains relevant. Above all, the problem of meaning.
“What is the nature of meaning?” asked the neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, published a few years after Camus, and another book that is still speaking to our dilemmas.. Frankl argued that we all experience an “existential vacuum” in which we sense that there is no inherent meaning or purpose in the universe. But this awareness is remedied by the actualizing of “values.” Frankl argued that the resulting investment of meaning is the result of a decision to bring three major classes of values into our lives: the creative, experiential, and attitudinal. The latter is the stance we take toward our suffering plights. Frankl wrote: “Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man, his courage and hope, or lack of them and the state of immunity of his body will understand that sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect”. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor, and referred to the high death rate in Auschwitz over the period of Christmas 1944 to New Year 1945, observing that so many prisoners died because they hoped to be home before Christmas, and when they realized this wouldn’t happen, they lost hope.
I think Frank’s observation is especially relevant in the context of modern South Korea, a nation that put is total faith in Westernizing modernization or development, undertaken at vertiginous speed. But the promise of development has not been delivered, or at least, not to the young people of Korea who do not benefit from it as their parents and grandparents have. The curve of development is now definitely downwards. It might even be catastrophically downwards because of humanly induced climate change or impending nuclear war. This closure of a hopeful Korean future must certainly be profoundly effecting young Koreans ability to find meaning in their lives.
This is especially exacerbated by the awesome competitiveness built into the system, which impacts on children from a young age. It is quite normal for school kids to go to regular school in the daytime and them to continue studies at ‘academies’ until midnight! In these places they are tutored in math, English, etc. in order to get an edge of their peers (who are also all going to the same academies), so that when they sit the university entrance exams at 18 they have a better chance of getting to one of the prestigious institutions and so graduate to a good career.
Now, all this grooming made sense when South Korea was on the up, when getting a university degree really did give one the edge in the buoyant career market. But the very success of Korea’s education system – almost all Koreans get degrees of some sort - means that the currency of academic qualifications is debased. Plus, the job market is shrinking rapidly, and will further shrink with the introduction of AI. Add to this the unbelievable barrage of information being relayed to young Koreans via their smart phones, and especially the corrosive influence of social media, and you can see why more and more of them have trouble finding life intrinsically meaningful.
Poor Moonbin faced his own very particular existential problems. But young Koreans in general seem more vulnerable than most youngsters. Obviously, I’ve only scratched the surface here as to why suicide is a problem. It is interesting and sad to note that the other disproportionately large group prone to suicide in South Korea are old people.
References
Albert Camus’, The Myth of Sisyphus was originally published in 1942: https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Sisyphus-ALBERT-CAMUS/dp/B077NL81RC/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1682301131&sr=1-1
Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was originally published in 1946: https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl-ebook/dp/B009U9S6FI
The image of Astro is from: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65339082
Black Pink’s image is from: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/news/blackpink-how-you-like-that-dance-video/.
The Black Pink video can be watched on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmAOeLRiXhQ
The suicide statistics are from: