Eating alone as psychological self-care: How the younger generation in Let’s Eat survives in neoliberal South Korea

Abstract

TV dramas that focus on food and eating reflect the popular trend of single culture, with a rising number of single-person households among the younger generation in South Korea. Analyzing Let’s Eat (tvN), the South Korean food drama series that specifically focus on eating scenes, this paper uses the framework of survivalism and the popular discourse of healing to examine how eating alone as a social and cultural phenomenon represents the psychological turn in neoliberalism. In its three seasons, Let’s Eat reflects how eating alone becomes a practice of endurance and resilience that encourages the younger generation to stay positive, even during an enervated state of mind, to bounce back, and to ultimately spring forward. I argue that Let’s Eat reflects how survivalism especially requires the marginalized population of women in precarious employment to reflect and grow confidence without considering the problems of structural inequality. Let’s Eat shows the younger generation’s struggle and lack of societal support, perpetuating neoliberalism’s focus on individual effort and blaming individuals for their enervation.

Keywords

eating alone endurance mokpang neoliberalism neoliberalism psychological turn resilience single culture South Korea

Food and eating have been popular themes of media in South Korea (hereafter Korea) since the early 2000s. The food drama genre is one example, with food as the main driver moving stories forward. An early example, Dae-jang-geum (2003) tells the tale of an orphaned kitchen cook during the Chosŏn Dynasty. This drama achieved massive success in domestic and international markets, generating US $34 million in revenue after being exported to approximately 100 countries (Chang, 2014). In addition to TV shows, the new genre of mŏkpang (eating shows), where a live streamer broadcasts eating on video platforms such as YouTube, has become popular among the younger generation since the early 2010s. AfreecaTV, one of Korea’s most popular live streaming platforms, had 406 simultaneous mŏkpang broadcasts in 2013 after designating mŏkpang as a specific category (Cho, 2020).

An evident cultural trend is a focus on eating as a single-person activity. Single culture reflects the exponential growth in single-person households. In 2020, Statistics Korea announced that 6.6 million of 21.4 million households in Korea were single-person, representing an increase of 200% since 2000. This number has been reflected in everyday eating practices, with an increasing number of convenience stores and convenience foods targeting singles. The sales of top five convenience stores increased 8.5% in 2019 compared to 2017 (Yi, 2019), adapting to the changing consumption behaviors of single households (Chŏng, 2019).

The popularity of eating alone has been analyzed as a cultural phenomenon through the lens of the hegemonic force of neoliberalism, especially its focus on individual self-care–to constantly care for and improve the self–and its effect on the emotional sentiments of the youth. Many scholars focus on the younger generation’s psychological need to watch other people eat on mŏkpang to cope with the precarious conditions of neoliberal market rationality, such as increasing competition for jobs in an unstable market (Baek and Baek, 2018; Cho, 2020; Donnar, 2017; Hong and Park, 2016; Jang and Kim, 2016; Kim, 2018b; Moon et al., 2017). The shared cultural experience of eating alone as seen through mŏkpang is a way for the younger generation to commiserate with and cheer for each other (Cho, 2020). Especially for women, Kim (2018b) argues that mŏkpang has become an affective, gendered genre due to its sensorial exaggerations, which both reinforce and contradict societal expectations. In the larger body of literature studying neoliberalism and gendered lives, Orgad and Gill (2022) emphasize that neoliberalism’s operation on the “affective or emotional level” is central to contemporary culture (16). They call this “the psychological turn in neoliberalism” (Gill and Orgad, 2022: 8). For women, the discourse of self-care heavily focuses on an emotional capability to regenerate from negative dispositions (Gill and Orgad, 2022). This paper aims to tease out the cultural meanings of eating alone, which reflect the psychological turn in neoliberalism in the Korean context. Exploring the idea of psychological self-care further, this paper also examines the link between eating and classed and gendered identities through televisual representations of young, single, urban Koreans in the era of post-2008 financial crisis.

Reflecting the cultural trend of singleton food culture, Let’s Eat (2013 tvN) was a TV trailblazer. After the first season’s popularity, two other seasons were released in 2015 and 2018. The second season achieved a peak rating of 3.4%, placing it first in its time slot among tvN’s target audience, which consists of people aged between 20 and 49 (Park, 2015). Deviating from the previously popular format of food drama, Let’s Eat was the first of its kind in the Korean context to focus on eating to advance the narrative, rather thanusing the theme of food as a backdrop. That is, each 50-minute episode includes eating scenes lasting 5–10 minutes. Before Let’s Eat, such eating scenes, if used at all, would bridge segments between important stories in dramas (Kim, 2013). The proven success of Let’s Eat in 2013 paved the way for other similar program formats, which now dominate contemporary Korean television entertainment.

