Hell Joseon

Hell Joseon (literally "Hell Korea" and Joseon referring to ), which appeared in January 2010, is an internet neologism or new lexicon used by Koreans to sarcastically refer to Korea as hell on earth to live in. The rising popularity of the Hell Joseon in the internet suggests many South Koreans, especially younger people, are growing increasingly dissatisfied or disillusioned with the state of South Korean government and society. According to Se-Woong Koo's depiction in recent , Hell Joseon is "an infernal feudal kingdom stuck in the nineteenth century." It is a place where ambitions are suppressed and free will is merely an illusion: "Being born in South Korea is tantamount to entering hell, where one is immediately enslaved by a highly regulated system that dictates an entire course of life. Demanding education and service in the abusive military are the norm." "Golden Spoons" — euphemism for those born into wealth and power — simply neglects such social system by leveraging their wealth and connections, whereas the commoners either compete their ways into a corporate job or "take refuge in the Fortress of Bureaucrats by taking the civil servant examination." The only escape is to "become self-employed and eke out a self-sustaining but disreputable bandit-like existence on the margin of society, or wade through the Forest of Emigration and leave South Korea altogether, finding freedom countries beyond hell."
Statistics
How hopeless do South Koreans really believe they are? South Korean society is very competitive, but do the people really think they have little control over their own lives? It is quite difficult to know exactly how many people think of their country as Hell Joseon, but there are statistical indexes, from which several insights could be derived.
The World Values Survey (WVS)
The World Values Survey (WVS) is a cross-national survey database that has the right data based on the worldwide survey asking "How much freedom of choice and control people think they have over their own lives." According to WVS documentation WV5, the question asks, "Some people feel they have completely free choice and control over their lives, while other people feel that what they do has no real effect on what happens to them. Please use this scale where 1 means "no choice at all" and 10 means "a great deal of choice" to indicate how much freedom of choice and control you feel you have over the way your life turns out."
The cumulative data shows mean scores of 7.53 in 1990, 7.14 in 2001, and 6.57 in 2010 respectively. This tells that the majority of South Koreans think they have a reasonable measure of free choice and control over their lives whereas the mean score has been consistently decreasing (-0.96 over 20 years), demonstrating a gradual sense of vanity or loss of control. Divided by age, the data also display significant differences. In fact, the average were 8.10 in 1990, 7.54 in 2001, and 6.84 in 2010 for 'up to 29' group. The decreasing figure in freedom of choice and control is significantly greater for this age group than the average for the entire population, which was -1.26 over 20 years. These data confirm the Hell Joseon thesis - an increasing sense of helplessness among young South Koreans.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
The is an international economic forum founded in 1961 to stimulate economic world trade and progress by analyzing the member nation's overall status and conditions including agriculture, development, environment, government, health, innovation and technology. Its mass economic database includes population, education, GDP, tax, income inequality, CO<sub>2</sub> emissions, debt, and unemployment rates. Interestingly, OECD data presents a counterexample to Hell Joseon phenomenon in current Korean society.
GDP is the standard measure of the value of final goods and services produced by a country during a period minus the value of imports. According to OECD, the average Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Korea from 1980 to 1984 was 3,214 USD and the average GDP from 2010 to 2015 was 31,815. The aggregate data also displays that the youth unemployment rate in 1983 was 9.17% while the rate in 2013 was 9.34%. Moreover, the youth population in Korea has significantly decreased, showing 30.2% of population was youth in 1985 whereas only 14.3% of population was youth in 2014. While WVS survey data could both measure and explain the overall satisfaction of their lives in a psychosocial means, OECD's economic data is not sufficient to explain Hell Joseon phenomenon with the Korean economic path the nation has come.
Conclusion
The term, Hell Joseon carries an extremely negative connotation and hyperbolic description, yet it depicts of what real life is like in today's South Korea. The country is excessively competitive and what angers the young Koreans are evident: sacrifice of youth for perpetual education, the state and jobs no one believes in, lack of financial security and social welfare, competitive job market, hereditary privileges of the haves and burgeoning inequality. With increasing number of temporary employees and fewer permanent positions available for the rookies of the real world, the corporates only demand for better and brighter specs for their candidates. While one uses Hell Joseon to snap with heavy sarcasm, others could apply this term as a signal for assistance or a demand for breakthrough.

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