hours per year on average, the highest figure in the OECD. More than
70 percent report their jobs make them depressed, according to a
survey by one of the country’s biggest employers, Samsung.
And the problems aren’t confined to the workforce. Ninety-six
percent of high school students reportedly do not get enough sleep. A
2011 survey found 87.9 percent of them feeling stress “in the past
week.” Teenagers in Japan, China and the United States report half
that level. South Koreans are, according to researchers at Yonsei
University, the unhappiest students in any industrialized nation. In a
country where mental illness is highly stigmatized, South Koreans
have the highest suicide rate in the world.
But now that they’ve achieved some measure of security and
material success, some are actively seeking a happier existence. South
Koreans are buying into the booming spa and cosmetics cultures, and,
increasingly, yearning for the mystical mountains and forests of the
deep Korean past. Since it arrived here in the fourth century,
Buddhism blended nicely with the peninsula’s ancient animistic
shamanism, the idea that natural objects have a spirit. In Korea, one
of the most powerful spirits is the sanshin, the mountain spirit. Trees,
too, have long been venerated as guardians of people and villages.
By the fourteenth century, though, Korean rulers would find in
China-originated Confucianism—with its teachings of regimented
status, societal obligations and an uncompromising work ethic—a
politically convenient philosophy for growing a nation state. There
now exists an uneasy and unequal détente between opposites: a
technology-touting, competitive and hierarchical system on the one
hand and the nature-affiliated spirits-are-everywhere firmament on
the other.
Euny Hong, in her irreverent cultural history of Korea, The Birth
of Korean Cool, explains an ancient proverb, “shin to bul ee,” which
means “body and soil are one.” Not soul, but soil. “It’s a concept that
predates Confucianism or any official organized belief,” she writes,