Taking Let’s Eat as a successful popular text reflective of the psychological turn within neoliberalism, I examine all three seasons to tease out the characteristics of psychological self-care in the rapidly evolving context of the post-2008 financial crisis in which contemporary, young, single, urban Koreans live. I argue that Let’s Eat represents eating as a form of psychological self-care in popular culture, following the larger cultural discourse of healing in survivalism. Survivalism refers to the mindset of the younger generation to continue and endure life in ongoing neoliberal challenges. Eating alone reflects the ways in which young, single, urban Koreans adapt to the ideals of endurance, resilience, and confidence, all elements of survivalism, and how they adapt their daily values and culture to survive the changing contexts of Korea. I contend that these individual psychological demands are especially prominent for women and those of lower socioeconomic status.

Upon survivalism: the psychological turn within neoliberalism

Neoliberalism refers to both the ways in which the market becomes the center of national and global economics with little regulation by the nation-state and a scheme that reorders the conduct of self, as Foucault (2008) explains. It proposes that one must actively engage in self-governing activities for one’s well-being (see Dean, 1999; Foucault, 1991; Rose, 1996, 1999). Well-being results from responsible decisions and rational choices, mitigating risk through self-discipline and self-care (Brown, 2003). Neoliberal self-care can range from the improvement of physical health and psychological wellness to educational and market performances that lead to high socioeconomic and cultural status. For example, in the late 1990s, Koreans strove to improve or maintain economic, social, and cultural status after a major economic crisis, leading to a boom of self-help books (Seo, 2011). Titles such as Stand Up as Me, Inc. assumed one’s consistent effort in improving personal assets, such as knowledge or interpersonal skills, that would help further one’s career and success.

A decade later, the economic stagnation that lingered after the global financial crisis in 2008 caused young Koreans to reconceptualize the meaning of self-care and success. Similar to countries such as Japan and China, which experienced weak economic growth and struggling individuals, Korea also suffered from declining jobs, especially among young adults, and an unsteady economy (Kim, 2016b; Song, 2014). Personal investment to achieve one’s economic goals became difficult amid high real-estate prices, fluctuating stock prices, and low interest rates for savings accounts (Song, 2014). The framework of self-care based on individual choices that led to a positive future, which further promoted a neoliberal agenda, no longer fit. For the first time, young adults – people in their twenties and thirties, dwelling by themselves in urban metropolitan areas – could not live up to upward mobility standards or even maintain the socioeconomic class set by the previous generation. Young Koreans stretched their cultural boundaries by reframing their everyday practices to manage neoliberal risks. For instance, the number of marriages and, subsequently, births decreased, and the average age for first marriages increased, according to Statistics Korea.

The worsening economic conditions – such as the liquidation and flexibilization of jobs, causing a lack of job security – infecting sociality and life in general called for a different construction of response and hope post-2008. As a reaction to the ongoing imperatives of neoliberalism, survivalism emerged as the prevailing quotidian sensibility. Survival in this context is not limited to overcoming extreme, traumatic experiences or achieving notable success. Orgad (2009) observes that the idea of a survivor in public discourse has become a psyche one adopts to overcome a variety of life experiences involving suffering and struggle. Survival can be applied to a struggle toward stability in the quotidian, including repetitive failures in competing for a stable job, recovering from an illness or abuse, or losing a loved one. Chu (2013) refers to Korean society’s struggle for survival as a psychological hunger – the feelings of loneliness from isolation, anxiety, enervation, and exhaustion that cannot be satisfied. The desire to seek relief from a challenging life in a neoliberal market economy calls for practices that create a feeling of joy and a sense of healing, however short-lived. Survivalism prioritizes the relief of self through proving excellence and self-worthiness to avoid failure and social exclusion in neoliberal competition (Kim, 2015b). This avoidance reflects the dire state that the younger generation is in – enervation. For example, the culture of ingyŏ (surplus) aptly captures this psychological sentiment. It is a peculiar online subculture of the younger generation that practices and celebrates unproductive activities, such as watching gamers live streaming for hours, for the sole purpose of entertainment and enjoyment (Song, 2018).

Survivalism refers to this shift in the broader psychological regime of neoliberalism to which young Koreans regard success as more equivalent to endurance and resilience than prosperity. Giving up the desire for upward mobility or an economically stable future, the idea of self-care has shifted to caring for one’s psychological needs. Self-care has become a set of psycho-therapeutic tools to overcome life’s struggles through self-management techniques and optimism.

