Consultation booths are set up at the 2026 Seoul Youth Policy Expo at Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul on July 10. The expo allows visitors to explore Seoul's youth policies — spanning employment and startups, housing, finance, mental health and culture — all in one location.Yonhap News
Park Myung-lim
The author is a political professor at Yonsei University.
The title of a recent paper on childbirth published in an international academic journal is striking: “It Is Always Best Never to Have Existed.” The idea that birth and existence themselves are forms of misfortune for humankind has deep roots. The problem is that this perception has re-emerged today, and South Korea is the most prominent example of this phenomenon.
Sophocles wrote, “Not to be born is, beyond all reckoning, best; but once a man has seen the light of day, the next best thing by far is to go with all speed back to where he came from.”
In the Bible, Job repeatedly curses the day of his birth, asking why he “did not perish at birth” and why his first breath was not his last.
In Goethe’s “Faust” (1790), after the pact with the devil, Faust cries out, “Oh, had I never been born!” Through this, Goethe reveals the contradiction between the suffering imposed by an unchosen existence and humanity’s desperate effort to escape it.
South Korea’s crises of population decline, regional disappearance, school closures, urban decline, and community collapse share two characteristics: long-term persistence and the absence of solutions. They are both systemic and generational problems.
The childbirth crisis has lasted for an entire generation. South Korea has remained at the bottom of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) fertility rankings for nearly two decades. Although there are slight signs of improvement, the situation remains among the worst. Suicide rates have followed a similar path. Suicide is the leading cause of death among people in their teens, twenties, and thirties, while child and adolescent suicide rates are especially alarming according to a 2025 publication on Statistics Korea.
Many young people refuse to pass the suffering of existence on to the next generation, either by choosing not to have children or by attempting through suicide to return as quickly as possible to the state before birth. This reflects their refusal to inherit the way of life created by the current generation and its system. Following this paradox, should we say they are choosing the best and second-best options available?
The terms “system problem” and “generational problem” have two meanings. First, these crises are products of social structures and policies that have persisted since democratization. Second, they represent collective resistance by the next generation against the fundamental conditions of South Korean life — a revolt against a society where even demands for change and voting fail to transform society.
The childbirth crisis cannot be solved by focusing only on individual choices. It must be understood as a problem of the population regime — a subsystem of the broader social system and the conditions under which human values can be realized.
The suicide crisis also cannot be solved by viewing it as individual choice alone. It is the outcome of people being pushed to the margins. Except during major economic crises, South Korea’s suicide rate was below the OECD average; In 1988, it was only half that average.
The population regime — including childbirth, suicide, generations and gender — is not an individual matter. The structural barriers facing younger generations include housing, education, employment, inequality, regional disparities and political representation. None of these systems works in favor of young people.
For example, the share of young people in nonregular employment has exceeded 30 percent despite the declining youth population.
Although youth issues are central to the nation’s problems, youth representation in politics remains among the lowest in the OECD. Lawmakers aged 30 or younger make up 0 percent, while those aged 40 or younger account for only 5.7 percent. Where can young people have their concerns represented and addressed through legislation? This country has a young generation, but it lacks genuine youth representation.
After economic, social and political exclusion, the older generation has now assumed the role of ideological and political gatekeepers over the younger generation. The generation that once resisted being labeled “pro-North Korean leftists” now labels today’s youth in similar ideological terms. This is a form of ideological and linguistic violence.
The solution lies not in stigmatization but in resolving youth problems and building a fair society.
This systematic structure may need to be called the combination of “generation” and “killing” — that is, genecide. The older generation is committing an unintended but structural form of genecide against the younger generation.
I appeal to the older generation:
Stop the systematic genecide of a generation!
If we do not stop it now and move forward together, this land will lose both its people and its future.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
