But that optimism evaporated after the country's 1997 financial crisis. For the first time in 3 1/2 decades, South Koreans experienced substantial reductions in income. More significantly, they were no longer confident that hard work would translate into higher status.
And in South Korean culture, status is everything.
"People are feeling frustrated," said Bum-Woo Nam, a professor of psychiatry at Konkuk University. "They're suffering from a relative, rather than an objective, sense of deprivation. They don't understand why they're working hard and not doing as well as someone else."
As early as 1979, sociologist Kyong-Dong Kim predicted that South Koreans would hit a wall. "I was worried then, and I'm still worried," he told me. "Our society is oriented around status and power. People yearn for them. This type of competition stimulated our development, but it can also create problems for people. It's a double-edged sword."
During my visit last fall, I trekked down to Seoul National University to chat with sociologist Kyung-Sup Chang. He argued that South Korean culture hasn't been able to catch up to the rapid economic and material changes of the last half a century. "The Americans pushed us into modernity," he said. "But we never really adopted Western philosophical ideals, only the material and functional aspects."
In other words, even though they've constructed a hyper-modern society, South Koreans continue to live by rather traditional rules based on family status and shame rather than individual happiness. Chang said that as long as people's economic prospects were improving, they were willing to ignore the unfairness of the system and the rigidly hierarchical nature of South Korean society. But now the competition is too much, and the prospect of being economically static is causing psychological uneasiness. But instead of fighting to change a system that has them working harder and harder for less and less, South Koreans are having fewer children and killing themselves trying to keep up with the Kims.