Eating alone as healing: psychological self-care

Since 2009, the discourse of healing, a specific sentiment of survivalism, has been widely available and visible in psychological self-care. Healing assumes recovery, rest, and recharging in the everyday context (Ryu, 2012), with the goals of holistic balance and harmony of the body, mind, and soul, encompassing peace and mindfulness and striving for a better tomorrow (Park and Whang, 2018). Self-help books in the formats of empathetic essays and psychological tools such as the Courage to be Disliked series (2014, 2016) have become bestsellers since 2011 (Kim, 2015a). On TV, talk shows such as Healing Camp (2011–2016, SBS) and Kim Je-dong’s Talk to You (2015–2017, JTBC) have featured celebrities and ordinary guests unpacking their past difficulties and present worries and troubles to “heal the tired mind,” as described in the program description of Healing Camp.

Healing assumes a state of enervation as a starting point, from which one commiserates and consoles the self and others (Kim, 2015a). Healing culture puts forward the recovery of physical and mental energy through self-reflection. The process of self-reflection requires the younger generation to realize the potential of the self and cultivate a sense of self-worth (Kim, 2015a, 2018a; Lee and Ryoo, 2014). Furthermore, healing culture acknowledges feelings, using positive encouragement and consolation as coping strategies (Sim, 2013). This attention to positivity and the avoidance of negativity serves as an effective strategy for both self-care and neoliberal governance, paralleling discourses of happiness (Binkley, 2014; Cabanas and Illouz, 2019) and resilience (Gill and Orgad, 2018) in Anglophone contexts.

Yet the discourses of healing in the early 2000s did not provide specific tools, skills, or knowledge to overcome reality, which was a complaint of the younger generation (Kim, 2015a). I characterize this early discourse of healing with its lack of effective actionable tools, as endurance. Endurance is defined, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, as the ability to withstand hardship or adversity. Whether it be physical or mental, endurance assumes the ability to continue and push through the boundaries of discomfort and fatigue (Salazer and Scheerder, 2023). Compared to physical endurance, mental endurance is more temporary and impalpable (Salazer and Scheerder, 2023). It assumes a focus on the present and efforts made to push through the psychological boundaries of negative thoughts. Mental endurance is the first step in sustaining positive psychology. The endeavor to escape negativity becomes a springboard for a bigger transformation of the self. Like the discourse of happiness that focuses on a mindset that can be engineered through willpower (Cabanas and Illouz, 2019), the positive feelings generated through endurance are both an area of self-care and an affective, regulatory ideal influencing the personal and collective psyche (see Binkley, 2014; Gill and Orgad, 2018).

With the demands put on youth, healing culture has evolved to provide more specific solutions for individualized problems after 2013, which Kim (2018a) calls post-healing discourses. Calling for active action items that can be planned and measured, post-healing shares core characteristics with the ideas of resilience and confidence. Resilience entails having a positive mental attitude, practicing intensive self-management, and possessing the capacity to bounce back from negative circumstances (Gill and Orgad, 2018). While it shares some similarities with endurance, resilience is more action-oriented because it requires motility, the ability to bounce back and spring forward. Resilience is often mobilized against the disabled or those in the welfare system and is used to blame individuals and demand that they demonstrate positivity (Friedli and Stearn, 2015; Jensen, 2016).

Confidence is also action-oriented and transformative, particularly encouraged for the marginalized – primarily women and those from lower socioeconomic classes. Women are often blamed for their problems and told to work endlessly on themselves (Banet-Weiser et al., 2020). Emotional tools have been a primary method of feminizing neoliberal ideology (Henderson and Taylor, 2020). For instance, mindfulness apps targeting women provide the tools to regulate negative thoughts and manage one’s confidence by quantifying the self via mental measurements – gathering and consistently monitoring one’s feelings, anxieties, and desires (Gill and Orgad, 2022; Orgad and Gill, 2022). By delegating working on the self to individuals, confidence as a gendered technology blames women with a lack of resources for failures, only faintly alluding to the problems of existing structures and rules (Orgad and Gill, 2022; Park and Whang, 2018; Song et al., 2018) and obfuscating the history of feminist struggles encompassing differences such as class (Orgad and Gill, 2022). The post-healing discourse limits an objective and critical point of view through which the economically challenged internalize the work of confidence.

