Knowing about South Korean work culture and years of cramming required to join it, what is the purpose of bringing kids there?
If a culture claims to be so hard-working, so smart, but fails to construct an environment where people would like to bring new people, it's absolutely normal that it is going to die out together with the carriers of the culture.
For all the pride that South Korea has around its successes, how good of a society can it be, if it is an abject failure when it comes to repopulation?
Arguments like "more progress" and "more geniuses" would make sense only if global population manages "geniuses" and "progress" efficiently. Which in fact is completely opposite. Homo sapiens brains are evolved for small population size, and unable to comprehend the modern structures involving millions of people.
As a consequence, billions of already existing humans still don't have access to proper education, economy or tech scene to unlock their potential. So the more humans you bring, the more potential Einsteins will stuck in Congolese villages, that's it.
Even "developed" countries, from what I observe are quite far from the ideal talent-unlocking - they still have crowded classes, non-motivated teachers and fixed curriculum. So millions will be (and already are) also stuck in "boring 9-5" "paying their student debs" even don't knowing their full potential.
It's just humans create environment they don't understand and can't handle, and it takes them a lot of time and effort to even somehow organise it on a small piece of a land. And then it ruins, and then they construct it again, and cetera.
Well, humans love too much assigning values to things around them, randomly-emotionally, and these values tell more about flaws of humans cognition, not the things itself.
Say, one of cases of judgement about about "world" is something like "world became a better place" usually feels like a person thinks that some fundamental constants has changed, and changed irreversibly. So before humans managed to enslave and kill each other but now magically stopped. Slavery no more, democracy! And then putin starts a full-scale invalion on Ukraine, it's exception.
And when exception turns into rule everyone forgets about their misprediction and postrationalises the new agenda (it was obvious that it's going to happen), it looks funny.
> How would you take care of your mental well-being?
Practicing/developing own philosophy, similar by the vibes to stoicism/buddhism, so I don't get broken enough to require a mechanic to fix me.
I find it very funny that nations who brag about having "science" and "technologies", proudly dismiss religion, but yet unable to come up with anything comparable to philosophical or religious systems, not talking about 100x improvements that terabytes of "scientific knowledge" bring.
I believe it is quite an advanced field involving neuroscience and human emotions. Hard to diagnose, treat, and measure. Not enough scientific research has been done in this field, and far from coming up with any solution. I guess we normally do not pay enough attention to our mental well-being. But, I always feel managing emotions and stabilizing our feelings is a great place to start.
Well, ancients managed to find damn good heuristics without all our knowledge and science. And we entire have a country proud of their universities, you know, ivy league branding and stuff, and they can't even take over the baton, just reprinting old books.
[I mean the mental firmware to not get broken. When it is really broken, I feel often it might be hard to climb out without a dedicated help of a _psychiatrist_.]
I believe research related to mental health is lagging. While ancient therapies may have been effective in the past, we're now living in a completely different age, and coping strategies and treatments need to advance accordingly. It can be very challenging to fix things when they are truly broken. That's why starting with mental well-being is crucial for taking control of it and building resilience. Don't wait until things are truely broken.
Well, I'd argue that fundamental things changed at all. On the contrary, humans got rid of their usual stressors like death, hunger or sickness. So maintaining mental health should be _easier_.
The new things of 21th century might me discipline of dealing with unnatural abundance of pleasure/information/change/people, but simple countermeasures already pop into my head without too much thinking, like abstaining from read news or social media.
Or learning to ignore the cultural values spread by random people around. Homo sapiens are known for unconscious masochism by accepting harmful values and proudly battling them :-)
I moved to Southern Europe, and I find it funny that people here are more joyful and content despite they earn less $$$ than citizens of depressed hardworking superpowers. Of course, they may have their own problems, but even on the subconscious level their facial expressions or postures perceived as noticeably relaxed.
I agree, fundamental things haven't changed much. However, cultural and social factors significantly impact our mental health. There is research available on these social factors if you Google it. The US, with its advanced economy, science, and technology, being an immigrant country, has benefited from life sciences and medical advancements. Despite this, we grapple with a society that is more complex than most. For instance, a less family-oriented culture and individuals with more mobility mean we receive less support. While support is a crucial factor in counseling treatment. This leads me to think that learning coping strategies through many single one-session counseling sessions might be more useful and practical than opting for a long-term treatment plan that delves into the past to explore correlations :)
It's not migrants who created fiscal and bureaucratic hell that disincentivizes people to open companies and employ citizens / become self-employed. It's government that was democratically elected by citizens itself.
Foreigners, on the contrary, often work remotely for other countries, so they don't steal job from Spanish citizens. It's hard to survive in Spain without Spanish, so it's strange that natives lose employment battle to people who don't know the language.
A democratic nation with powerful economy and complex social rules. Parents push kids to study hard in school. Kids learn a lot, so they pass exams, create smarphones, robots, yet unable to create an environment where people would be motivated to bring their kids and wouldn't be as stressed or suicidal.
