Until recently, we dreamed of embracing a ‘You Only Live Once (YOLO)’ mentality to enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime life without regret. But these days, the key word ‘God-saeng Life’ is popular on various social media services such as Instagram and YouTube, focusing on the MZ generation.
What is ‘God-saeng Life’? It is a newly coined word that combines ‘God’ and ‘Life,’ and it means a lifestyle that spends each day fruitfully and diligently. This word contains the characteristics of the MZ generation, who feel and pursue a sense of accomplishment and a small but certain happiness everyday by spending a day more planned and fruitful instead of dwelling on distant future.
Then why is ‘YOLO’ passing by and the trend of ‘God-saeng Life’ becoming popular? Compared to the past, ‘YOLO’ urged us to enjoy the day because of the difficulty of employment, uncertainty in the future, tremendous academic stress, and the Korean society characteristic of pursuing life ‘more quickly’. However, as we live like this, we lose more than we gain. Therefore, the social trend of ‘God-saeng Life’ emerged, encouraging us to live a better life by spending our days more meaningfully.
The point of ‘God-saeng Life’ is to be planned and practiced. Because of this, we should make small goals which can be easily achieved such as taking a walk and taking a shower rather than setting a grand goal. However, just because you make up your mind and no matter how trivial your goals are, it does not mean you can immediately live a new life. Thus, there are many IT services and applications that help with these projects. Apps such as ‘Naver Café, Blog, Band, To DO Mate, and My Routine’ give motivation by helping users plan and practice and rewarding them when they certify their accomplished activities.
The MZ generation leads the trend of ‘value consumption’ and ‘environmental protection’ together with ‘God-saeng Life’ since they prefer their current work and small satisfactions. ‘Value consumption’ is a campaign to consume products that match one’s own values. It includes not only participating in the campaign, but also actively sharing and promoting it on social network services.
This is deeply related to eco-friendly and environmental protection activities. To practice sustainable consumption, the MZ generation is leading ‘the Zero Waste’ movement to reduce waste in their daily lives, respectively by using tumblers and shopping baskets instead of disposable cups and plastic bags. There are lots of activities endorsed by ‘the Zero Waste’ movement such as ‘veganism,’ which requires adherents not to consume products that use animal ingredients or involve animal experimentation, ‘plogging’ to pick up trash on the road while running, and ‘Earth Hour,’ a global campaign to turn off lights.
On the other hand, excessive pursuit of productivity does not bring good results all the time. It may cause another aspect of anxiety and burnout. Not being satisfied with the present and constantly trying to make yourself in a better state through self-affirmation that ‘anything can be achieved’ may soon cause self-exploitation. If you criticize and push yourself harshly when your efforts to live a desirable and sincere life every day are excessive, or when things are not going as well as you want, many new problems will arise.
Even if you do not grow each day or when you haven’t achieved your goals, sometimes you need to be generous to yourself. There is nothing that can be solved with a completing a straight line at once. All problems get better as selfimprovement and determination are repeated. It is the curve of growth that fails and does not seem to improve, but then gets much better before you know it. So, don’t push yourself too hard and wait slowly. In some situations, like winter trees, there are times when they are growing just by holding out.
