대충 살자

Origin

The "Daechung salja" ("let's live sloppily") series began with a screencap from the American cartoon Arthur. In the frame, the aardvark protagonist is listening to music with headphones resting not on his ears but against his temples — while wearing an entirely earnest expression.

Someone captioned that image "Live sloppily, like Arthur, who listens to music through his temples despite having ears," and the meme was born. The humor works on two levels: the sheer brazenness of a drawing that is plainly wrong and that nobody flagged at the time, and the original poster's word choice — answering it not with "that's wrong" but with "sloppy."

Spread

The format spread quickly across Twitter, other social platforms and Korean online communities from early September 2018. Its structure is a single line — "Live sloppily, like ___" — so anyone could slot in whatever sloppy moment they had spotted. People combed through cartoons, ads, broadcast footage and everyday photos hunting for new entries, and the series kept growing.

On October 26th, 2018, the newspaper Segye Ilbo covered the trend by tying it to the "Moomin generation" — young Koreans worn down by the endurance narratives summed up by the bestseller title Youth, It Hurts, now sharing a refusal to overexert themselves in the form of a joke. The point being that this was not simply image play; it was tracking a real mood among young people at the time.

Variations

Widely circulated entries included a photo of Kim Dong-wan of Shinhwa wearing two white socks of different heights ("Live sloppily, like Kim Dong-wan, for whom socks only need to match in color") and one of actor Hwang Jung-min wearing a number balloon on his head because holding it was too much trouble ("Live sloppily, like Hwang Jung-min, who stuck the number balloon on his head rather than hold it"). Subjects ranged from historical figures like Beethoven to fictional characters and real people.

The most interesting derivative ran in the opposite direction. Around the series' peak, Yunho of TVXQ appeared on the variety show Knowing Bros and made remarks displaying his famously outsized drive; that prompted an inverted "let's live diligently" series using the same template. The meme had generated its own antithesis.

How It's Used

On finding a drawing, object or situation handled absurdly carelessly
As a joke in place of announcing that you're letting go of perfectionism
Self-deprecating confessions of your own mistakes or laziness
Conversely, the "live diligently" form, used on someone who is trying far too hard