The Politicized Pulpit: South Korea's Churches at a Crossroads Between Radicalization and Renewal
Change won’t be easy, as it requires the Church to admit its shortcomings, potentially losing its power and members who prioritize political alignment over religious conscience.
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48 Hours on Fake Dopamine
Thousands of Koreans a day order meals that never come and take smoke breaks without cigarettes. I spent two days living the same way, to understand why it works. ‘Your order has arrived.’ My phone said so just before midnight on a Wednesday, and my phone was lying. Nothing had arrived. Nothing had been cooked, paid for, or carried to me. I had spent eleven minutes choosing fried chicken, filled a cart, pressed the button and watched a courier cross a map, and every step of it was fake. I went to sleep less hungry anyway. For two months I had been reading about these “dopamine sites”: web pages that reproduce the routines of spending with everything left in except the buying. If you have ever filled an online cart and closed the tab before paying, you already understand most of it. The best known spoofs Baemin, Korea’s biggest delivery app. Its name, “food never comes” in Korean (음식만안와요), turns a complaint into a promise: only the food does not come. Another is built around damta (담타), short for “cigarette time,” the office smoke break. In April, Money Today reported that the smoke-break site alone drew about 30,000 visitors a day; by early summer the story had reached The Times of London and Psychology Today. That number was what caught me: not that the sites existed, but that so many had decided a break that gives them nothing was worth taking. So, I gave the trend two days of my life. The rule: from Wednesday to Friday night, every craving had to go through a fake version before a real one. I wrote down every visit. I spent around five hours on the different websites, four in total: nine fake orders, five virtual cigarettes. Nothing bought. Around it, just an ordinary week: morning shifts at my university office, evenings studying in a cafe, iced americanos in between. The fake app is as complete as the real one: menus carry ratings, reviews and delivery times, and the address field is optional. I compared two chicken places, chose the one rated 4.9 stars, and added cold buckwheat noodles (naengmyeon, 냉면) on the side. While the courier icon crossed the map, I felt the same small lift a real order gives. Not a real pleasure but more like anticipation: attention narrowing onto something good that is on its way. Then came the effect that explains why people keep coming back. As soon as I ordered, I felt less hungry. I was also happy about the unspent money. Not relieved. Happy, as if I had actually earned it. *Screenshot of 음식만안와요 (Food never comes) website, where every order is fake.* The fake smoke-break site is simpler. Click the cigarette and it lights. Hold the filter down and it burns faster. I have never smoked, yet I took five three-minute breaks anyway, in themed rooms: an office rooftop, a university gate, outer space, a room of silence. A counter shows how many strangers are on break with you. During my second cigarette, someone in the chat complained about a manager. Someone answered, “Me too.” A third: “Me too.” I felt less alone, which I had not expected, since I was alone, in a cafe, watching an animation of a cigarette burn. None of this was an experiment in any strict sense: one person, two days, no control condition, nothing measured beyond what I noticed and wrote down. My hunger and my comfort were feelings I reported, not data, and since I have never smoked, nothing I felt at the smoke-break site can speak for someone who does. The pattern itself, though, is well documented by people working with rather more than a sample of one. Dopamine, the chemical the sites are named after, has more to do with wanting than with having. A 2001 brain-imaging study by Brian Knutson and colleagues found the brain’s reward system firing hardest while people waited for a payoff, not when they received it. My chicken order ran that course: a cue, the app icon at midnight; then the wanting, eleven minutes of menus and ratings; then the button meant to settle it. In real life a fourth step follows: the food, the bill, the full stomach. The sites give you the first three and remove the last one. My missing hunger has an explanation too. In 2010, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University reported in Science that people who imagined eating a food, bite by bite, ate less of it afterward, not because they liked it less, but because they wanted it less. “The anticipation often generates a psychological reward equal to, or sometimes greater than, the actual purchase,” the media psychologist Pamela Rutledge wrote in Psychology Today. Even the receipt was part of it: a record of what I had not spent, a small reward for not buying. By Thursday night it was less an experiment than a new habit. I filled carts without appetite, wanting the filling more than the food. Through other people’s posts I found more of these sites, including a fake mall selling impossible things; I stayed too long in the reviews of a ten-million-won (about $7,000) time machine. Meanwhile, my friends had booked a real dinner for Friday. The comfort was real too, but each visit delivered a little less of it. Rutledge warns that such simulations help when they add to a life and cost us when they replace it. Critics call them a kind of scrolling: a short break that fixes nothing. “This is an era of uncertainty about the future and heavy emotional strain,” Kim Heon-sik, an adjunct professor at Jungwon University, told the Hankook Ilbo. “People now find comfort in the very state of being loosely connected online.” So, should we worry about a generation ordering food that never comes? Not about the sites: they offer a free break that works and fixes nothing, which is what breaks are for. What is worth watching is the line Rutledge draws: whether these rituals are added to a life or quietly stand in for one. It is not visible from outside, and in two days I felt it move: by Thursday the fake order came instead of the decision, not before it. When thirty thousand people a day take their rest with strangers in a fake room, that says something about the weight they are carrying. The real question was never whether the fake dopamine works. It is why so many people need it this badly.
