Koreans react to startling results in Pew "what makes life meaningful" poll

https://koreaexpose.com/what-makes-life-meaningful-in-korea/

by debo_ • 5 years ago

90 106 5 years ago

Besides material well-being (19 percent), the things that are more likely to give Koreans meaning in life are health (17 percent), family (16 percent), general satisfaction (12 percent), society (8 percent), personal freedom (8 percent) and work (6 percent).

But even then these higher levels of interest are far below the median, except in the category of general satisfaction, where Korea has the second-highest portion of respondents (12 percent) saying they are satisfied with life, after Germany at 17 percent (at the other end of the spectrum only two percent of Americans say they are satisfied with life, and one percent in Greece).

If "material well-being" was at 19%, health 17%, and family 16%, that doesn't sound like an outlier in and of itself, and not entirely that alarming. Somewhat concerning to me is in the next statement, where it's stated that only 2% of Americans say they are satisfied with life, compared to 17% of Germans. As an American, that speaks volumes about our lifestyle and culture, and I find it disappointing. Satisfaction is contagious; I want to live among others who feel this way. Most of my friends work from home and are either alone most of the time, or have significant others but few friends whom they see on an active basis.

Secondly, I wonder (not trying to cast doubt, genuinely wonder) how surveymakers level-set these questions to be linguistically neutral. How do they account for "material well-being" translating perfectly across most European and some Asian languages? Or even the expression "meaningful"? Just something I think about when it comes to large surveys.

rootusrootus2• 5 years ago

As an American, that speaks volumes about our lifestyle and culture, and I find it disappointing.

I wonder if the dissatisfaction started the tribal political wars, or if the wars precipitated the dissatisfaction. In the end, I think that much of the problem lies with politics at this point, regardless of whether it was the chicken or the egg.

pestaa• 5 years ago

So in a way, does the current political atmosphere fulfill our need to feel dissatisfied?

dboat• 5 years ago

The problem lies with all of the little ways a dysfunctional democracy fails to take care of it's people. I don't think it makes any sense to suggest dissatisfaction causes these policies.

Politics is the culprit only in the sense that many otherwise straightforwardly practical issues have become politicized to the point that objectively poorer and often dangerously irresponsible choices are preferable to any choice that is associated with one's political opponents.

Looking at it this way, it is clearly the political situation that is causing dissatisfaction.

rumblerock• 5 years ago

* As an American, that speaks volumes about our lifestyle and culture, and I find it disappointing. Satisfaction is contagious; I want to live among others who feel this way. Most of my friends work from home and are either alone most of the time, or have significant others but few friends whom they see on an active basis.*

This puts into words my motivation to enact policies that would free up time and resources for people to better optimize or remove unnecessary weight from their lives. Whether it be healthcare, childcare, rising rents, etc. – the time-suck nature or just constant level of financial stress created by some issues weighs on the individual psyche, and in turn the collective one. When you can't leave your job because of healthcare, need the money for childcare or to service debt or pay rising rents, of course personal life and overall outlook on life take a hit. I may not live in a cycle like that, but I don't want to walk down the street knowing how common it is among the people around me. Death by a thousand cuts, it seems like.

And yes, much of this lives at the societal / cultural level as well, not purely the political. But in my opinion the collective burden of the problems that can be fixed by political means imposes an inertia on life that drags everything else down with it.

throwaway23316• 5 years ago

Very nuanced take; I agree.

Unfortunately, it's impossible for the societal / cultural to progress at all without having the free time and tranquility-of-psyche to actually reflect on life.

Concurrent is a severe lack of noblesse oblige in the U.S. The highest strata has forgotten its cultural roots, and lacks spiritual depth in this age.