Eating alone arose as a strategy within healing and post-healing discourses (Pak, 2016). Prior to becoming a practice of healing, eating alone represented the lonely reality of a sad single life (Ko, 2014). When eating alone became popular both as a cultural phenomenon and on media content through the live streaming of mŏkpang, however, the healing culture reframed the meanings of eating alone. Especially for mŏkpang, eating alone is a means of sharing and communicating emotions via viewership and participation (Ahn and Choi, 2016; Cho, 2020). Eating popular, simple, easy menus, live streamers commiserate with viewers’ current circumstances and feel sympathy toward and cheer for each other’s precarious lives (Cho, 2020). The psychological pleasure of watching other people cook and eat on media is another main reason for mŏkpang’s popularity (Donnar, 2017; Hong and Park, 2016; Jang and Kim, 2016; Moon et al., 2017; Park, 2020). Watching others eat satisfies both a psychological and physical hunger through vicarious pleasure of the audiovisual elements of cooking and eating (Hong and Park, 2016) and the epicurean joy they bring (Bruno and Chung, 2017; Park, 2020). Eating alone has become an acceptable means to recuperate, feel pleasure, and heal the self.

The sobering backdrop of survivalism provides implications for this emphasis on the psychological joy of eating alone. Some view the phenomenon of mŏkpang as pathological (Choi, 2015); as a tool of fantasy for conforming young individuals to neoliberal forces and rendering them unpolitical subjects (No, 2016); or as resistive, which ironically results in reinforcing neoliberal governmentality because it fails to connect to meaningful actions (Moon et al., 2017). These analyses are representative of the enervated state of the younger generation lacking hope. Baek and Baek (2018) and Cho (2020) argue that eating alone on media reiterates the problems of neoliberalism and advanced capitalism – meritocracy based on academic background, a lack of equal opportunities, and precarious employment. Having evolved within the realm of healing culture, eating alone has become a psychologized form of address. With the ideas of endurance, resilience, and confidence, I turn to the text of Let’s Eat and tease out the meaning of eating alone as a form of psychological governance for both the younger generation in general and women, a marginalized population.

Eating alone as endurance: staying in a positive, joyful present

Throughout the series, Let’s Eat reflects the realities of survivalism by stressing states of torpor from precarious employment, failed relationships, and traumatic life experiences. The key characters of the series struggle in their everyday lives as young, urban Koreans. Soo-kyung is a divorced secretary at a lawyer’s office; Soo-ji is an economically struggling writer with precarious employment; and Dae-young is an insurance salesperson and food blogger who encounters both successes and failures in his career and relationships. Living in an enervated state of mind, these characters often cannot or do not follow the conventional self-care practices for success; that is, they are not ideal neoliberal citizens improving and developing their skill sets. Rather, the characters exemplify the detailed ways in which young Koreans’ single-person culture adapts to the economic and social realities of the stagnant neoliberal society into which they’re forced. Eating alone as healing self-care is both a demand of survivalism and a struggle of the younger generation that I characterize as endurance, manifesting their need to withstand hardship by pushing the boundaries of discomfort and offering consolation and joy in the present.

In order to situate eating alone as an act of endurance, the first season of Let’s Eat resists the social perception of isolation and loneliness that eating alone has been associated with. Previously, repetitive portrayals of eating alone in negative contexts reflected the public gaze, which regarded eating by oneself as a lonely and isolated activity, stigmatizing solo diners as shameful figures (see Ko, 2014). Dae-young resists this judging gaze and justifies eating alone as a sound neoliberal activity, an example of Gill and Orgad’s (2022) observation of the expansion and intensification of self-care practices. Dae-young reframes eating alone as a sign of individuality and the pursuit of happiness that one creatively exercises for oneself, which is deeply associated with the psychological well-being of the present. This is especially visible in the conversation between Soo-kyung and Dae-young that ensues in season 1, episode 10 when she runs into him in a restaurant in which she hesitates to dine by herself. In their conversation, Dae-young explains the benefits of dining alone in an esoteric tone. He explains the positivity and joy that come with eating alone. From deciding between menu options to eating at one’s own pace, eating alone maximizes individual customization and thus, freedom. This attitude subsequently leads to the well-being of the self – the state in which one feels psychologically content.

In the following episodes, Soo-kyung acknowledges the positive value of eating alone as a desirable activity for healing. An earlier episode, however, portrays her enervated state and eating alone as an extension of her negative feelings. In season 1, episode 7, after a lonely and depressing day, Soo-kyung has a quick and simple dinner of kimpap (rice, vegetables, and meat rolled in dried seaweed) by herself. She can eat only one roll and does so at a slow pace – both of which are unusual for Soo-kyung. Then she expresses her frustration to her dog: “I feel miserable to have no one to eat together and talk to when I have such a bad day. It’s okay. Life is just like eating dinner alone anyhow.” Coupled with her bad day, her lack of will to take care of herself amplifies the state of survivalism and enervation – no effort to improve, whether intellectually or emotionally. But in the subsequent episodes, a vital characteristic of eating alone as endurance emerges. Soo-kyung realizes that eating alone is her willful decision to withstand bad situations and focus on the happy present moment.

