One rainy Tuesday afternoon, Jeđin was cooking lunch for her friends in the apartment she lives alone on the outskirts of Seoul, content that she is not in a relationship.
While they are eating, one of them shows them a well-known cartoon dinosaur mime on her phone.
"Be careful," warns the dinosaur. "Don't let yourself die out like us."
All the women are smiling.
"It's funny, but it's also dark, because we know we could be the ones to cause our own extinction," says Yeđin, a 30-year-old television producer.
Neither she nor her friends are planning to have children.
They are part of a growing group of women who have decided to live life without children.
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South Korea has the world's lowest birth rate, which continues to plummet, breaking its own staggeringly low record year after year.
Figures to be released on Wednesday are expected to show that in 2023 this rate has fallen by another 8 percent to 0,7.
This is the number of children that women are expected to have.
For the population to remain stable, that number should be 2,1.
If this trend continues, Korea's population is expected to halve by 2100.
'National emergency'
Globally, the birth rate is falling in all developed countries, but nowhere as extreme as in South Korea.
Her projections are bleak.
In 50 years, the number of people of working age will be halved, the contingent expected to participate in mandatory military service in the country will decrease by 58 percent, and almost half of the population will be over 65 years old.
This will have such a negative impact on the country's economy, its pension fund and security that politicians have declared this a "national emergency".
For almost 20 years, government after government has spent money on this problem - 286 billion dollars to be exact.
Couples who have children are showered with money, from monthly allowances to housing subsidies and free taxis.
Hospital bills and even IVF are covered, though only for those who are married.
Such financial incentives have not borne fruit, prompting politicians to seek more "creative" solutions, such as hiring sub-minimum South-East Asian nannies and exempting men from conscription if they have three children before the age of 30.
Therefore, it is not surprising that politicians are accused of not listening to young people, especially women, and their needs.
Over the past year, we've traveled the country and talked to women to understand the reasons behind their decision not to have children.
When Jejin decided not to have children in her mid-twenties, she defied social norms - in Korea, living alone is generally considered a temporary phase in your life.
And then, five years ago, she firmly decided not to marry, and therefore not to have children.
"It's hard to find a desirable man in Korea, one who will share the housework and childcare equally with you," she tells me.
"And he doesn't look down on women who have babies on their own."
In 2022, only two percent of births in South Korea were out of wedlock.
'Speed circuit work'
Instead, Jeđin decided to focus on a career in television, which, she claims, does not give her enough time to raise a child anyway.
South Korea is notorious for its long working hours.
Jejin has a traditional 9-to-6 (the Korean equivalent of 9-to-5) hours, but she says she usually doesn't get off work until 8, and on top of that, she works overtime.
Once he gets home, he only has time to clean the house or exercise before going to bed.
"I love my job, it completely fulfills me," she says.
"But working in Korea is hard, you're doomed to a heavy cycle of work."
Jeđin also says that there is pressure to study in her spare time in order to become better at her job.
"In Korea, they have the mentality that if you don't constantly work on improving yourself, you will fall behind others and be a failure. Because of that fear, we try twice as hard."
"Sometimes on weekends I go get an IV so I have enough energy to go back to work on Monday," she adds casually, as if it's a pretty normal weekend activity.
She also shares the same fear as every woman I've spoken to - that if she goes on maternity leave after having a child, she may not be able to return to work.
"There is an implicit pressure from companies that when we have children, we have to leave our jobs permanently," she says.
She saw it happen to her sister and two of her favorite TV presenters.
'I know too much'
One 28-year-old woman, who worked in HR, said she had seen women forced to quit their jobs or miss out on promotions after going on maternity leave, which was enough to convince her never to have children.
Both men and women are entitled to one year of absence from work during the first eight years of their child's life.
But in 2022, only seven percent of new fathers used part of that leave, unlike 70 percent of mothers.
Korean women are the most educated among women of all OECD countries, yet the country has the worst gender wage gap and an above-average proportion of unemployed women compared to men.
Researchers say it proves it that they are put before the choice - either career or family.
They are now increasingly choosing a career.
I met Stella Shin in the living room, where she teaches five-year-olds English.
"Just look at those kids. How cute they are," she gushed.
But at 39, Stella has no children of her own.
It was not her active decision, she says.
She had been married for six years, and she and her husband wanted a child, but they were so busy with work and enjoying life that time just flew by.
She has now come to terms with the fact that her lifestyle makes it "impossible".
"Mothers have to stop working to fully devote themselves to caring for children for the first two years, and that would send me into a depression," she says.
"I love my job and I love taking care of myself."
In her free time, Stella takes K-pop dance lessons with a group of older women.
This expectation that women stop working for two to three years after having a child is common among women.
When I asked Stella if she could share parental leave with her husband, she rolled her eyes.
"It's like if I make him do the dishes and he always doesn't do them well, I wouldn't be able to trust him," she says.
Even if she wanted to give up her job or juggle family and career, she can't afford it because rent costs are too high, she says.
More than half of the population lives in or around Seoul, where the vast majority of business opportunities can be found, putting enormous pressure on housing prices and resources.
Stella and her husband were gradually pushed further and further away from the capital, to the neighboring provinces, and they still cannot afford to buy their own apartment.
Seoul's birth rate fell to 0,59, the lowest rate in the country.