Take for example Beatrice Webb calling Andrew Carnegie a "reptile" -- a time-honored tradition. Now, there is a complete lack of self-policing within the betters, a la "Michael O. Church."

chrischen• 5 years ago

We all get heavily sold the “American dream” which is a lie to keep the lower classes constantly working hard.

missedthecue4• 5 years ago

A lie? Americans have the highest median disposable income in the OECD after adjusting for government transfers like healthcare and education and for purchasing power parity. And it's not even close. US is at $54k, second place is tiny Luxembourg with $49k, Germany is at $42k, United Kingdom and Sweden at $35k, and Korea at $27k.

https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm

(change net to gross adjusted in the menu to view the data)

darth_avocado• 5 years ago

I strongly disagree with the statement, United States, although behind a lot of countries in social mobility index, still ranks pretty high in the world. It also leads with 8.8% of the adult population being millionaires, only behind Switzerland and Australia. That speaks volumes on how many opportunities exist in this country to make yourself better.

jakeinspace• 5 years ago

That question which the article claims is asking whether respondents are generally happy with their lives was completely misinterpreted. I had a difficult time discerning the meaning of it without seeking out the actual appendix from the PEW study. But certainly more than 2% of americans are happy in life, we're not all that depressed and stressed out.

bartart• 5 years ago

Yeah, the actual pew summary for that question was "Germans more likely than those in other publics to say they are satisfied while offering few specifics".

It seems like the takeaway is only two percent of Americans say vague positive things when talking about what gives them life satisfaction, with many more saying specific positive things

ralph84• 5 years ago

So 83-98% of people are unsatisfied with life regardless of what country they're in. Maybe humans have evolved to be unsatisfied because those who are unsatisfied have outcompeted those who are satisfied.

thatguy09002• 5 years ago

Or maybe "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."

titanomachy• 5 years ago

"it's stated that only 2% of Americans say they are satisfied with life, compared to 17% of Germans"

This isn't actually what the original study says, it was quoted in a confusing way by this article. 2% is the number of Americans who "refrain from offering detailed responses, responding instead that they are satisfied with life, that they feel fulfilled, or something else broadly general but still positive." [0]

So 17% of Germans find life fulfilling but don't particularly feel inclined to share their reasoning.

The percentage of Americans who find meaning from some source is clearly much higher, although I'm having a hard time finding that number.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/11/18/general-rather...

armchairhacker• 5 years ago

Current statistics seem to suggest that around 82% of people in the US are satisfied with their lives [0].

I wouldn't be surprised if these numbers are inflated, but it's way more than 2%.

Actually US mean satisfaction is higher than most places in Europe [2]. I don't doubt that social isolation and culture are a problem, but it's nothing compared to extreme poverty and not being safe.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder [2] https://thehill.com/homenews/news/537118-americans-personal-...

Imnimo• 5 years ago

And yet look at how many comments in this thread are breathlessly accepting the idea that only 2% of Americans are satisfied with life, and drawing a variety of philosophical and political conclusions from that absurd statistic.

Camillo• 5 years ago

Secondly, I wonder (not trying to cast doubt, genuinely wonder) how surveymakers level-set these questions to be linguistically neutral. How do they account for "material well-being" translating perfectly across most European and some Asian languages? Or even the expression "meaningful"? Just something I think about when it comes to large surveys.

We're talking about survey professionals here. Experts. To suggest that they did not take care in aligning translations in an international survey is borderline insulting.

On the other hand, the article says:

But in these four European countries many provide more than one answer to the question on what makes life meaningful so material well-being is pushed down to the position of the second- or third-most common answer.
(Interestingly, in Asian countries respondents were far more likely to mention only one source of meaning in life, with Koreans most likely to do so at 62 percent.)

Which to me sounds like most Koreans might have not realized that they were expected to provide multiple answers. I can easily see that happening, given that European languages tend to have grammatical plural ("Please list the most important things that give meaning to your life"), while Korean doesn't, AFAIK.

So yes, I guess it's entirely possible that they fucked up the basics of their international survey.

rossitter• 5 years ago

"Please list the most important things that give meaning to your life"

The actual English-language version[0]:

...What about your life do you currently find meaningful, fulfilling or satisfying? What keeps you going and why?

So respondents in English were not prompted to list more than one item. What is not marked for plurality.

Unfortunately I've only been able to turn out the English-language prompts for this study.