This focus on the present is well demonstrated in her eating scenes. The length varies episode by episode, but the show consistently includes two to three eating scenes of 2–4 minutes in length. On average, the total time dedicated to eating scenes amounts to approximately 8 minutes of a 50-minute episode, which makes up 16% of the series as a whole. The sheer number and total length of eating scenes are a novel characteristic of Let’s Eat. The eating scenes have absorptive power for the characters and the audience alike with their gripping music, sound, and camerawork emphasizing pure joy in those moment. For instance, the lyrics of the background song played during the first season’s eating scenes focus solely on the process of and the associated feelings with eating, “Come into my mouth / You’re sweeter than chocolate syrup / You make me giddy and crazy / Come to me / Hurry up / I’ll swallow you in one mouthful / Let’s eat, let’s eat / Let’s eat with me / Let’s work after we eat.”

In addition to the music, these eating scenes illustrate instinctual olfactory, gustatory, auditory, tactile, and visual sensations; camerawork and sounds highlight the texture of the food. The eating scene in season 1, episode 11 is a representative example. In eating a dish of spicy chicken feet, the camera starts at the steamy food and follows Soo-kyung as she puts on plastic gloves to eat with her hands; she picks up the food, blows on it to cool it down, and then takes a bite. The use of a mini zimizib camera and a crane camera closely captures her facial expressions, mostly satisfied looks (Ko, 2014). Sound fulfills a similar function in emphasizing joy in the moment. The clinking of the bowl and chopsticks and the sound of blowing, sucking, swallowing, and chewing, accompanied by occasional exclamations about the flavors, are enhanced throughout the scene. The extreme close-ups and sounds of eating in most episodes portray the ways in which characters dive into their own world of eating without any concerns or worries. This is especially true when a character indulges in food. In season 1, Soo-kyung positively portrays gluttony in every episode through her enthusiastic and self-indulgent eating. Although not portrayed positively in every episode, her gluttony is mostly considered “nice to look at” (episode 5), “very appetizing” (episode 2), and “a pleasant scene” (episode 9). The positive portrayal of gluttony – as her personal preference and a hobby – reflects the focus on the present moment.

These moments of eating alone push the boundaries of negativity by evoking psychological comfort, joy, and therapeutic consolation. Eating alone in the present moment represents both the ability to withstand adversity or suffering (Salazer and Scheerder, 2023) and a demand by neoliberalism to have the right dispositions for survival (Gill and Orgad, 2022). In season 1, episode 11, before eating the chicken feet described above, Soo-kyung becomes stressed by work when her boss pesters her about photocopying documents that he does not need that day. She feels unfairly treated at work and contemplates leaving for another job. She also laments the systematic and structural problems within the contemporary neoliberal economy – the lack of job prospects for young people, the overall insecurity of the employment market, and the lack of opportunity in general. The barriers inherent in neoliberal structures, combined with Soo-kyung’s personal frustration about her situation, lead her to vent in the most effective way she can with her limited money, time, and energy. After work, Soo-kyung dines out alone in a restaurant that serves spicy chicken feet to release her stress. This scene depicts eating alone as a practice of endurance – withstanding hardship and adversity and maintaining self-worth rather than taking action for change. Eating alone is an activity that brings consolation and comfort to pull Soo-kyung together to get through the day. The emphasis on eating sounds and exaggerated close-ups of her face as described above show how Soo-kyung’s mood changes over the course of eating. As soon as Soo-kyung sees what she orders, her face lights up. The sounds of blowing on hot food, the occasional vocal and verbal exclamations, and her humming reflect the gradual elevation of her emotional state. After her feast, she says to herself, “Now that was a good meal.” She seems to have forgotten what had happened earlier that day. Eating relieves and consoles the character in the face of everyday stress. Dining alone is a therapeutic experience, granting her the elasticity of mind and the psychological comfort she desperately needs, leading her to positivity. Soo-kyung’s representation of eating alone reflects how Korean society develops into the self-care society that Gill and Orgad (2022) describe in which self-help expands and disperses. Taking care of one’s feelings is a psychological form of self-care, diffusing the problems of survivalism to individuals.