K-Beauty Moves Fast. But Can It Stay Distinct?
Walk into an Olive Young store in Seoul today, and it becomes clear that K-beauty is no longer defined only by large legacy brands. Shelves are filled with names that did not exist, or were barely visible a few months ago. Some sell a single viral toner pad. Others focus on ampoules, or minimalist skincare routines. Products rise quickly through rankings, social media clips, and online reviews, only to disappear behind the next trend a few weeks later. What looks like consumer obsession with trends is also the result of structure. Korea has built a beauty industry that moves rapidly. Korea still has large integrated cosmetics companies such as Amorepacific and LG H&H, which have long managed broad parts of the beauty business, from research and development to manufacturing, branding, and distribution. Yet the recent beauty boom follows a different model. Instead of controlling every stage of production and distribution themselves, they move through a connected system of manufacturers, retailers, social media platforms, and export networks. This structure makes launching a beauty brand easier than before. Original Design Manufacturing (ODM) companies can handle formulation, production, packaging, and quality control, allowing small brands to focus more on branding and marketing. Olive Young gives indie brands visibility through rankings, reviews, shelf placement, and online exposure. Social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram rapidly circulate textures, ingredients, and product formats across borders, and export platforms help smaller brands reach overseas consumers earlier in their life cycle. Together, these layers create a market optimized for speed. Products can move from concept to shelf quickly, and trends can spread almost immediately through social media and retail rankings. When a toner pad, ampoule, or sunscreen texture becomes popular online, similar products often flood the market within a short period of time. Brands react quickly to what is already gaining attention, which makes the industry highly responsive but also increasingly repetitive. That constant cycle of launches and imitation has helped transform K-beauty into a global phenomenon. The low barrier to entry allows indie brands to appear continuously, making the market feel dynamic and experimental. Consumers are exposed to endless product discovery, while brands respond quickly to changing preferences. Compared with earlier generations of beauty retail, where consumers often stayed loyal to a few established brands, today’s shopping experience is driven more by constant discovery and rapid trend turnover. As a result, K-beauty constantly produces something new, yet much of that newness can begin to feel strangely familiar. Many newer brands rely on similar manufacturers, ingredients, minimalist packaging, and social media language. Products compete through immediate visibility—a viral ingredient or a celebrity campaign—instead of aiming for long-term recognition. For example, once PDRN serums become popular on TikTok and appear in Olive Young rankings, dozens of similar products quickly follow. As more brands converge around the same trend, consumers increasingly remember the ingredient rather than the brands behind it. The result is a shopping experience driven by continuous trend-chasing, making consumer loyalty difficult to sustain. This does not necessarily mean the products themselves are weak. K-beauty continues to produce technically sophisticated and trend-responsive products with strong formulations and fast product development cycles. What feels less distinct, however, is the identity behind many of the brands. As more companies chase rapidly changing trends, brand images can begin to blur together. Earlier generations of K-beauty often built clearer aesthetic worlds and emotional positioning. Brands such as 3CE felt recognizable through a specific visual identity and mood. Consumers remembered the brand and the lifestyle it presented, not simply the individual products. Today’s indie brands operate in a much faster and more crowded environment. The market feels more dynamic than before, yet the trend itself often becomes more memorable than the brand behind it. This shift also changes how consumers experience beauty shopping. Consumers scroll through TikTok clips, compare Olive Young rankings, watch influencer reviews, and quickly move on to the next launch. Shopping increasingly feels like continuous browsing rather than long-term attachment to a brand. New products appear constantly, micro-trends spread rapidly, and consumers are encouraged to keep searching for what comes next rather than settling on a particular brand. For indie brands, this creates a different kind of challenge. K-beauty already knows how to move quickly, but speed alone is no longer enough to make a brand memorable. In an industry where trends often receive more attention than the brands behind them, building long-term recognition and consumer loyalty becomes increasingly difficult. This is why the future challenge for K-beauty is differentiation. The industry’s ecosystem has lowered barriers to entry and opened opportunities for smaller brands. That accessibility is one of K-beauty’s greatest strengths. By relying on value chains, indie brands can reach consumers more easily than ever before. Given this unprecedented opportunity, indie brands should try more than trend imitation to stand out. Beyond keeping pace with trends, they may need to build a recognizable image, consistent vision, and lasting relationship with consumers.