As far as Korean goes, it might not require speakers to mark (certain) nouns for plurality, but there are of course common ways to do so when desired. There is a particle (들), and there are various modifiers that could be translated to e.g. some, several, many, a few, one or more... The difference is that if you use these modifiers, you don't (as in English et al.) have to make the noun "agree" in number. Roughly speaking, one or more thing would be fine.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/11/18/what-makes-lif... (under "How we did this")

mlindner• 5 years ago

A society made up of large amounts of satisfied people is also a society that isn't advancing. New companies are born chiefly from strong frustrations with how things are going. If there aren't frustrated unsatisfied people then society stagnates.

lisper2• 5 years ago

What an egregiously misleading title. The actual underlying facts are that South Koreans' resposes to a survey about what makes life meaningful were different (when placed in rank order) from all of the other countries in the survey. Not absent, just different. And also, if you actually look at the numbers, not all that much different.

dang2• 5 years ago

Yep. I've replaced the title with something more neutral now. Unfortunately I actually had to write something new (this is almost never necessary— https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

debo_• 5 years ago

Ah, I didn't realise I was supposed to rewrite headlines under certain conditions. I understood the rule to be "use the headline as written, even if you can think of a better summary." I'll try that next time.

politician2• 5 years ago

Maybe? The final two paragraphs:

“What the Pew survey shows isn's that Koreans are far more materialistic than their counterparts in other developed economies. It's that Korea suffers from an absence of existential purpose.

Many of its people say they have nothing to live for, and that's the country's biggest problem.”

lisper2• 5 years ago

But the data don't support that conclusion at all. It's a value judgement that materialism is somehow invalid as an existential purpose.

lazyant• 5 years ago

Yes, actually one of the biggest outliers is the importance of "faith" in the US.

amelius• 5 years ago

Perhaps this explains the quirky TV shows like Squid game, which basically revolves around the misplaced idea that if one can't have wealth, they might as well be dead.

thatguy09002• 5 years ago

The characters weren't just poor, they were in crippling debt or desperately needed money for other pressing reasons.

honkdaddy• 5 years ago

Definitely. Some of the most powerful scenes in that show stem from the notion that a life crippled by debt is worse than no life at all.

karaterobot• 5 years ago

I would recommend reading the entire article before drawing any conclusions, not just the headline or the summary graphic.

Barrin92• 5 years ago

pretty hard to square the results with lived experience on several fronts. For one Singapore turns out to allegedly rank material well being-relatively low, when from personal experience it's kind of 'late capitalist' on steroids even compared to SK or other East-Asian countries. Often in Singapore when I asked what people do for fun the first answer was 'go to the mall'. SK still does have a fairly active cultural life besides work in comparison and a thriving art scene.

The general trend of a lack of life satisfaction beyond material terms is right but I'd say it's a global condition, somewhat more intense in East-Asia but not by much, the differences in the survey seem random or probably dependent on how open people are about these questions.

throw3849• 5 years ago

First you buy a house and get established, then you start family. In Asian culture it is not even possible to get married without that.

Jensson2• 5 years ago

I wonder how much this has to do with language barriers? I doubt these terms have the exact same meaning in every language as they are very abstract.

colinmhayes• 5 years ago

I've got a feeling that the reason most Koreans only gave one answer as opposed to western countries where most gave multiple is language barriers.

mdorazio• 5 years ago

Pew is not some random company doing research - it's a well-respected non-profit that focuses on demographic and religious research and has been operating for ~17 years. I'm quite sure they know how to run a proper survey to account for things like language differences.

Jensson2• 5 years ago

I'm quite sure they know how to run a proper survey to account for things like language differences.

