If you were an ardent reader in your primary school days, you would probably recall the book Don't Eat the Marshmallow Yet!: The Secret to Sweet Success. The overarching message in the book reflects a quintessential characteristic in bestsellers of the late 90s and early 00s: your future success is defined by how much patience, self-control, and other good qualities you harness, even to the intensity where you can manage not to immediately stuff your face with marshmallows at an admirably young age.

The 2022 rendition of Marshmallow Story is perhaps more apt with the title Winnie the Pooh, It’s Okay to Eat the Marshmallow. Current trends gracing bookstore shelves showcase a near dichotomy to the tale of dispassionate self-improvement encapsulated by the literary trends at the start of the millennium. Gamsung (directly translated from Korean to English as “sentiment”) essays, pieces of literature that offer condolences to mental health struggles with soft, ambivalent language are in raging vogue. Popular books of the gamsung genre include Winnie the Pooh, Happy Things Are Always Here, and  I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki. Messages offered by these books rarely diverge from postulations of self-care, private happiness, and mental peace.

Some choose to view the trend of these essays as the bane of one’s literary existence. Many essays invariably rely on cliché content as they intend to craft overtly universal depictions of emotion; in the process, many authors turn towards ambiguous, flowery language when describing events. The dearth of rhetorical depth is also a dire turn-off for many readers. It is common to see advertisements for such essays on social media, and a centerfold in these commercials is not the value the books hold as an actual literary publication; rather, the aesthetic value of the book comprising of the cover design and inner illustrations are often depicted as the key attraction, along with a few catchphrases to make rounds on social media. Simply put, gamsung essays are viewed as the epitome of superficial activism in the era of social media, painfully destitute of any authenticity.

Before we start castigating the readership of these essays (predominantly the younger generation) for choosing to entertain themselves with such trivial renditions of literature, however, a fundamental question may need to be asked: Why are younger people feeling the need to reach for superficial condolences in the forms of books in the first place? How did young people go from reading books on how to control their impulse to eat a marshmallow for ultimate self-improvement, to actively chasing sweet affirmations of one’s own capabilities? Book trends better reflect social phenomena than no other. Younger readers’ shift in attitude towards success stories over the course of a decade may imply the generation’s growing fatigue with the constant social pressure to improve. Self-improvement pieces such as Marshmallow Story essentially postulated that one’s struggles were largely due to their own wrongdoings, and constantly prodded readers to painfully question everything they have to reach for a life of true success. In contrast, the self-love essays offer a soothing mental refuge, as they assure their readership that they are, indeed, doing more than enough.

It is intriguing that young people are chasing the self-love heralded by these essays, rather than going for traditional ways people have received affirmations such as familial structures, friend groups, or even organized religion. Could this perhaps insinuate that younger people are suffering from the vacancy of socialization to the point where they must consult gamsung essays for condolences? Or — could they all be simply sick to the bone of self-improvement books that ceaselessly castigate readers for not being enough, and choose to reach for the damned marshmallow and indulge in sweet self-mollification instead?