Name: South Korea Is Everything Wrong With Society
Uploaded: 2025-05-02T03:30:47.000Z
Duration: 19 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The view from the Maepo Bridge is one of the best in the city.

Adverbs of degree

A night's saw'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 promising escape from the high pressure world above.

Because of its accessibility and location, Maepo Bridge has gained a dark reputation as a favoured 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 Korea Herald's interview with one potential jumper on a similar bridge.

Referred to as A to protect her identity, the 19-year-old woman was just moments away from jumping before she was held back by a passerby.

Before trying to jump, she had used one of the crisis phones, but strong winds stopped her from hearing the person on the other side.

In a conversation afterwards, the passerby who had just saved her life asked the girl why she had done what she did.

Quote, your mother would have been so sad, she said.

A then responded, my mother and I don't get along.

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 eye-wateringly long and stressful.

If you're a Korean student, your school will most likely start at 8am sharp, meaning you'll have to get up far before then.

So let's say if you're living in Seoul, you can expect to spend over an hour travelling 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 were 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 at night school, or otherwise known as hagwon.

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 it 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 10pm or sometimes even later, hagwon 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 aren't lucky enough to have parents who are too busy just have even more work on their plates.

And with that hour long commute, kids might be getting back at about 11pm 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 lack 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.

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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.

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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, but 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 CSAT.

This 8 hour marathon is mostly a test of memorisation, 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 Seoul University.

The big companies that dominate South Korean society like Samsung and Hyundai, 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 labour.

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 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 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 a domestically made app which offers a mixture of different uses and services.

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 Kakaotalk.

It's popularity does make sense, South Korea is a very image dominated culture.