I am Korean. I grew up inside these explosions.
In 1998, there were about a hundred PC bangs in Korea. Basement rooms with a dozen computers each, open all night, smelling faintly of ramen. StarCraft had just released. A cable channel called OGN would soon launch, broadcasting matches as if they were sports. Then something happened to the curve.
I am Korean. I have watched this happen to my own neighborhood four or five times.
The shape repeats. A Korean craze does not rise the way trends rise in other places. It ignites. Four years, five years, and the country has reorganized itself around a thing that did not previously exist. Then the craze either saturates and becomes infrastructure, or it burns out and leaves behind the shells of itself.
What gets called a boom in English is a weaker word than what actually happens. A boom implies enthusiasm. This is closer to what entomologists call gregarization — the point at which individual locusts, after reaching a density threshold, stop being individuals and start behaving as a single organism moving in one direction. Korean density, Korean group chats, Korean lifetime competition produce this.
There are now more than a hundred thousand coffee shops in Korea. Seoul alone has 610 Starbucks — more Starbucks than any other city on earth. A whole sub-genre has emerged where you pay by the hour to study in silence. “Cafe” stopped being a kind of shop and became a kind of room.
The public bathhouse — the mogyoktang — had existed in Korea for nearly a thousand years. In a single decade, the jjimjilbang absorbed it. The old small neighborhood bathhouses closed one by one. The new ones opened at the scale of shopping malls, with saunas and sleeping rooms and restaurants and karaoke. The mogyoktang did not disappear. It became a floor inside its replacement.
Between 2020 and 2024, the number of marathons held in Korea went from 19 to 254. More than a million participants. Running clubs became known as the new dating apps. A single race in November 2025 drew thirty thousand runners through central Seoul. Major roads are now closed almost every weekend. Complaints to Seoul City about marathon traffic: 15 in 2021, 498 in 2023.
The United States runs about the same number of marathons it has always run. Korea, in four years, produced a thirteenfold increase.
The flat line is the United States. The staircase is us.
I am writing this in 2026. My street in Seoul has four running stores that did not exist two years ago. There is a cafe on one corner, a study cafe on the opposite corner, and a jjimjilbang three blocks down. The PC bang on the other side of the subway station closed last year. In its place is a pilates studio, which I have been told is the next one.
I cannot say whether this is exhausting or exhilarating. Those are both words for the same thing when you are inside it. What I can say is that the next craze is already forming somewhere, and in three years it will be impossible to miss on the walk to the subway, and in five years we will have moved on to whatever came after.
We do not catch trends. We complete them. What other countries spread across a generation, we finish in four years and forget in six. The running boom will end the way all of them end — not because it burned out, but because something else has already started, and we have already noticed, and we are already there.