Suicide in Korea - Page 15

On May 26 2011 19:03 Anon06 wrote:
um this has been going on in japan for long time why's it suddenly special now that koreans are doing it?

On May 26 2011 06:09 Holcan wrote:

Isnt this an oxymoron? You think its sad that people commit suicide, but you want other people to drive themselves towards suicide?

On May 26 2011 21:44 McStupid wrote:
I find the status of education in Korea to be rather ridiculous. Thousands of students are being indoctrinated into a mindset of being the best to get a good job so the BIG COMPANY they work for becomes richer. And they get a small piece of the money as a reward.

I'm willing to bet a Korean high school graduate, with no college, who can start and run a successful self employed business, can do as well as or even better than the horde of mindless university graduates.

Remember the old Speed Racer cartoons? There's an example of an Asain mindset. When Speed would be in some tough spot over a race he'd think to himself "I'VE GOT TO WIN, I'VE GOT TO PROVE TO EVERYONE THAT I'M THE BEST. I heard it in many episodes.

Do not think that going to big university and getting a job at the big company is the only way to go, I have known people who became self employed, or invested in real estate and bought and owned many housed that they rented out, and after a few years they did very well on money without much effort. Not even working 40 hours a week.

On May 27 2011 02:03 JamesJohansen wrote:
Too many people are content with mediocrity

I'm a premed student at Williams College, guessing most people haven't heard of it, but from wikipedia: "56 percent of the students were expected to be valedictorian or ranked in the top one percent of their class." We're fairly selective. There is a fine line between nerdiness and insanity, and most students here are so far beyond that line into the realm of insanity that their origins are unrecognizable. What makes me so mad about this whole culture of academic perfection is that for all the hours that a lot of these students put in to get perfect grades, it doesn't really translate into any usefulness. It's all for nothing. It's a correlative effect, rather than a causal effect. The measurements that school use for efficiency's sake are only proxies for the real qualities that they are looking for. For instance, a high GPA in biology is meant to mean you care a whole awful lot about the subject, and as a researcher you would have a passion for it. 99% of what you need to know to perform at a job in say the biotech sciences, you are taught when you are hired. What school is meant to do, is give you a passion, and having a passion for something makes it so you don't have to work hard, because work is easy. There has been tons of research done on how sleep deprivation, chronic stress, and other factors that are brought about by a stressful learning environment can inflict very significant damage neurologically (look up hippocampal neurodegeneration), yet this old anxiety based system of fostering inter-student competition is still used because administrators, professors, and many others are deluded into thing that "no pain, no gain" applies well to academics. Many professors hate this new wave of students with a firey passion because they are like robots who memorize rather than learn to apply concepts, yet at the same time, teach and test in a way that fosters this phenomenon. You know when someone is discussion a particular strategy in starcraft, and you are really into the information, and you can't stop thinking about it? You could spend hours doing unit testing to figure how well something works? That characteristic is what makes a good researcher. Making flash cards of all of the unit stats, and boasting that you know how much a corrupted roach with +2 armor takes from a +1 attack roach doesn't make you a good researcher (edit: I say researcher, because I can only speak from my own experience, but from everything I have ever seen, this is the same for pretty much any profession. Warren Buffet is a pretty good example of this). When you know why you are learning something, you'll remember it for a very long time when you do learn it. If you are learning something so that you can score higher than someone else, you use learning strategies that have a short term advantage. You would think that people so focused on academic improvement would pay attention to the science of learning itself, but it's completely ignored. I think much of it comes down to bigotry and narcissism in the academic community (high schools are measured in SAT scores, premed programs measured in MCAT scores).

