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Doing Nothing—For a Prize
Could you turn yourself off for 90 minutes while staying awake? An annual “space-out competition” in Seoul, South Korea, challenges participants to sit on yoga mats and zone out without sleeping, checking their phone, or talking. It rained during this year’s contest, but that didn’t stop more than 100 people from joining in, many of them lying flat on the ground or settling into meditative poses. Onlookers voted for their favorite contestants, and the person in the top 10 who had the lowest heart rate won a trophy. The competition began in 2014 and has become a welcome respite for many, as South Korea is known for having some of the longest working hours in the developed world—an average of 1,915 hours a year, compared with the U.S. average of 1,791 hours. Korean students also cope with long hours of study and high levels of stress. “Korean society is very competitive, so sometimes doing nothing is essential,” one office worker at the event told The Guardian. “I think we’ve forgotten how to do that.”