I've seen people who quit and people, like me, who clinched their teeth and got through the whole ordeal. I myself at the time considered whether I should quit and stop wasting my precious time. I decided against, because in that society not having completed military service would be a social stain impossible to erase.
More importantly, quitting would change the way I view and value myself. I wanted to see myself as someone who performed their fair share of service back to society, and not a parasite. With the mindset I had back then, quitting would have changed my self view, and at least temporarily lost my sense of integrity. I would be a very different person today.
Looking around my social group, I might be biased but those that chose to quit military service more often than not drifted into the sidelines in terms of career, social integration, and other aspects. Of course some are absolutely fine. I can't say if that's merely correlation or actual causality, but I'm content with my loss of years spent doing something I wasn't really enjoying.
> More importantly, quitting would change the way I view and value myself. I wanted to see myself as someone who performed their fair share of service back to society, and not a parasite.
This is an insanely sad thing to read. You pay taxes, unless you're in an active war, you don't "owe" anything to the society.
Notwithstanding the military service being mandatory for really bad reasons, but if it's South Korea it's kinda not?
Saying the only way to 'owe' anything is through money sounds like a... weird Americanism to me (speaking as an American).
Ofc, caveat, if it's rich people deciding poor people have to do service, then yeah that's messed up. But kind of a separate issue.
In their defense, using taxes to pay others to do the work of maintaining/defending a nation allows better specialization of labor which can have its advantages. But it needs to be balanced with actual shared effort too, especially with things like national defense.
PS I volunteered and served nearly for a decade as an officer.
When you phrase it like this, it seems to me that you value having a good career and social integration.
On the other hand just seems to me that one's career and social integration is exactly the sort of thing that someone who quits conscription values highly. Without more information, it seems to me that such a person as you describe may consider themself to be leading a good life (in terms of satisfaction and/or morally).
Maybe it wasn’t that mandatory.
I’d reckon if it’s your first/second time it’s better to stick with it a bit longer, if for nothing else than to learn what your own limits and endurance are.
Once you’ve had a a few adversities endured under your belt, you can quit soon as soon as you like and still be considered in good light.
Who knows, things might become better at some point and then you could get some more rewards or at least bragging rights.
And if nothing else it would end up as a good story, and what’s our lives if not collection of stories, both good and bad.
To be more concrete - I once worked for a company where the team I was on was very unpleasant and I just couldn’t take it anymore, I was very close to throwing out the towel, and said so to my manager. After some back and forth I was offered some generous amount of money to stay, and eventually moved myself to a different team within the company itself. But I stayed, and to be fair it turned out to be one of the most interesting and rewarding experiences of my career.
I was labeled as an engineer to be admired and got a lot more influence in the company than I would have otherwise had. Sure nobody knows what would have happened had I quit - maybe would have found a better place, maybe not.
It’s like choosing a partner, sometimes its worth sticking around for your own sake if not for someone else, if you abandon them you’ll probably find someone else that doesn’t have the problems that you hate, but will have their own set of problems. Dealing with problems is its own skill and you cannot develop them unless you stick around. And sometimes the problem might be yourself, in which case you definitely don’t learn by quitting.
According to corporations, 40 years minimum. Likely 60 with the way the economy is going.