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Watching the Koreans

Korea Keeps Saying Jeong Is Dying. The Gifticon Data Says It Just Got Small.

In short

Korea really is getting more individualistic by every measurable metric — but the same period saw 2.5 trillion won a year start moving through small, unsolicited mobile gifts. Jeong didn't disappear. It got compressed into a size that fits modern boundaries.

In this article

1. The part that's true: Korea is getting more individualistic
2. Which is exactly why the ending doesn't add up
3. Why it shrank instead of disappearing
4. The new format even grew its own etiquette
5. What this means if you're trying to understand modern Korea

Korean dramas love a certain kind of scene: a market vendor throws an extra handful of vegetables into your bag without being asked. A neighbor shows up with a plate of food nobody requested. A bus driver waits an extra beat for a running passenger. Shows built entirely around 1980s neighborhood life — the kind where everyone's door is unlocked and everyone's kids are everyone's kids — get pointed to constantly as proof of

jeong

jeong (정) — a deep, often unspoken bond or attachment, closer to "affection built through shared time" than any single English word.

, the thick, unasked-for warmth that's supposed to define Korean community.

Here's an uncomfortable admission: plenty of Koreans under about thirty have never actually lived inside a scene like that. They've watched it happen on screen. They have not had a stranger's grandmother press extra rice cakes into their hands unprompted. And the easy conclusion — the one op-eds reach for constantly — is that jeong is disappearing, another casualty of a Korea that got richer, more urban, and more alone.

The data backs up half of that story. It just doesn't back up the ending.

The part that's true: Korea is getting more individualistic

This isn't nostalgia talking. Researchers tracking Korean individualism have used several hard proxies over the decades — divorce rates, the share of one-person households, the share of elderly living alone, average household size, even how often first-person pronouns show up in the lyrics of popular songs — and nearly all of them point the same direction: up, up, and up, while household size shrinks. A 2023 study in the Korean Journal of Psychology and Personality Studies tracked these markers across decades and found the trend consistent and accelerating.

So the underlying premise — that Korea has been getting less collectivist, less built around extended family and tight neighborhoods, more built around individual households making individual choices — checks out. That's real, and it's not slowing down.

Which is exactly why the ending doesn't add up

Jeong requires something to be dying if the story is "individualism killed it." But look at where actual money is moving in Korea and a strange thing shows up: Koreans are sending each other small, unsolicited gifts through their phones at a scale that keeps climbing every year.

Kakao Talk's "gift sending" feature — a way to send someone a mobile voucher for a coffee, a cake, or a small treat with a couple of taps — passed 2.5 trillion won in annual transactions, up from roughly 1.02 trillion won just a few years earlier, growing more than 40 percent a year, used by around 17 million people. The most commonly sent items aren't expensive: mobile vouchers in the 10,000–20,000 won range, Starbucks coffee, cake sets, ice cream. Small. Frequent. Usually unprompted.

Jeong didn't disappear along with the extended family and the unlocked doors. It got compressed into something that fits in a chat window.

Why it shrank instead of disappearing

Put the two data sets side by side and a shape emerges. Individualism, as Korea has gotten more of it, comes bundled with a stronger expectation of personal boundaries — you don't show up at someone's door uninvited anymore, you don't assume access to their time the way a tight-knit 1980s neighborhood might have. But the impulse behind the market vendor's extra handful of vegetables — the "I noticed you, here's something small" gesture — didn't need a village to survive. It just needed a format that respects boundaries while still landing.

A mobile gifticon does exactly that. It costs the sender a few thousand won and thirty seconds. It doesn't obligate the receiver to invite anyone over, host anyone, or reciprocate on any particular timeline. It's warmth sized correctly for a society that values not intruding on each other. That's not a downgrade of jeong. It's jeong re-engineered for people who, quite reasonably, don't want the "unlocked door" version of community anymore, but still want to tell a friend they were thought of.

The new format even grew its own etiquette

Here's the strongest evidence that this isn't a shrunken, lesser version of jeong but a fully-formed social practice in its own right: it's already generated its own unwritten rules. As gifticon-sending has scaled up, so has a quiet set of norms around it — when it's appropriate to send one, whether you're expected to send one back, what it means if someone lets a gifticon expire unused. A gesture doesn't earn its own etiquette unless enough people are doing it, often enough, for norms to have something to attach to. Jeong used to have unwritten rules about how you shared food with neighbors. Now it has unwritten rules about how you send someone a cake voucher. Different container, same underlying social machinery.

The same shift shows up in business, too, just at a larger scale. Long-term partnerships in Korea have traditionally leaned on jeong built over shared dinners and drinks as much as on the contract itself — a relationship layer sitting on top of the transactional one. That hasn't gone away either; it's just running alongside the small-gesture version rather than replacing it. Jeong, it turns out, scales in both directions: down to a 12,000-won iced coffee sent for no occasion, and up to years of dinners that make a business relationship durable.

What this means if you're trying to understand modern Korea

If you came to Korea (or Korean media) expecting the market-vendor, blanket-in-a-snowstorm version of jeong constantly, on demand, you'll come away thinking it's gone. It mostly isn't gone — it's just harder to spot, because it doesn't look like the drama scenes anymore. It looks like a Starbucks gifticon showing up in your messages on a random Tuesday for no stated reason. Smaller, faster, easier to miss — but running through nearly two and a half trillion won a year, which is a strange amount of money for a supposedly dying impulse to be moving.

So the practical version of this, if you're on the receiving end of Korean friendship or a Korean workplace: don't wait for the grand, unmistakable gesture before deciding someone has jeong for you. It's more likely to arrive as something that costs less than a meal and takes thirty seconds to send — and the fact that it's small is exactly what makes it sustainable enough to still be everywhere.

That compression shows up elsewhere in how precisely Korea prices social obligation — in the exact won amount that has quietly become the new wedding-gift standard, and in the very specific, unwritten math behind why company dinners still happen at all.