When “living” becomes “surviving"”

Thoughts about Korean abductions in Cambodia.

If you have a keen interest in Korean culture, or live in Korea currently, you might have heard of Korean abductions in Cambodia. The act has been going around for several years, but the number of cases were pretty low compared to now. Then, now, we see reported cases are more than 330 — more than once per everyday in average. If we consider the number of unreported cases, the actual cases would be countless.

Shockingly, victims traveled to Cambodia willingly for high paying opportunities. If you think about the economic success of Korea, one of 15 largest economy in the world while Cambodia is 1/60th the size, this is very puzzling. Why is this happening?

*I’m not a journalist, political scientist, social psychologist, economist or sort. I just wanted to share my opinion. Some facts and statistics may be inaccurate. Please take this post with criticism.

In the last several years, more than 330 Koreans have been abducted or trafficked in Cambodia—lured by the promise of implausibly high-paying opportunities. The number itself is disturbing. But the deeper phenomenon is not simply criminal deception. It is a clue for a larger social pattern that can emerge when economic pressure, demographic stagnation, and the hypervisual internet converge. I’m not a journalist or a political scientist or a sociologist, and some details in this commentary may not be perfectly precise, but as a Korean adult watching this unfold, this is the shape of the conclusion that keeps coming back: this is what a society looks like when living becomes survival.

For Gen X (born ~1965–1980) and early Millennials (born ~1981–1988) in Korea—those who personally remember when a stable and modest life was still attainable—“ordinary living” once felt realistic. Today that baseline has eroded. Housing costs exploded in the only regions where opportunity concentrates, the workforce is shrinking, and future economic growth is projected to stagnate. A life that used to be lived has become a life that must be strategically won. In Korea today, survival is not metaphorical—it is an actuality.

Korea industrialized fast, globalized fast, digitized fast—and then normalized platforms where life is publicly performed. Platforms became the site where identity is sculpted. As Marshall McLuhan wrote, “the medium is the message.” The form of a medium determines the type of message that can survive inside it. Newspapers rewarded argument and explanation. Television rewarded emotion and spectacle. Smartphones rewarded immediacy and interruption. Platforms reward continuous comparison, because the interface is built to rank interpersonal signals—likes, comments, followers, saves—against everyone else’s. The user does not need to consciously seek comparison. The medium itself imposes the frame.

One of the basic behavioral principles in humans is that the easiest possible action tends to be selected, simply because it costs the least energy; in physics this parallels the principle of least action, where systems evolve along the path requiring minimal energy. SNS products leveraged this principle in order to become part of everyday life. By continuously removing steps that required effort—simplifying log-ins, integrating cameras, auto-saving drafts, introducing infinite scrolling, enabling one-click posting—platforms lowered the resistance for digital social engagement to almost zero. And when friction drops close to zero, usage becomes frequent, automatic, ambient.

In early 21st century Korea, this reduction of behavioral resistance became a critical catalyst. Digital socializing required so little effort that it could be performed dozens of times per day. This normalized the habit of engaging through platforms instead of through embodied social experience. The more the habit was constructed around effortless interaction, the more natural it became to maintain relationships inside the medium itself.

And then another layer emerged. Because the platforms were visual and engagement-based, the content that traveled fastest was the content that performed lifestyle well. Not because consumers consciously sought luxury signaling, but because the system’s feedback structure naturally advantaged highly aesthetic posts. The result was not just more usage—it was the accelerated spread of aesthetic performance as the baseline expression of identity.

Cyworld was an early 2000s Korean social networking service where users customized profile rooms and exchanged a digital currency called “acorns.” Its original purpose was simple: enable connection without physical presence. The striking effect was that intimacy became accessible at very low resistance. What once required scheduling, travel, or effort could now be maintained inside a private digital space at home. Even more importantly, Cyworld introduced a subtle numerical logic to social meaning. Profile visitors could be counted. Attention could be quantified. The human drive for connection was translated into a visible metric.

The population shaped by this system was naturally drawn to the next generation of services—Facebook and Instagram. Facebook, Instagram, and later platforms did not invent this logic; they intensified it. Likes, comments, retweets, follower counts—these transformed relational meaning into a multi-parameter scoring system. When social behavior is numerically expressed, behavior tends to drift toward whatever produces the highest number—and the number becomes a silent judge of value. In visual platforms, the content format that most efficiently produces high scoring is the aesthetic performance of lifestyle. The platform does not need to explicitly instruct consumers to pursue expensive symbols. The architecture already rewards it.