South Koreans on HN, any ideas why? ;-)
For me personally, South Korea is a great example, how entire nations of homo sapiens can be unconsciously cognitively trapped, and in how technological progress, science and ability to solve differential equations !== wellbeing.
It is my thinking that successful religions are built on at least one tenant of "have kids and teach them the religion" otherwise as social complexity grows we tend to forget the have kids point and the society falters, and this has been an issue with humans for much more than the modern age.
I'm not saying religions are right or closer to some ground truth here, but evolution does hing on the point of requiring reproduction of some type.
From my knowledge, religious communities not only "brainwash into having kids", but they also provide a support network for them and their parents.
"Atheists" in "modern age" try to achieve more individual freedom by replacing the local community by a state. However, there is a problem. The way religious community organised at least empirically somehow matches human biology. E.g. small tribes, support, shared ideals. However, it turns out, modern humans have around-zero practical knowledge how to build a "modern" successful state for millions of individualists that would adequately respond to all changes/challenges. Yes, there are countries that were lucky to get a ~d20 roll~ stable democratic govt at some point. But if you look closer, even in these "developed" countries feedback loops are often extremely slow and clumsy.
> religious communities not only "brainwash into having kids", but they also provide a support network for them and their parents
Really? Is daycare cheaper for Christians? Are Christian families (causally) less likely to have two parents working full-time? Because it seems to me that slogging your ass to church every Sunday to be told you're not Godly enough and should vote Republican just seems like Yet Another Fucking Thing that working parents have to do each week, on top of everything else. Do you have any, y'know, evidence at all, that religious parents have more of a support network around them than non-religious? (And that this difference is due to religion, not confounding factors like socioeconomics?)
> "Atheists" in "modern age" try to achieve more individual freedom by replacing the local community by a state.
Another hot take, eh? Any evidence for this one either? This is an unbelievably over-simplistic take. I guarantee whatever trend you think you're seeing here is just as prevalent among the highly religious. If you want to know why individual communities are breaking down, you'd be much better off looking at car dependence, the abundance of suburbs, and zoning laws than just deciding it must be the godlessness of those heathens causing all the problems.
It sounds like you'll never step into a church for a few months to learn this, understandably so. But the answer to all you're questions is obviously yes. Churches are generally tight-knit, welcoming, and very community oriented. They are a literal support network, that will often weekly hear out any concerns of people and try to help them. They often have more kids, so they help each other with the daycare of kids. They are more likely to prioritize single income households, and will move to places more accommodating to church support networks and single income households to live that lifestyle.
I'm an atheist and am very much anti-religion in that I think it's a net bad and imaginary in the worst ways, but I do think, just like any group of like-minded people, that it does support a social network. Religion provides a common ground and shared set of beliefs. It's the same way expats find each other in countries because there's some commonality, or how you go off to school and can find "your people".
As much as I'm not a fan of religion I can admit there are some good things about it and plenty of good people who practice it.
Religious people apriori have much better chances of building support networks than non-religious, just because they have tight trust-based community based on common faith. It's not slogging your ass to church, it's form of networking. Just a reminder, it's a frequent complaint in "modern age" about loneliness, especially on HN. And these people have their social time at least once per week.
Even more - if you come to a new country, you go to the local church, and voila, you got new friends. No need in stupid shallow "hi were are you from" meetups. Btw, I just realised that while expats in Estonia complained about loneliness, my jewish and muslim friends have zero problems with it, because they had their club by default.
There they could easily ask for advice, or get a recommendation for a trusted person to solve their problem. Cm'on, one of main ideas of religion is basically a form of psychotherapy, and the second big is helping each other.
And imagine if the participating families are big. You'll have bigger chances of catching something rare like 5th son of your friend becoming a mayor and using this connection to promote your business.
Also, regarding help, I know a person who used a wonderful method of sending money. Just go to a sinagogue, give money and the recipient magically gets it at the other end.
> Is daycare cheaper for Christians?
It can easily be, and not only daycare. You know, like a discount for a good person from the ingroup.
Also, daycare is a pretty modern concept made by "individualists". Usually people solve it by asking other members of family to help.
> you'd be much better off looking at car dependence, the abundance of suburbs, and zoning laws
South Korea isn't special for having bad demographics, it's just farther along the curve.
Every single industrialized country is well below replacement rate TFR. The fact that modern society has this effect on fertility is something that every affected country is going to have to address sooner or later.
I don't think there's a monotonic curve where more development leads to lower fertility. Both Sweden and New Zealand have higher HDIs than SK, but their fertility rates are higher than many countries which are considered less developed
I mean, there's definitely a correlation globally speaking, but after a certain point of development (e.g countries with HDI 0.8 and above) it looks like the correlation isn't as strong
Swedish fertility rate could also be driven by immigration numbers. And considering a significant fraction of Swedish immigrants don't even know the language, that's definitely going to be a skewed number.
> significantly lags the US and China as a tech power.
> US and China
Notoriously famous for their awesome work culture.
