Seoul Launches 24-Hour Call Center for ‘Lonely’ South Koreans

The city government of Seoul announced on Monday that it will launch a 24-hour call center for residents who are struggling with intense feelings of loneliness and isolation.

The need for such a service offers another glimpse at the cultural impact of demographic collapse.

The city government said the “Goodbye to Loneliness 120” hotline will go live in April (“120” is the number Seoul residents can dial to reach their municipal government). The government has budgeted almost $330 million for the call center and other anti-loneliness initiatives.

An AI-powered chat system will bolster the phone hotline using an instant messaging platform called KakaoTalk that is popular in South Korea. The therapists staffing the phone and programming the chat system will all be people who have overcome their own struggles with loneliness.

People who contact either the phone or chat system will be eligible to receive follow-up support, including further counseling, on-site visits, and even emergency interventions. City officials encouraged family and friends to use the hotline if a loved one is suffering from extreme loneliness.

Another part of the program will be the “Seoul Heart Convenience Store,” a string of four shops where people can mingle while eating a city-owned brand of ramen noodles called “Seoul Ramyeon.” Loneliness counselors will be on staff at these locations.

Seoul will also be inaugurating a series of “challenges,” in the manner of video game achievements, which lonely people can meet by attending festivals, library readings, cooking classes, and similar events. Participants in these challenges will be rewarded with perks such as free tickets to future events.

Seoul mayor Oh Se-hoon said loneliness and isolation are “challenges that should be resolved together within a society,” and vowed to mobilize all of his city’s resources to create a “Seoul without loneliness.”

That will be a tall order. Mayor Oh cited city government data that showed one in four elderly residents lived alone in Seoul in 2022, while at least 130,000 of its younger residents said they felt “secluded and isolated” in a survey last January. Some elements of the Seoul loneliness initiative are geared toward the elderly, including city-funded exercise classes.

The budget includes funding for simply finding lonely people and reaching out to them, using techniques such as monitoring water and power usage, shopping habits at convenience stores, and residence at gosiwon, which are incredibly tiny apartments in South Korea favored by people who live alone.

“Social issues like low happiness levels, high suicide rates and depression are all related to loneliness,” Oh pointed out to justify these surveillance programs.

South Korea is suffering one of the worst demographic declines in the world. The most recent data from the Ministry of Economy and Finance showed a mild uptick in population during 2023, but some analysts said this was almost entirely due to increased immigration, and native South Koreans are still in demographic free fall.

South Koreans currently have the world’s lowest fertility rate at just 0.72 births per woman, far below the minimum rate of 2.1 required for a stable population.

Low birth rates mean the population is “aging” quickly, with a growing number of elderly citizens relying upon a dwindling cohort of young workers to finance their benefits. 18.6 percent of South Korea’s population is now classified as elderly, and 22.5 percent of them live alone. A growing number of citizens are reaching old age without having any children.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol declared a “demographic national emergency” in June, promising a “pan-government comprehensive response system until the low birth rate issue is overcome.”

One of the Yoon administration’s ideas for arresting demographic collapse was to invite ethnic Koreans living in other countries, especially Russia and China.

A group of Koreans known as Koryoins migrated to Russia in the late 19th Century, only to be forcibly displaced to Central Asia in one of dictator Joseph Stalin’s ethnic cleansing campaigns. Many of the Koryoins settled in the former Soviet states of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where they have now lived for generations. 

The South Korean government has taken steps to make it easier for Koryoins to move back to their ancestral homeland, providing assistance for family relocation and language classes, since many of them do not speak Korean.

The returnees have been finding work in South Korea’s manufacturing sector, which is desperately short of manpower. Observers say, however, the Koryoins have been largely keeping to themselves instead of mingling with native-born South Koreans, so they might not be having much effect on the loneliness crisis. 

Some South Korean parents reportedly dislike sending their children to schools with heavy Koryoin populations because the language barrier slows down the learning process and South Korean education is notoriously competitive. Conversely, frustrated Koryoins have displayed high dropout rates.