FYI, My sister went here as well, and took her life her junior year due to major hypomanic episode set off by academic pressure, much longer story but I'm not going to write my life story out on the innernettes. Also: I think people saying that governments should have protective measures for students under academic pressure think too idealistically about this kind of thing. No matter how you word it, any kind of support system, not would, but does bear a mark of intense shame at the upper levels. The problem here is the manner by which students are taught and tested, and the absurd fact that schools don't care very much about false negatives in test scores. When we hear about Asian countries, and to a lesser extent some western countries, that have systems where 1 exam dictates your placement, we shouldn't be thinking "wow they are harsh, that is terrible" we should be thinking "wow that is an incredibly uneducated and wasteful way of going about doing their job." They are essentially trading a large portion of the career life potential of someone who did badly on 1 exam for the ability to test people in a fast, and more cost effective way. Not a very good trade for society IMO.

On May 27 2011 02:20 TheGiz wrote:


Holy crap THIS.

I find it very upsetting that people today knowingly do things to hurt themselves and their standing in society. Even if your standing in society is not important to you, to allow yourself to fail is some kind of sick self-cruelty. You're basically selling yourself short, and are saying to yourself, "I'm going to get less out of life as a result of this decision and I am OK with that because good things don't make me happy."

I find stuff like this heartbreaking. I genuinely want to see good people around me do well but when they sell themselves short I feel nothing but sadness for them. I feel like a father whose son is his world but all his son does is screw up opportunity after opportunity. Why don't people want to do better? There is nothing wrong with failure if you tried your best, but to deliberately aim lower is unfathomable.

On May 27 2011 21:02 Zuxo wrote:


Totally agree

On May 26 2011 10:58 Danglars wrote:


Well are these state-sponsored universities? Hasn't been mentioned yet. Perhaps you would be more receptive if I put it in the eyes of private contributions towards this end. I am having trouble understanding your lack of prejudice against religion or religious people when you aren't against the sharing of ideology. Get the firebrand of the pejorative words, "separation of church and state," thrown at any thought of showing someone a non-secular reason to live. I'm recommending a look at these programs in universities, whether or not the funding is privately-sourced or publicly. The suicides mentioned by the OP point to the need for more than just availability of psychological counseling for students.

On May 26 2011 02:24 dreamsmasher wrote:


this is the stupidest shit i have ever heard. go take 9th grade biology again.

On May 30 2011 11:54 ZiegFeld wrote:
Great argument, good representation of every post you've made in this thread.

On May 30 2011 14:39 dreamsmasher wrote:


no need to validate my argument when you're extending darwin's theory of natural selection (a biological concept that explains the evolution of species) to the structure of society.

On May 30 2011 11:54 ZiegFeld wrote:
Great argument, good representation of every post you've made in this thread.

On May 27 2011 02:20 TheGiz wrote:


Holy crap THIS.

I find it very upsetting that people today knowingly do things to hurt themselves and their standing in society. Even if your standing in society is not important to you, to allow yourself to fail is some kind of sick self-cruelty. You're basically selling yourself short, and are saying to yourself, "I'm going to get less out of life as a result of this decision and I am OK with that because good things don't make me happy."

I find stuff like this heartbreaking. I genuinely want to see good people around me do well but when they sell themselves short I feel nothing but sadness for them. I feel like a father whose son is his world but all his son does is screw up opportunity after opportunity. Why don't people want to do better? There is nothing wrong with failure if you tried your best, but to deliberately aim lower is unfathomable.

On May 31 2011 01:19 KaiserJohan wrote:


No, he is correct, Ziegfeld, that was probably the worst argument I've ever heard. It's like saying the holocaust is fine because of natural selection. Strongest survives eh?

On May 31 2011 01:28 Twistacles wrote:
Memorizing formulas and descriptions is mostly clutter when you get to the job market. You're essentially killing yourself to learn frivolous bullshit so that you're more attractive to an employer in a few years because you have bigger numbers on some transcript. That's not real life, and some people realize this early.

On May 31 2011 01:19 KaiserJohan wrote:


No, he is correct, Ziegfeld, that was probably the worst argument I've ever heard. It's like saying the holocaust is fine because of natural selection. Strongest survives eh?