I'm quite sure it is impossible to do that since there are no perfectly equivalent terms between languages for these things. The results can still be interesting, but if there are big outliers I'd look at that first. For example, what is included in the word "family"? Or "health"? Those things can cover very different things in different languages.

james-redwood• 5 years ago

You'd be surprised at how incompetent big companies are sometimes. Used to do a lot of work with S&P500 companies and the amount of times we used to have problems with incompetent translations was startlingly high

carabiner• 5 years ago

I'm surprised by some of the things reported by zero percent of respondents to make life meaningful, particularly pets and nature. It's been reported that Koreans are obsessed with their pets and that hiking is practically a national sport. When I lived in LA, there were huge groups of Korean hikers on popular trails. I wonder if there is a language barrier in Pew's survey, if "life meaning" carries some other nuance or significance to Koreans (maybe it means "outward life" or something?).

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-economy-pets/l...

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/travel/along-the-trail-of...

InfiniteRand2• 5 years ago

I wonder if the people who find pets give them meaning might consider pets as family

9999000009993• 5 years ago

To be fair, if you don't have material well being, you can't afford your partners healthcare and ...

The ability to provide for your family is also key .

franciscop3• 5 years ago

That's mainly in the US; in e.g. EU you can afford your partners healthcare because it's been already paid with your taxes. In Japan it's "affordable" and I am unsure of Korea but if media is correct it's not as cheap as Japan.

kazen44• 5 years ago

i don't know if the survey stated it as suchs, but material wellbeing doesn't mean you need money (per se). It usually means you have the means to live your life in safety. having proper infrastructure, housing, food etc to not have to worry about basic needs in life. (like, getting food).

9999000009993• 5 years ago

What if said partner can't work due to illness, what about kids who generally like eating.

You can't live a decent life in poverty

tmm• 5 years ago

The actual survey results seem more interesting: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/11/18/what-makes-lif...

For instance it highlights the finding that 62% of South Koreans and 58% of Japanese respondents provided only one source of meaning in life vs only 1% of Spanish respondents and then goes on to clarify how that skews the results:

These differences help explain why the share giving a particular answer in certain publics may appear much lower than others, even if the topic is the top mentioned source of meaning for that given public. To give a specific example, 19% of South Koreans mention material well-being while 42% say the same in Spain, but the topic is ranked first in South Korea and second in Spain. Given this, researchers have chosen to highlight not only the share of the public who mention a given topic but also its relative ranking among the topics coded, both in the text and in graphics.

franciscop3• 5 years ago

This might be a direct consequence of language; in Spanish, when you ask questions like this you are normally specifying whether you expect a single or multiple answers by default (akin to "what thing(s) make life meaningful", noting that you can ask with or without the "s" but that is a choice). In Japanese, singular and plural are not distinct except in very particular situations, and IIRC the singular is normally the default unless context makes you think it's plural, so I expect this to contribute greatly (akin to "which makes life meaningful?"). I don't know Korean to comment on that though.

greggman3• 5 years ago

That Koreans and Japanese only choose one answer would suggest to me a poorly worded form that made most of them think they were only supposed to choose one.

didibus3• 5 years ago

These surveys in my opinion are meaningless (pun intended). It depends too much on interpretation, who answered them, what their current life situation is, and most importantly the set of answers is too reductionist, and can't possibly capture a complex dynamic system like human meaning and happiness.

smexy• 5 years ago

In Korean and most Asian cultures, it goes without saying that material well-being is a means to supporting your family.

I wouldn't take much away from a multiple choice question about such big, abstract, interconnected concepts.

dsizzle2• 5 years ago

Supposedly the group is more important than the individual in "Eastern" cultures, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170118-how-east-and-wes... so it's perhaps curious that Korea is the outlier in rating "family" relatively low.

angelzen• 5 years ago

That is a rather superficial "narrative" article that ignores the major impact of industrialization on culture. It is not Western vs. Eastern cultures, it is pre-industrial vs. industrial cultures. Obviously, within those two big clusters there are differences, the point is that those differences are dwarfed by the industrialization variable.

dsizzle2• 5 years ago

Anecdotally I first heard this distinction from a Japanese person, that Japanese culture is more "collectivist" than in the US. The article includes general statements like this that also include Japan:

Generally speaking - there are many exceptions - people in the West tend to be more individualist, and people from Asian countries like India, Japan or China tend to be more collectivist.

One thing Japan is not is "pre-industrial"!