Housing aside, there are also the costs of private education.
From the age of four, children are sent to a series of expensive preschool activities - from mathematics and English to music and taekwondo.
The practice is so widespread that opting out is seen as not wanting your child to succeed, an unthinkable idea in hyper-competitive Korea.
That's what she became the most expensive country in the world to raise a child.
A 2022 study showed that only two percent of parents do not pay for their children's private lessons, while 94 percent of them complain that it is a big financial burden for them.
As a teacher in one of these busy schools, Stella understands this burden very well.
She sees parents spending up to $890 per child per month, which many of them cannot afford.
"But without those lessons, the child falls behind other children," she says.
"When I'm around kids, I want to have one too, but I know too much about everything."
For some, this system of excessive private lessons is a bigger problem than just the cost.
"Minji" wanted to share her own experience, but not publicly.
She is not ready for her parents to find out that she will not have children.
"They will be shocked and very disappointed," she says, from the coastal city of Busan, where she lives with her husband.
Minji confided that her childhood and twenties were unhappy.
"I've spent my whole life studying," she says, first to get into a good university, then to take civil service exams, and then to get her first job at 28.
She remembers spending her entire childhood years in classrooms until late at night, studying math, which she hated and was bad at, while at the same time dreaming of becoming an artist.
"I had to compete forever, not to realize my dreams, but to live a mediocre life," she says.
"It was exhausting."
Only now, at the age of 32, Minji feels free and can enjoy life.
She likes to travel and take diving lessons.
But the most important thing for her is that she does not want to give the child the same competitive misery and misery that she experienced herself.
"Korea is not a place where children can live happily," she concludes.
Her husband wants a child and they constantly argued about it, but he did not end up respecting her wishes.
She occasionally hesitates, admits, but then remembers why it's impossible.
Depressive social phenomenon
In the city of Daejeon, Jungyeon Chun finds herself in what she calls a "single marriage."
After picking up her seven-year-old daughter and four-year-old son from school, she goes around the nearby playgrounds, killing time until her husband returns from work.
He rarely gets home before bedtime.
"I didn't think I was making a big decision when I decided to have kids, I thought I'd be able to go back to work pretty quickly," she says.
But soon social and financial pressures set in, and much to her surprise she found herself raising her children alone.
Her husband, a trade unionist, did not help with raising the children or with household chores.
"I was very angry," she says.
"I had a good education and I was taught that women are equal, so I couldn't accept that."
And therein lies the very core of the problem.
Over the past 50 years, the Korean economy has advanced at breakneck speed, providing women with higher education and the workforce, and broadening their ambitions, but the roles of wife and mother have not evolved nearly as fast.
Dissatisfied, Jungyeon began to notice other mothers.
"I was saying to myself, 'Oh, my friend who's raising a child is also depressed and my friend across the street is also depressed,' and I said to myself, 'Oh, well, this is a social phenomenon.'"
She started making drawings about her experiences and posting them online.
"The stories just poured out of me," she says.
Her "webtoon" was a huge success, as women from all over the country recognized themselves in her works, and Jungjeon is now the author of three published comics.
She now says that she has overcome the stage of anger and regret.
"My only regret is that I didn't know more about the reality of raising children and how much is expected of mothers," she says.
"The reason women don't have children today is because they have the courage to talk about it."
But Jungjeon is sad, she says, because women are denied the charm of motherhood, because of the "tragic situation they are forced into."
But Minji says she's grateful to be able to do something about it.
"We are the first generation that can choose.
"Before that, it was taken for granted, we had to have children. And that's why we choose not to have them because we can."
'I would have ten children if I could'
In Jeidja's apartment, after lunch, her friends fight over her books and other objects.
Fed up with life in Korea, Yeijin decided to move to New Zealand.
She woke up one morning with the realization that no one is forcing her to live here.
She researched which countries ranked best in terms of gender equality and New Zealand emerged as the clear winner.
"It's a country where men and women are paid equally," she says, almost incredulously.
"And that's why I went there."
I ask Jeđin and her friends what, if anything, could make them change their minds.
Minsung's answer surprises me.
"I would like to have children. I'd have ten if I could."
So what's stopping her, I ask.
This 27-year-old woman tells me that she is bisexual and has a same-sex partner.
Same-sex marriage is illegal in South Korea, and unmarried women are usually not allowed to use sperm donors to conceive.
"Hopefully, one day that will change and I'll be able to get married and have children with the person I love," he says.
The friends point out the irony that, given the difficult demographic situation in South Korea, those who want to become mothers are not allowed to do so.
But it looks like politicians may be slowly coming to terms with the depth and complexity of this crisis.
This month, South Korean President Jon Suk-yeol admitted that attempts to solve the problem with money "have not borne fruit" and that South Korea is "excessively and unnecessarily competitive."
He said the government will now treat the low birth rate as a "structural problem," although exactly how that will affect policy remains to be seen.
At the beginning of this month, I got in touch with Jeidjin in New Zealand, where he has been living for three months.
She was excited as she talked about her new life and friends, and her job in the pub kitchen.
"My work-life balance is much better," she said.
He can arrange to meet up with friends even during the work week.
"I feel much more respected at work and people judge you a lot less," she added.
"I just have no desire to go home."
Additional reporting: Lihjun Choi and Hosu Lee
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