Throughout the years, Korea has become a mysterious nation known for its degeneracy. As seen in the order books, Koreans have very low interest in buying boomercoins while the Korean Won occasionally tops the charts to be the most traded fiat pair.
“But why? How is this even possible? I mean, why are they even doing this to themselves??”
Pain and agony were a byproduct of this market; they are the market.
Welcome to Doomerland
Folks on CoinDesk or Bloomberg want to convince you that Koreans are just gamblers, and they have an appetite for risk (which is not unfounded). But have you ever asked why such a huge portion of the demographic has turned into dopamine junkies at all?
In Korea we call it success. Success is this magical concept where things just go great as follows: you go to a SKY university, get a good paying job at a Chaebol corporation, marry the perfect person, own a house in Seoul, make a couple of babies, don’t forget the occasional vacation to SEA and Europe, oh also drive the newest sedan, buy drinks for your friends, have time for an expensive hobby, and also you have to stay fit, maybe chuck in a couple of more hobbies there again, and you probably need to have a fire instagram profile to show off everything mentioned above.
Success is what everyone needs, and everyone wants. But what is success? I don’t know about other places, but in Korea it’s defined by a metric commonly referred to as money.
Material well-being was the 1st choice of what gives meaning to life, when asked to Koreans. Most other countries responded with family, so I guess there is something going wrong here?
Well, Imagine you live in a society where 40% of the population lives by themselves. No family, no housemates, no human contact, just you. What happens when you have nothing to rely on but merely numbers in your bank account? You hoard. Like a starved carnivore in the wild. And when there are too many predators in the jungle, turf wars enusue. After the life-or-death struggle, those who emerge will call it the “survival of the fittest”, but again, do you even have a house in Seoul?
Even the fittest cannot afford an apartment in Seoul unless they sell both of their kidneys. But if you ain’t living in Gangnam, you ain’t living at all. Why? Because education said so. The meaning of success transforms into something bigger when you enter your midlife. Now how good your kid is at school becomes the metric.
“Wadafaq? It wasn’t all money??”
No, because how good your kid is at school will decide how much they will make.
Back to work. But this time at least you have more money?
The Line Must Go Up
Speculation on these grounds have been historically unbeatable. The saying “Gangnam Bulpae”(강남불패), meaning that you will never lose money buying property in the Gangnam area, has become a prevalent theme throughout investors.
But the problem is that most people are not “investors”. They are just passive observers; no skin in the game. They just want to buy a house they can live in, but the price has to go up. “Just buy a place in Gangnam. Great schools and infrastructure!” comes in play at this moment. Obviously most people can’t afford an apartment in Gangnam so Seoul as a whole sees a meteoric rise in housing prices. Then down bad.
Your money is gone. You look around for something, someone, anyone, please!
“…What is this shiny new object I am looking at?”
The line of said object was extending from $0.07 to $64,000. Everyone seems to be made rich out of this. You found the corn. The corn to all answers. The corn to solve all your problems. But you calculate its total market cap is too large for you to make any meaningful returns. Your extensive experience in the markets comes in handy this time. We’re so back.
You just need to create a KBank account, login to UpBit, send funds. The user experience is superb. Fiat on-off ramps are so smooth you didn’t even know you were agreeing to 500 other terms with your Face ID authentication. Now all set. Time to change your life one ticker at a time.
The first coin to dominate: Ethereum Classic! You have never heard of its name before, don’t know what it does, and actually don’t care. If lines goes up, it goes up. That’s all you need. You’ve only seen these type of returns in movies. I mean, not even in movies.
But suddenly the music stops. Panic ensues. You ain’t no rookie no more. The pull out game was strong on this one. You have some leftovers, but a battle lost is still a loss. Time to make it all up, again.
Somewhere in the forums you keep encountering the word “futures”. Sometimes “margin”, “short”, “liquidation”. What could all this mean? The innate curiosity of yours is unforgiving. You must now know how these anons make gazillion dollars over night.
“Easy”
Setting up a futures account on Binance was the most simple task you executed after trading corns on the interwebs. But then you realize why it is made to be so easy. Everything was designed for you. The interface, colors, buttons, sliders, margin amount. It was all made for you. For you to lose money. Thank god you didn’t put all of your savings in it. But you realize it’s too late.
All in.
Humans Doing Human Things
I hope the totally-not-true-story-related-to-nobody above made sense to anyone reading this far. It is all about pain. The pain of not being rich. Not being wanted. Never owning something. A broken mind will take the path of least resistance. When it is so easy to click buttons for internet money, you will. But most people forget about the fact they can also lose money. One must be most fearful when dealing with Koreans because the FOMO-driven bids are a form of anger and despair. It is a call for help; more than a degenerate trade.
I feel like the culture in Korea is dominated by materialism, lookism, elitism, and old hierarchies that reinforce all things bad. The constant drag of not being a model, not being smart, not having a good job devours the minds of people with such force as to create a society with the highest suicide rates and lowest birth rates.
These statistics signal that Koreans are asking for a reset. A reset of the world they were born into. But instead of a hammer and sickle, they picked up keyboards and mouses. The revolution will not be televised, but it will be traded. Instead of a mass protest on the streets, we are trading in the sheets, to overcome the gatekeeping and deceit.
It is ironic that we must do it in the most market-centric way possible. But that is what we were told; be better. The society has been trained to choose competence over equity, when in reality all we want is the latter. It is truly unfortunate that we can’t be honest to our most desperate intentions.
Language Comes Before All
Everything is downstream from culture. But culture is also formed by language, and language is how you interact with humans. Human interaction here in Korea is very odd.
Koreans are very shy to strangers. When I mean stranger, it is everyone else but people they know. So basically everyone in this world. Just go to a networking event. You’ll find people just staring at walls or talking to their friends. Networking parties make little impact because people simply don’t know how to network. All this is because of the language, and the hierarchies that it introduces to two strangers.
Once you want to talk to someone, it must be in an honorary form, which is already a pain in the ass. You don’t want to be rude. Nor do you want to be looked down upon. So, you choose not to engage at all. I mean, to not engage first. Because that is a sign of weakness. Bowing down to beg for a conversation is not what you do.
Once two strangers miraculously end up talking, it is a must to ensure who comes on top. Your age, school, company, friends, family, everything you have done in your past becomes a weight of measure to evaluate your worth to be respected.
This weird tension discourages casual conversations. Like, what you would expect at a house party from college. There is no honesty, thus no fun, and only shallow conversations that won’t lead anywhere. All Koreans want to do is give out their name cards and leave.
Therefore, it is not only important to learn the language to understand why Koreans like to be so Korean, but one must observe and understand the fundamentals and underlying cultural artifacts that create such stereotypes.