By situating eating alone as a practice of endurance, Let’s Eat demonstrates how the survival of the now operates as a cultural norm and response to neoliberalism. The meaning of survival includes avoiding physical failure in competitions and resisting the psychological sense of loss and injury (Song et al., 2018). However, one’s survival in the present does not guarantee success in future competitions (Kim, 2016a). Thus, the perpetuation of precarity leads to an ongoing state of endurance. This continuity is important as the seemingly neutral stance of endurance reflects the younger generation’s negative response toward the current structure via their lack of energy and state of lethargy.

Endurance is the best strategy and self-rescue measure for the younger generation to hold steady while lacking the energy to act. From the standpoint of neoliberal governance, endurance also effectively addresses the need to console and encourages the generation to rest, rather than engage in collective action, to move forward. Endurance in the state of survivalism is a correctional tool to prevent individuals from deviating, which reinforces the neoliberal structure, such as long labor hours, low wages, and workers’ silent consent. In lieu of addressing the challenges that the system brings to the younger generation, economic hardships and feelings of failure are delegated as individual’s problems, leading one to seek relief by oneself. Emphasizing the instinctual joy of the present, eating alone is a perfect culture to be promoted and celebrated. It touches on the pathological condition of survivalism – it is a silent cry and struggle for stability – which has permeated into the psychological realm.

Eating as resilience and confidence: pushing the classed and gendered to spring forward

In addition to situating eating alone as psychological endurance, Let’s Eat also moves forward with implications of hope for the future, as most Korean TV dramas do. For example, in the first season, Soo-kyung’s perception of eating alone after episode 10 gradually changes to empower her to withstand the barriers erected by broader societal structures. For her, eating alone eventually triggers an individual yearning for cultural change, however minute and static. The second and third seasons begin to more clearly address the enthusiastic attitude of those seeking individual solutions or action plans amid survivalism, especially for socioeconomically marginalized women. The last two seasons situate the characters in traumatic experiences, such as facing the economic difficulties of the sudden loss or illness of a loved one, committing a crime and living as a runaway, and being a victim of bullying and overcoming it as a survivor. This character development follows the progressing narrative of post-healing, which offers concrete tools to overcome difficulties after 2013 (Kim, 2018a). Resilience – to bounce back from adversity with an empowering stance, positive attitude, and intense self-management activities, as explained by Gill and Orgad (2018) – becomes the post-healing narrative of eating alone, a change from the emphasis on endurance in survivalism. In addition to positivity and the psychological momentum of bounce-backability, resilience in the Korean context takes the form of actionable solutions that extend to the idea of spring-forwardability for the marginalized.

Dae-young’s lack of marginalization may make it easier for him to adopt attitudes throughout resilience and positivity. As the hero throughout all three seasons, his financial situation, career, and psychological state fluctuate throughout the series. In the first and third seasons, he is a successful middle-class salesman with a stable career – the insurance king, as the drama calls him. In the second season, however, he is demoted and relocated to a less important, more rural post due to a poor sales record. In the third season, he regains his career but deals with and recovers from the sudden death of his girlfriend in a car accident. As Dae-young overcomes life’s hardships, eating becomes the only solution. In the first season, he articulates why eating alone is the best kind, and in the third season, how eating is the only consolation and joy in the mundane. As a survivor of a traumatic experience in the third season and a struggling young professional getting back on track in the second season, Dae-young always falls back on eating to regain his strength and positivity, and ultimately bounce back from hardships. In the portrayal of Dae-young’s recovery, the series incorporates eating together and alone, presenting both as valuable post-healing activities. Selectively eating with others – choosing the right company to eat with and having an enjoyable dining experience – is considered psychologically beneficial in addition to eating alone. While Soo-kyung merely uses eating alone to change her present mood in season 1, Dae-young uses it throughout the series as a stepping stone for a bigger and more fundamental change in attitude. He is the perfect neoliberal character – the subject who possesses the right attributes, such as resilience and positivity, to thrive (Gill and Orgad, 2022). Dae-young’s middle-class position with financial resources reflects eating as resilience, emphasizing the return journey and overcoming the crisis.

Dae-young has many opportunities. Even when he is in a career crisis, he still holds a stable sales job. His passion for eating alone even turns into a new business venture in the third season – quitting his job after a promotion and starting a food delivery service for single-person households. His will and resources to spring-forward allude to the privilege, mainly social, cultural, and economic, that Dae-young has as a middle-class man. Aligned with the critique that healing discourses fail to suggest specific solutions (Kim, 2015a), focusing on eating as a tool of resilience obfuscates the enormous labor and resources required to bounce back from hardships. The drama does not address how Dae-young surviving a lousy situation is easier compared to Soo-ji or Soo-kyung, women with precarious or dead-end careers, because he has the financial and social resources to recoup.