No, thank you. Another useless tech doesn't worth my mental health. Especially with the ability of working remotely and not being tied to the local market.
Switzerland has great workers rights plus salaries slightly below the median (in tech), but way higher for most other professions. Overall much better distributed wealth. Here you're easily getting 120k+ for regular tech jobs in your 30ies.
How people can (still) be in favor of hustle culture and work for companies that actively prevent unions and live in societies that encourage unequalness to such a great extend is beyond my understanding.
Every single person I know from my CS program in the US got a job paying more than 120k straight out of college. By their 30s they’ll be making double that.
> and make 2+ times as much as tech workers in the EU do.
Phew, what is the purpose of this 2x salary, if you don't have time or energy to use it. To raise another generation of busy burnoutees? Or to buy benefits the European takes for granted?
From what I see, Europe actually has the opposite trend for switching to the 4-day workweek, instead of working hard @ buying big houses and cars.
The purpose of a 2x salary is to be able to achieve financial independence at a much earlier age and getting the freedom to retire anywhere you want in the world.
Not 70 years, not oppression. Oppressed Ukraine had cossacks who even managed to make their own short-lived state in the middle ages. Oppressed Baltics joined EU after the USSR fell.
The problem is, russian nation never had a (stable) democracy since the fall of Novgorod (~1500). It always quickly turned into an imperial autocracy where the russians were the titular nation who receives all the benefits.
Again (as elsewhere in this discussion) saiya-jin nails what Russia was, and is.
Communist Russia - the 'glorious' Soviet Union - was the epitomy of oppression for seven decades. It created the stereotype for the idea of 'dystopia' that embedded itself in popular cultures around the world.
That's a staggering achievement - built on human misery and lies. Don't belittle that.
And only now, while the Russian Federation is burning itself up in Ukraine, is this truth trickling through into the Russian consciousness. If Russia can be comprehensively defeated (as it must be), I hope that the full truth utterly guts the population for generations to come, as it did with the descendants of Nazi Germany.
> one of the most hopeful/optimistic periods in human history
I first thought that you were American, but then I read more carefully
> and lived in Russia
Sorry, but how can you combine "90s" and "optimistic" if you witnessed it by yourself?
For post-soviet people it was a nightmare, it was a total collapse of their world, with oligarchy, banditry, miserable salaries (or no salaries at all). I was a kid during that time, but I'm pretty sure nobody was giving a flying duck about US budged surpluses, and people wasn't able to admire the rise of internet, because they got it only in 00s.
Why, the 1990s were the time when Communism finally fell, and something closely resembling a Western system (if you squint just right) was being built.
Also, times of tumult like the 1990s are always times of opportunity for those who has the energy and connections. Huge businesses have been built in Russia during 1990s, and many of them were built honestly, so to say, not by plundering some Soviet-era resources. Some obvious examples familiar for the IT crowd would be Yandex, Kaspersky, ABBYY.
The system wasn't even close to the Western one. On the opposite, it was raise of lawlessness and crime. Yes, people had connections, connections with mafia. Either for paying racket, or even participating in their business. It was extremely hard to be a fair player (western style) that time.
But look! A parliament, with actual-looking elections! Actual-looking (though of course rigged) presidential elections! Free to open your own business! (Well, subject to dealing with mafia and corrupt police.) The influx of the Western merchandise, and of the Western media! And the Communist rule most obviously gone!
It was quite different from Soviet times, different enough to keep an illusion of things going in the right general direction in a sufficient number of people, especially in large cities, despite impoverishment and wars. The powers that were pushed the idea that it's either these transient problems, or the Communist rule back! (Which was ironic since many of them used to be high-ranking Communist leaders.)
After that, the mafia and KGB have completely overtaken the dominant heights, including the president office, so they strangled non-systemic local corruption. Oil prices also helped. The economy was growing. Some time in 2005, life in Russia might look genuinely attractive, if you happened to live in Moscow. Much like life in Shanghai might look fantastic, rich and free in 2005, too, compared to the times of the Great Leap.
Yes, and empty shelves in the shops, and absence of salaries, joblessness. Maybe in the beginning some people really believed in the changes, but they quickly got disillusioned.
The thing is, under commies people were brainwashed that they live in the best country in the world. It wasn't some kind of evil dystopia with everybody suffering. Yes, they were poor, but they didn't know life outside do compare to understand their poverty. The state gave everybody the bare minimum to live. The state gave the clear direction and meaning of life.
Even now there are plenty of (older-ish) people who feel nostalgic about that times!
edit: I agree that in 00s the situation became better, but that's the point, that life in 2005 != 1994.
The idea of romantic love is pretty new. Knowing how lame humanity is, I'm not surprised that no culture has found or integrated yet the replicable way to find and properly develop the relationship with a "soulmate". It doesn't mean that the way doesn't exist.
If a culture claims to be so hard-working, so smart, but fails to construct an environment where people would like to bring new people, it's absolutely normal that it is going to die out together with the carriers of the culture.