As an aside, you labeled the article as superficial, but I thought it actually went deeper into some nuance. For instance, it mentions that in Hokkaido, people tend to be more individualistic, possibly because it's a "frontier" of sorts compared to the rest of Japan. And the US is largely populated by people who (themselves or their ancestors) went to a similar "frontier".

didibus3• 5 years ago

I think oftentimes people find meaning in what they can have, because simply put, you have too, otherwise your life would be meaningless.

So I wonder if that means a lot of countries still see that material wellbeing, health, hobbies, nature, travel, new experiences, romantic partners, friends, etc. are all too hard to have or keep or sustain, where-as family is all you end up with, and thus what you have to find meaning in of itself?

That would mean from a different lens, seeing family as number one would be indicative of issues in that country in acquiring anything more? And if you were to see family rank low, it be a good sign, which means that you don't have to find meaning in family, because while you have family, you also have other avenues you can rely on to find meaning.

zwkrt• 5 years ago

if it’s worked for 10000 years I wouldn’t be so quick to knock it.

didibus3• 5 years ago

That just reinforces my statement. For 10000 years, most people only had family, because they couldn't afford the cost/time for friends, material wellbeing, good health, nature, travel, new experiences, etc. Thus you had to find meaning in family.

My thesis is that you will always find meaning in what you have. If your whole family is dead, you might find meaning in your pet dog for example, or in your friends. Similarly, if you only have family, you will find meaning in them.

Family tends to be the only thing you are given for free at birth, so it makes sense that it ends up what most people find meaning in. All the other stuff require work/chance on your part to acquire. And are thus much harder to lean on to find meaning, since they can be easily taken away, or simply be unaccessible to you.

Which means maybe in a country that shows other things beyond family as what they find meaning in is actually a sign that in that country people are easily able to have a lot more than just family, and can thus find meaning in more things.

iforgotpassword• 5 years ago

I don't think this is true. I feel like we started to realize that money isn't buying you happiness. The previous generations were proud to work hard so they can buy big houses and big cars and be really proud of that and show it to all their friends and neighbors.

The next generation wondered if maybe not getting the biggest car possible, but in return having to work a little bit less and actually spend time with your kids while they grow up etc isn't such a bad idea at all.

terrorOf• 5 years ago

People got to consider at least two following points:

- Chosun Ilbo is news media that is right-wing and always produce news articles (even fake news) that against left-wing parties inc. current government. Many Koreans do not trust Chosun Ilbo. I have no idea why Chosun Ilbo was even interviewed. - South Korea has even poorer than any other countries only 50-60 years ago. There was pretty much nothing to feed on back then after the Korean War which was happened after Japanese horrible invasion was just over. This is different situation than any European countries.

InfiniteRand2• 5 years ago

Didn’t a lot of European countries have hunger issues after world war 2? Certainly Germany. There’s only 5 years between the end of world war 2 and the beginning of the Korean War

SlowBall• 5 years ago

In Spanish the idiom "Salud, dinero y amor" (health, wealth, and love, in that order) is (very) commonly used when talking about what's important in life. I wonder if that had an influence in the results for Spain, which seem quite different from the rest of European countries.

singold• 5 years ago

My grandma used to say that and added "que lo demás, todo se arregla" (that everything else can be fixed).

I'm not from Spain but from a Spanish speaking country

zz865• 5 years ago

The article didn't talk about how S Korea was dirt poor two generations ago. All the other countries have been wealthy for centuries.

arcturus17• 5 years ago

I find it funny being Spanish but having lived in Germany how we rank family third and yet family bonds into adulthood seem much more important in Spain than in Germany…

tonyedgecombe• 5 years ago

Perhaps more reliance on family makes the relationship more difficult.

nurumaik• 5 years ago

I have read their paper several times, but can't find translation of their question to other languages. Wanted to find the exact question they asked koreans, in korean

rambojazz• 5 years ago

This looks like a wishlist, ranked by what people desire the most (but don't have).

Koreans react to startling results in Pew "what makes life meaningful" poll

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