Unlike resilience for Dae-young, who has the means to bounce back, resilience for people with fewer privileges is imposed more heavily and requires a greater degree of effort toward growth. For women especially, suffering is framed as an individualized issue as they are asked to internalize the need to transform their lives through practices of gratitude, affirmations of self-worth, and other strategies of confidence (Orgad and Gill, 2022). Confidence is a specific tool with which women can measure their mental health. Mental health apps, for example, specifically target women and offer them tools that help categorize emotions and make intelligible one’s anxieties, feelings, desires, and traits (Gill and Orgad, 2022). Let’s Eat shows the development of women’s self-confidence as a strategic and actionable post-healing tool.

As a temporary laborer with precarious employment who lives paycheck to paycheck, Soo-ji, the heroine of the second season, demonstrates the marginalized position of women facing economic hardships. Her financial situation is often mocked and compared to upper-middle-class and upper-class workers with steady government jobs. The second season is a chronicle of Soo-ji’s attempt at a better life – her upward mobility through a marriage with Sang-woo, a high-ranking government official from an affluent family – followed by a revelation of her psychological state, her realization of her inferiority, and her desire for empowerment through change and growth. Her dates with Sang-woo exaggerate their differences through everyday activities. Sang-woo has expensive tastes and a love of molecular gastronomy, a gourmet, upper-class approach to food that makes Soo-ji feel insecure. When she realizes dating Sang-woo has made her feel negative about herself and decides to break up with him, Soo-ji becomes empowered to change. She says to Sang-woo in season 2, episodes 16 and 17:

I intentionally approached you because I needed a man who is well-off to save my life. Now I understand how stupid I was. I tried to become a woman who suits you and felt inferior. I would’ve felt it anyhow in this state of mind. So I decided to change. I’m going to write my novel and feel confident in myself.

Soo-ji’s personal manifesto is the result of reflecting on her experiences of eating alone and selectively with others. Compared to Dae-young who rarely lacks confidence, Soo-ji’s resilience starts from a dire, enervated state at rock bottom, a place from which she seemingly cannot bounce back. Yet, she realizes that she feels happiest and most comfortable when eating alone or with a small group of people with whom she shares no barrier, unlike her relationship with Sang-woo. Eating alone especially serves as a catalyst for her desire to become a better version of herself, both psychologically and financially. Practicing confidence is a resilience tool that allows one to spring forward from a negative past and empower the self with hope. Soo-ji first confronts her traumatic past as a hikikomori (a modern-day hermit who withdraws from society completely) and reformulates it as a motivational injunction. Her candid conversation with Sang-woo shows Soo-ji’s strong will to overcome her current state by proclaiming a practical solution to her enervated state – regaining confidence. The entire season’s focus on Soo-ji’s failures, vulnerability, and the conditions that she needs to overcome accentuates this self-intervention, leading to a transformation imperative. The way Soo-ji expresses her psychological and financial vulnerability to Sang-woo is a step toward confidence, as foregrounding insecurity and pain allows women to find opportunities for growth (Orgad and Gill, 2022). Presenting this revelation at the climax of the storyline, the second season shows how effective this push toward action is for Soo-ji. Let’s Eat insinuates a more decisive action of spring-forwardability for the marginalized, with the expectation that escaping austerity requires self-reflection, action, an ever-positive attitude, and constant and perpetual self-invention.

The gendered body and eating are another narrative trope associated with gaining confidence through intensive self-reflection and discipline (Orgad and Gill, 2022). Soo-ji has a complicated relationship with eating as a formerly obese hikikomori. Throughout the series, she shows extreme self-restraint in the amount of food she eats and her calorie intake, intensive forms of self-management, mostly to appeal to Sang-woo. Similar to her efforts to maintain her physical shape, the emotional work Soo-ji performs to get past her traumatic past and maintain a healthier self takes constant vigilance, self-monitoring, and behavioral exercises cast as the work of confidence building. Neoliberalism frames this endless work on the self and the surveillance of women’s bodies as empowerment and choice (Banet-Weiser et al., 2020). Women’s intensive body management as an ongoing work of confidence shows the internalization of resilience – to constantly remind the self of vulnerability only to repudiate and act upon it. Soo-ji’s traumatic past is instrumentalized as a lesson so that it can be reformulated as a motivational injunction.

The way that Soo-ji deals with insecurity, inequality, and a struggle with self-reflection and self-confidence teaches us that survivalism normalizes these conditions as individual issues. Instead of questioning the neoliberal order that created the struggle and pain, the problems are reduced to an individual’s struggles and solved through eating. This psychological work silences any critiques of the structures of inequality by emphasizing intensive individual resilience as a solution to the precarity and inequality that women face (Gill and Orgad, 2018).

