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Distorted Self-Portrait

Show me your daily schedule, and
I’ll tell you, not just how you live,
but what type of person you are.

The 2009 survey on how Koreans spend their time on an average day, released by Statistics Korea Tuesday, expands this to a national proportion. Unfortunately, though expected, the result seems pretty far from what a good _ or at least worthwhile _ daily life should be like.

The Korean people have long been notorious for all work and no play. But the quinquennial survey found that Koreans spent less time at work and enjoyed more time at leisure, for dining, exercising and grooming last year than they did in 2004.

It is good the improved living standards have led to more relaxation but the ways the people are spending these spare hours _ mainly on eating and looking better _ leaves some points for pondering. This sense of a superficial life gets even more acute when considering some specific figures: An average Korean watched TV for 118 minutes but read books for only eight minutes a day. The reading time of a college student averaged 11 minutes a day, half of that of grade schooler’s, suggesting what’s gone so awfully wrong with this country’s education system.

The most shameful aspect is that 29 minutes were spent on sports activities and 78 minutes on personal hygiene and maintaining appearance but only ``two” minutes were spent on volunteer work, one minute less than five years before. Only 1.7 percent of Koreans 10 years or older took part in service for others, even down from the 2.2 percent in 2004. The comparable rate plummets to 0.1 percent among the high income bracket, those who earn 5 million won or more a month. This may explain why ``noblesse oblige” has become such a hackneyed phrase but hardly practiced here.

When competitiveness is the only national scenario, aid to others, either to foreigners or compatriots, could be little more than hypocrisy or the show of wealth unless it is backed by genuine volunteerism, something this poll showed Koreans are utterly lacking in.

Seven out of 10 respondents said that they are always busy and running short of time for activities not related to earning a living. Seen positively, this means they live and work hard, but from a negative viewpoint, it also reveals that their lives are very tiring and stressful _ far from happy in other words, in the word’s original sense. One only needs to look at the world’s highest suicide rate and the lowest birthrate as well as the continuous fall in the number of marriages. In the 1960s when Koreans were reeling under extreme poverty, the suicide rate was as low as the most optimistic European countries of Italy, Spain and Greece.

All of this is evidence of how Koreans have changed and what they have sacrificed to attain the rags-to-riches miracle of economic growth in just one generation, an economic boom that is almost without parallel in history. The world’s 14th-largest economy now resembles the fiercest jungle in which not even the fittest but only the meanest can survive.
The recent government survey should be a stern reminder of the need for Korea and Koreans to rethink the meaning of some basic words such as success, happiness and, most of all, life itself.

Excerpt from The Korea Times
Source: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2010/04/202_63497.html

Question
1. When is your most wasted time during a day?
2. What can be a method to spend your leisure time effectively?
3. For your success and happiness, where should your time be invested in?

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