One of the trending sentences that emerged last November in Korea was "What is important is an unbreakable heart" uttered by DRX, a Korean League of Legends esports team, while taking part in the 2022 League of Legends World Championships. Deft, DRX's captain, made the comment after losing to the European team, Rogue, in the group stage. Coming from a team that had just lost, it was oddly refreshing to hear. The team won the 2022 LoL World Championships.
Pandemic-weary Koreans must have empathized. Abbreviated to "jung-kkeok-ma" in Korean, it was frequently quoted across the board, like a mantra, in Korean society after that. There had been such mantras before. In the 2002 World Cup games co-hosted by South Korea and Japan, the sentence "Dreams do come true," rallied players and the public alike. Before that, in Korea's industrial development stage (the 1970s), the emphasis was on the expression "a can-do" spirit.
If the two previous "mantras" rang of headlong efforts toward achievement with no excuses allowed, the "unbreakable heart" recognizes that failures are part of life's process. It was about resilience, a resilient heart and mind.
It is welcome to see this sentiment emerging from this pressure cooker that is Korean society, where the sheer competition to outdo others is sometimes beautified as "can-do" -ism and lurks in just about every life stage.
Resilience is needed post-pandemic, both on personal and social levels. Recent statistics released in Korea show much work lies ahead. Abundant news reports talk about the declining number of self-employed in Korea. These self-employed businesses are your favorite restaurants and cafes, which usually account for one-fourth of the Korean economy. However, January's figures regarding the self-employed, announced by Statistics Korea, showed that the self-employed made up just over 20 percent of all those employed in 2022. The figure is the lowest since 1963 when the government began counting the number of self-employed businesses ― in that maiden year, the figure stood at 37.2 percent.
Children have been impacted. The Korean Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry's research announced last May, showed that among those aged five and under, only 52 percent of them showed normal development in language, sentiment and cognition. Who can confidently say that the youth and adults have been faring well during the past three years of the pandemic?
These are just but a few of the challenges standing before Korean society. To surmount them we will need to draw from the well of resilient minds and hearts, or "unbreakable hearts." It is an interesting development that noted minds have already applied the word resilience to help us keep standing, as today's virulent disruptions frequent our lives and world.
One such thinker is Jeremy Rifkin, who, in his latest book "The Age of Resilience," notes that the "Age of Progress" in existence since probably the 18th century was over and just waiting for a "proper postmortem," and that the "Age of Resilience" has set in. His resilience is more about vulnerability, and people opening up and adapting to new experiences. It is about adopting "fresh thinking" in governance and the relationship between nature and civilization, as technology turbo-develops while the Earth is warming up to dangerous levels. He wisely counsels that new perspectives of oneself in regard to nature, civilization and technology may well help people perhaps shift toward "stewardship" instead of "sovereignty" over natural resources, and "distributed peerocracy" from "representative democracy."
This may well be a bit of a stretch, but resilience can work for us when disruptions present themselves.
The writer is a member of the editorial board at The Korea Times.
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One of the trending sentences that emerged last November in Korea was "What is important is an unbreakable heart" uttered by DRX, a Korean League of Legends esports team, while taking part in the 2022 League of Legends World Championships. Deft, DRX's captain, made the comment after losing to the European team, Rogue, in the group stage. Coming from a team that had just lost, it was oddly refreshing to hear. The team won the 2022 LoL World Championships.
Pandemic-weary Koreans must have empathized. Abbreviated to "jung-kkeok-ma" in Korean, it was frequently quoted across the board, like a mantra, in Korean society after that. There had been such mantras before. In the 2002 World Cup games co-hosted by South Korea and Japan, the sentence "Dreams do come true," rallied players and the public alike. Before that, in Korea's industrial development stage (the 1970s), the emphasis was on the expression "a can-do" spirit.
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