> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://blog.desinda.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Korea: The Weight of Work - URL: https://blog.desinda.dev/korea-the-weight-of-work/ - Published: 2026-10-17T14:17:57.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-20T08:44:27.000Z - Description: We explore how Korea shows us the workplace when overworking becomes a normal part of life, and where it leads. - Author: Luke Selman - Tags: Forging a New Path ## The Stream That Does Not Move ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fb/21/fb21455e-e1f2-4825-a5db-51aff6ed5ffc/content/images/2026/10/20251213_083606.jpg) A stone with carved writing in Classical Chinese on one of Jeju-do's trails On Jeju Island, beside a stream that runs down from Hallasan, stands a stone carved with a poem by Hyeil, a Buddhist monk of the Goryeo period who lived some seven hundred years ago. It marks the site of a hermitage called Seocheon-am, the Passing-Stream Hermitage. The name comes from Confucius, who once stood beside a river and lamented that everything flows away like water, day and night, without pause. Hyeil did not accept the lament. He answered Confucius with Sengzhao, a Buddhist thinker who taught that things do not truly move at all. The poem closes with an invitation: look with a higher eye, and the endless waves are still. I begin here because modern Korea is a nation that has taken Confucius at his word. Its people have learnt to flow without stopping: from school to private academy, from the office to the after-hours dinner with the boss, from one obligation to the next. Hyeil's question is the question of this chapter. What happens to a people who never learn to see the stillness beneath the current? ## A Nation Built in a Hurry To understand why Koreans work the way they do, we have to go back further than the boardroom. Between 1910 and 1945, Korea lived under Japanese colonial rule. In the final years of that period, hundreds of thousands of Koreans were mobilised as labour for the Japanese war effort, in mines, factories and construction sites across the empire. Work, for that generation, was not something you chose. It was something done to you. Liberation brought no rest. The peninsula was divided in 1945, and the Korean War of 1950 to 1953 left the South among the poorest countries in the world. When Park Chung-hee seized power in 1961, he set the nation on a course of rapid, export-led industrialisation. What followed became known as the Miracle on the Han River: within a single lifetime, a shattered agricultural country became one of the world's great industrial economies. Miracles have a price, and someone always pays it. The factories ran on long hours and low wages, and trade unions were tightly controlled. Koreans even have a phrase for the spirit of the age, *ppalli-ppalli*, "hurry, hurry", and it is still heard everywhere today. One man's name stands at the centre of this story. Jeon Tae-il was a young garment worker at the Pyeonghwa (Peace) Market in Seoul, where teenage girls sewed for fourteen hours or more a day in cramped attic workshops. He studied the Labour Standards Act, found that almost none of it was being enforced, and petitioned the authorities again and again. Nobody listened. On 13 November 1970, aged twenty-two, he took his own life in protest, calling for the law to be obeyed and declaring that workers were not machines. His death is widely regarded as the birth of Korea's modern labour movement. It also marks the first time the link this chapter explores, between overwork and the taking of a life, was brought to light before the whole nation. Seventeen years later, the democracy movement of 1987 and the wave of strikes that followed won workers real rights. The law changed. The culture, as we shall see, has been far slower to follow. ## The Weight Carried Today Modern Korea is democratic, wealthy and technologically dazzling. Yet the habits of the hurried decades remain. According to the OECD, South Koreans worked an average of 1,833 hours in 2025, the sixth-longest of the 36 member countries with data, and 97 hours above the OECD average. A German worker, by comparison, put in 1,332\. ([source](https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/20260705/s-koreas-yearly-working-hours-fall-by-32-hours-last-year-but-remain-longer-than-oecd-average?ref=blog.desinda.dev)) In fairness, the trend is downward. Korea's annual hours stood above 2,100 in 2010, and the 52-hour weekly cap introduced in 2018 pushed them below 2,000 for the first time. ([source](https://biz.heraldcorp.com/article/10798187?ref=blog.desinda.dev)) The present government has pledged a 4.5-day working week and has moved to curb the "comprehensive wage" contracts that quietly fold unpaid overtime into a monthly salary. ([source](https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/amp/southkorea/politics/20250919/govt-seeks-passage-of-45-day-workweek-bill-this-year-despite-industry-pushback?ref=blog.desinda.dev)) But