Compared to endurance, resilience, and confidence allude to the active motility of the mind and body. The relatively passive stance of endurance requires one to stay positive, while resilience and confidence ask one to motivate the self enough to take action – to turn a negative past into an intervention for a positive future. In Let’s Eat, the disadvantaged population works the hardest toward this change. Soo-ji especially uses the tool of eating to gain the strength to empower the self. While Soo-kyung’s narrative expresses a yearning for change and action, Soo-ji’s story demonstrates that internal reflection, particularly while eating alone or with others, is the key to her gradual realization of confidence. Soo-ji, in the end, springs forward to save herself amid survivalism. It is a happy ending that everyone wants for the younger generation, which costs nothing, except for the younger generation themselves.

Conclusion

Through its portrayal of eating, Let’s Eat reflects the psychological turn in neoliberal Korea. When neoliberal governance through self-care can no longer push young people suffering from the ubiquity of personal failures or traumatic experiences to perform their best, it tends to their psychic wellness instead. In response to survivalism, Let’s Eat redefines eating alone from a lonesome activity into a psychological practice of self-care by connecting the broader single-culture trend and the rising number of single-person households.

The need and desire for eating alone reveal the specific expectations of endurance, resilience, and confidence in neoliberal governance in the age of survivalism. As Salazar (2021) notes, endurance’s meaning depends on the dominant cultural discourses of a specific time and place. Let’s Eat frames eating alone as a psychological joy and therapeutic consolation, emphasizing the importance of the present with the instinctual sensations that eating brings. Eating alone is a means of healing as it allows the characters to endure stress. For the underprivileged population, the push for resilience and confidence reflects the ruthlessness of neoliberalism. The solution to survivalism for the underprivileged encourages the internalization of positivity and bounce-backability to overcome individualized problems, even if the problems arise from structural and systemic inequality. This is evident in the comparison between the series’ hero and heroines. When Dae-young begins a new individual business in season two, the drama does not emphasize his social and economic resources from his previous steady employment and fame as a popular food blogger. Compared to him, Soo-ji, with her temporary employment, goes through a more intense process of self-reflection and psychological reformation to spring forward. Women are often constructed as confidence-lacking subjects who should adopt the prescribed strategy of confidence to overcome this flaw (Orgad and Gill, 2022). Let’s Eat confirms how practices of confidence are a gendered technology of the self. The ability to spring forward is both a pathological representation of survivalism and a representation of the marginalized’s hope to survive.

Eating alone as psychological self-care demonstrates part of the affective governance of youth designed to shape thoughts, actions, and the intelligibility of structures of feeling (Gill and Orgad, 2018). The encouragement to turn negative moments into positive momentum, to stay positive after consecutive failures, and to connect the discourses of healing and single culture all call forth passive docile bodies to comply with the current state. In doing so, a huge amount of labor goes into staying afloat – labor that is not acknowledged as work but as opportunity and experience instead. Spring-forwardability as an action also requires the subject’s compliance. The marginalized population is coerced through motivational injunctions into performing voluntary practices. The action-oriented practices of healing, especially of confidence, seem to intensify with quantified measurability. Maintaining body weight, quantifying minutes of happiness or the intensity of positive feelings, naming anxiety, and actively changing mood all are prescribed exercises of confidence, especially for women, gaged to show the temporal progress of spring-forwardability.

I agree with Scharff’s (2016) observation that neoliberalism is moving further into psychic life, requiring people to develop the right frame of mind to survive. Especially after COVID-19, endless apps claiming to work on one’s psyche have proliferated to help people manage their dispositions (Gill and Orgad, 2022). Transforming the fundamental, instinctual human desire of eating into a form of governance, neoliberalism burrows into the deepest psychic lives of young Koreans. Reframing eating, a basic joy for many, into a tool of endurance, resilience, and confidence is a grueling trend in survivalism. Turning eating into a psychological tool of self-care is the pathological way of neoliberalism, perpetuating the endless work on the self and encouraging one to work toward winning competition after competition, all at the expense of the younger generation’s future. The younger generation remains trapped within an individualistic and psychological framing that is becoming more and more central to contemporary forms of neoliberal governance, which silences the critique of structural inequality and efforts to improve the conditions induced by neoliberalism in the long term. The unfavorable attitude toward underprivileged populations – blaming and forcing them to improve conditions on their own – is both ignorant and unfair and can create further problems for the youth giving up on having any opportunities in their future.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Hojin Song

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