2026 is the new 2016
The Chainsmokers, the puppy dog filter with the tongue out, King Kylie wearing a satin bomber jacket with a velvet choker: all of this reminds us of the 2016 era vibes. We all agree that 2026 isn’t a downgrade, but 2016 was definitely something—before the heavy AI-exploitation of today, the last time makeup felt like fun with a whole set of matte liquid lipsticks and heavy baked concealer, Taylor’s The 1989 album on repeat. It might sound like mere romanticizing of a certain era, like every other fashion trend that borrows from the past to go viral. Still, why has this specific era become the internet’s ‘collective obsession’? Was there truly something different about the air? Why do we want to go back to this particular slice of time when it has already been a decade? AI wasn’t there ‘living with us’ in 2016. Sure, AI was already progressing to reach how it is today, but still something ‘too far’ from that era to talk about. It was before AI took over our daily lives. Hence, people have come to a common conclusion that 2016 represents the last Golden Age of the organic internet. Instead of AI-generated content saturation that demands our attention, it was full of the raw and chaotic energy that made us ‘Humans’. Some may argue we’ve just run out of new ideas, but it’s rather a sign that we’re trying to bring the ‘human touch’ back, remembering that sometimes you have to look back ten years to move forward. In 2026, we are suffering from algorithmic fatigue. We crave 2016 because it was a time when ‘going viral’ meant a human accident rather than a curated performance. 2016 existed in a world where the digital space was still supplementary to physical life. Yet this changed dramatically with the COVID lockdowns, which transformed the digital space into the only accessible ‘third space’ for an entire generation. In contrast, 2016 represented a time when logging on felt like a choice rather than the only means of communication, a survival mechanism. The vibrancy we remember wasn’t a performance for an algorithm, confined within a screen. It was an overflow of real-world energy into digital spaces, not the other way around. Beyond the digital landscape, this human touch also existed in a loud aesthetic. The 2016 aesthetic stands in stark contrast to the minimalism that represents 2026. Everything has been moving towards a ‘quiet aesthetic’. No more of the sun-drenched, high contrast Los Angeles vibe. In an age where AI-generated imagery often feels too clean and conforming—much like the clean girl makeup trend—we feel at home looking back at the oversaturated energy of a decade ago. But this nostalgia runs deeper than mere visual preference. The bold aesthetics of 2016 reflected a particular cultural moment: the Obama era’s optimism and the rise of girlboss feminism, where progressivism felt tangible and unapologetic. We aren’t just missing old trends. We aren’t just nostalgic for the clothes we wore. We are hungry for the era’s unapologetic confidence that wasn’t afraid of looking ‘too-much’—a confidence that felt politically and socially aligned with a sense of forward momentum towards a society of acceptance. Finally, 2016 was the era of tropical house and indie-pop music that felt emotional and simultaneously highly energetic. Music is the ultimate time machine, and we all know for sure that the 2016 music hits were distinct. The Chainsmokers ruled the world. Justin Bieber’s Purpose was making the pop era at its peak. The moody anthems of Halsey, all the DJs making hits with legendary pop representatives, and Maddie Ziegler dancing to Sia’s consecutive hits defined a year in pop music that could not be replicated. This was a time when music felt like a communal experience, coming out of every car window and blaring on a festival stage. But now in 2026, music often feels like a background soundtrack designed for 15-seconds short clips just to show off your life on social media—not something that could define an entire summer. By hitting these decade-old anthems, revisiting our teenage playlists, we rewind to a world where music functioned as a shared heartbeat, rather than a mere tool to soundtrack a virtual version of ourselves that does not truly exist. Ultimately, the ‘2026 is the new 2016’ trend is far more than a simple aesthetic fashion cycle. Of course there is an endless list of eras worth romanticizing. Yet, the internet made a deliberate choice to anchor itself in 2016, suggesting something deeper than mere nostalgia. We are attempting to bring the human heartbeat back into a digital age that has become ‘too quiet’—and reconnect with a moment when boldness felt like progress. Sometimes we need to revisit the last time we truly felt like ourselves as a simple reminder: that before technology and social media reshaped how we connect, the raw, human spirit—authentic, unfiltered, and present—is what truly made life worth living. Our longing for 2016 isn’t really about the past, but a longing for that version of ourselves that didn’t lose the beat in the digital noise.
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