Increasingly my gut feeling is that the elite young generations in North Korea are "suffering" from acute BOREDOM these days. They're jealous of the South's exciting, high energy pace of life, fast cars and fun gadgets yet they're conditioned to feeling forever unable to share in any of that way of life. At the same time I'm sure North Korean youth feel they are physically superior in toughness and survival skills to the soft, liberal, urban, easy living kids on the other side of the DMV and thus feel that they and NOT the Southern youth would survive a new civil war if one were to break out now!
In addition, the other major group of people in North Korea "suffering" from acute boredom these days is the North Korean Military and Military Industry. All this parading around of tanks, troops and mobile missiles is getting so monotonous, and old hat. Mostly likely the youth of the North are prone to ask 'why do we have all this stuff if we NEVER get to USE IT in a real war?
The North Korean generals have probably been asking this same question for decades and besides they are running out of places on their uniforms to pin all the many rows of grandiose medals they are constantly being awarded to maintain their inflated egos. In one photo I saw (was it a photoshop parody?) these generals had the entire fronts of their dress jackets covered with so many medals that the newest rows were having to start on the LEGS of their dress pants! For sure THIS alone must be terribly boring by now for the North's military establishment. A fanatical organization that can envision no other occupation but this one and will never so much as consider a 'scaling back' of their forces and budgets as has occurred in modern China.
North Korea's epidemic of acute boredom among the military, both young and old as well as the nation's young elite, will only increase day by day, like a human version of a nuclear plant with it's cooling system turned-off. Add to this the West's provocative and increasing sanction regime which must be seriously crimping the North Korean Elite's luxury life-style and chipping away at their collections of play toys, the only distractions they have from their country's dismal society, dead-end future, confining size and their own chronic, depressing case of self-inflicted boredom with peace and the endless armistice
North Korea's worsening societal, nuclear overheating metaphor is probably somewhat overdue for an actual "meltdown' followed by an explosion of all the things aforementioned. Ironically, these same victims of 'political' and national boredom, I believe, secretly WANT to be liberated from their own unalterable, immovable institutions of national suicide. Their own mess, Their own sprawling prison. Unfortunately, their only way out of this self-perpetuating predicament similar to "police assisted suicide" where a disturbed adult unable to change his life shoots at police forces so that they will inevitably shoot back and do for him what he couldn't do to himself.
The North Korean regime feels that the ONLY way out of their depressing and maddening boredom is to make a serious attack on the West so that the west will strike back, invade, occupy and ultimately pay to rehabilitate it's enemy as with Japan and Germany at the end of the war that they started.
