Faking death to force a better valuation of life, that’s the recipe a Korean entrepreneur has found to help prevent suicide among his stressed compatriots:
In a country infatuated with “well-being” [...] training companies are now offering courses on dying a good death.
“Korea has ranked number one in many bad things such as suicide and divorce and cancer rates, so I wanted to run a programme for people to experience death,” says Ko Min-su, a 40-year-old former insurance agent who founded Korea Life Consulting, which offers fake funerals as a way to make people value life.
Korean corporations [...] send their employees on Mr Ko’s courses regularly, partly to encourage them to question their priorities in life and partly as a suicide prevention measure.
Link (thx Michelle)
The FT describes the whole experience, one nobody will ever go through as it is a funeral from the first person perspective.
Mr Ko [...] begins the course with a motivational presentation that includes a “life calculator” counting the time until one’s death down to the millisecond.
Then participants are led to a dark room where they are told to sit at candlelit desks and write their wills, prompted by some sample questions. If you died today, what would you tell your family? What would you say about your job and your life?
As they start to write, the room becomes filled with sniffing, women in particular struggling to hold back their tears.
Will completed, they collect their funeral portraits – participants are asked to pose on the way in – and enter the “death experience room”, a large, dark space containing a series of open coffins and decorated with posters of famous bygones such as Ronald Reagan, Diana, Princess of Wales, and Lee Byung-chull, Samsung’s founder.
In front of an altar covered with flowers and his funeral portrait, Mr Ko instructs his trainees to choose a coffin, put on a traditional hemp death robe and then read out their wills one-by-one.
Next, it is time to be buried. Participants lie down in their coffins, while a man wearing the outfit of a traditional Korean death messenger places a flower on each person’s chest. Funeral attendants place lids on the coffins, banging each corner several times with a mallet. Dirt is thrown down on the lid, as loud as stones on a tile roof. The attendants leave the hall for five minutes – but it seemed like 30 minutes to those taking part.
Once the lids are lifted, Mr Ko asks the trainees how they felt. “When they were nailing the coffin and sprinkling the dirt, it felt like I was really dead,” Ms Baek says. “I thought death was far away but now that I have experienced it, I feel like I have to live a better life.”
How long until we have such courses in Europe? Is playing death acceptable in western societies?
Here is another example of the (amazing) power of the Internet. My 