a law can only change what a culture allows it to. [As I wrote](https://blog.desinda.dev/forging-a-new-path/) at the start of this series, a policy is just a piece of paper. The people who live by it do the real work. The data for working hours in Korea does not appear to show whether this is per employer or overall. In retrospect, most Koreans end up taking up more than one job to make ends meet and is not clearly demonstrated by evidence on the subject. There is a telling irony in the numbers. Korean employers themselves report that hourly productivity is only around three-quarters of the OECD average. Koreans, in other words, work longer to produce less per hour. The long hours are not simply about output. They are about being seen to work: arriving before the boss, leaving after them, and never being the first to stand up. Korea even has a word for the extreme end of this: *gwarosa*, death from overwork. And beyond the hours lies something heavier still. In 2024, 14,872 people in South Korea died by suicide, a rate of 29.1 per 100,000 people and the highest in over a decade. That is nearly three times the OECD average, and Korea has had the highest rate among OECD members every year since 2003\. Suicide is now the leading cause of death for Koreans in their teens, twenties and thirties, and in 2024 it overtook cancer among people in their forties for the first time on record. ([source](https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10583603?ref=blog.desinda.dev)) No single cause explains these figures. Poverty in old age, academic pressure on the young, isolation and stigma around mental health all play their part. But the forties figure is worth looking at. These are people at the height of their working lives, carrying careers, mortgages, children's academy fees and ageing parents all at once. When the very generation that holds the economy together is the one most at risk, the cost of the hurry can no longer be hidden. ## The Mother in the Pot ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fb/21/fb21455e-e1f2-4825-a5db-51aff6ed5ffc/content/images/2026/10/20251214_115650.jpg) A line of Jeju Stone Statues at Jeju Stone Park, Jeju-do, Taken 14 December 2025 Jeju has an older story than Hyeil's, one that reaches back into the island's shamanic past. The giant goddess Seolmundae Halmang, it is said, scooped up earth to build Hallasan itself. She had five hundred sons. One day, while cooking an enormous pot of porridge for them, she slipped and fell in. The sons came home hungry from their labours and ate their fill, finding the porridge richer than ever before. Only the youngest, ladling out the last of it, discovered what they had eaten. In their grief, the sons turned to stone. They stand on Hallasan still, the rock pillars of Yeongsil known as the Five Hundred Generals. I cannot read this story now without seeing modern Korea in it. A generation gave itself entirely to feeding the next, labouring in the factories and workshops of the hurried decades until there was nothing left of them. Their children inherited the prosperity, and found it nourishing, without always knowing what it had cost. And now the children too are hardening, standing in place, working through the night, unable to move. Korean tradition understood, in its way, that a life needs attending to. Before old graves stand the *dongjaseok*, small stone children placed there to wait upon the dead and console their spirits. At the edges of villages stand the *jangseung*, guardian posts that mark where one domain ends and another begins. Even the dead were given companions. Even the village was given boundaries. Yet the modern worker, alone at a desk long after dark, is often given neither: no one to console them, and no line where work ends and life begins. In the introduction to this series I wrote that we turn to the path of least resistance, and that we build out of passion. Korea shows how those two ideas can come apart. In a culture where everyone stays late, staying late is the comfortable choice. It is the path of least resistance, even when it is wearing you down. To leave at six, to rest, to say no: these are the truly uncomfortable acts. Work that once came from a passion to rebuild a nation has, for many, become work that comes from fear of being the one who stops. Learning to be comfortable with the uncomfortable, then, is not an abstract idea here. It may be the first step towards a life that moves freely again. ## Towards the Next Pressure Hyeil looked at a rushing stream and saw stillness. Modern Korea looks at stillness and sees failure. Yet the pressure to keep moving does not stop at the office door. It follows people home, into their schools, their screens and even their own faces. Nowhere is this clearer than in the world of K-pop, where the demand to perform has been carried to its furthest extreme, and where the standard is no longer only how hard you work, but how you look while doing it.