Norms emerge from those habits. Norms are not fixed. Norms are drifting anchors that respond to the symbols a population consumes. The “symbol of freedom” in some countries became the Jolly Roger flag in One Piece, not because it was legislated, but because millions absorbed the same storyline until the symbol became a shared emotional shorthand. If those millions consumed a different narrative, a different symbol would have taken the slot. Norms are artifacts of narrative saturation. When a medium has enough reach, norms can shift not by argument, but by semiotic momentum.

Korea is uniquely vulnerable to this process. A relatively small population cannot easily sustain large, resistant subcultures. There is a concept that a minority culture requires roughly 100 million people for stable survival. Below that threshold, niche cultures struggle to retain momentum against dominant trends. Korea is roughly 50 million. The digitally shaped generation is even smaller. When a new trend emerges, resistance has no demographic fortress to retreat to. And if the primary medium for norm formation is the visual social network feed, the dominant ideology becomes the ideology that photographs well.

This interacts directly with economics. Once social visibility became the primary currency of value, the boundary between appearance and achievement blurred. Those living below the newly formed standard were not only anxious about falling behind; they were publicly read as incompetent. In a culture where worth is indexed by how well one performs success, being perceived as ordinary became intolerable. To defend against that stigma, many began leveraging their current status—through savings, loans, or speculative investments—to project competence. The fear of seeming inadequate drove risk-taking more than ambition did. Housing prices in Seoul and the surrounding regions reflect this mentality: the pursuit of prestige through real estate, while much of the country faces stagnation or decline, is a visible artifact of survival through optics.

The same mechanism extends into family decisions. In an economy where visibility defines competence, child-rearing is no longer a private commitment; it is a public performance. Parents compare schools, tutoring, travel, and the aesthetics of parenting through the same visual metrics that rank everything else. Under such a system, raising a child without matching the visible standard of “successful parenting” feels like exposing incompetence twice—financially and socially. The cost is not just economic; it’s existential.

The result is a paradoxical demographic trap. The fewer children are born, the more competitive their upbringing becomes, and the higher the perceived bar for “acceptable parenting.” That rising bar feeds back into further decline. Fertility decisions, once shaped by family aspiration, are now shaped by public comparison. The ideology that promised empowerment through visibility now penalizes any form of life that cannot be displayed as success.

Thus, the macro-indicators—low birth rate, rising household debt, regional inequality—are not disconnected statistics. They are synchronized expressions of the same cultural equation: when competence is defined by optics and every optic demands capital, participation itself becomes selective. Living transforms into performance, and performance, over time, into exhaustion.

Every domain of life becomes a leaderboard when the symbols of success are ranked in public view. Work, relationships, leisure, even moral virtue—each is quantified, displayed, and silently compared. The result is a collective exhaustion that disguises itself as ambition. The harder one strives to maintain visibility, the more fragile the sense of worth becomes. Effort no longer guarantees stability; it merely resets the baseline for the next comparison.

When survival depends on optics, patience loses its value. The slow virtues—discipline, restraint, long-term craftsmanship—fade beneath the algorithms that reward immediacy. What once built continuity now builds anxiety. The irony is that this anxiety sustains the very platforms that produce it: the more insecure a population becomes, the more it performs; the more it performs, the more data it yields; and the more data it yields, the better the system learns how to keep it performing.

This is not a uniquely Korean phenomenon. Korea may simply be the first to experience a particular convergence: a digital environment that rewards performance over substance, a social and economic structure that amplifies comparison, and a population conditioned to equate visible success with personal competence. When these conditions overlap, the result is not cultural weakness but structural momentum. The logic that emerges is behavioral, not moral. Under compression, pressure accelerates action; acceleration narrows deliberation; and the pursuit of quick outcomes begins to masquerade as competence itself.

Regulation may slow it. Education may contextualize it. Cultural reinvention may redirect it. But the deeper question remains: what kind of person does such an environment produce? When the path of least resistance is the path of perpetual comparison, identity becomes conditional on exposure. The self that cannot be displayed begins to feel unreal.

And so, the problem is not only economic or technological; it is existential. A society cannot remain stable if recognition is attainable only through performance. The more frictionless the system becomes, the less room there is for character, patience, or quiet competence. Those qualities take time, and time is what the system no longer rewards. Because when living becomes survival, shortcuts are not aberrations. They are predictable outcomes. The rest of the world might want to pay attention—before this case study becomes a case preview.

I’d like to hear your opinions on this. Do you see similar patterns forming elsewhere? What do you think could change this trajectory—or should it change at all? Share your thoughts. Maybe understanding begins there.

Dr. Wooyong Leo Cho is an audiologist and writer interested in how modern societies shape the way we live, think, and connect.