Where on this planet are you able to shave a yr or two off your age? South Korea — which has simply handed a set of payments to desert its conventional system of calculating ages.
The present system, broadly often called “the Korean age,” acknowledges individuals as a yr outdated at start and in addition provides a yr to their age each January 1 — slightly than on their start date.
But on Thursday, Seoul’s National Assembly handed payments requiring using the worldwide age-counting system for official paperwork. It will likely be carried out by June subsequent yr.
The resolution was made to “resolve the social confusion caused by the mixed use of age calculations and the resulting side effects,” the National Assembly mentioned in an announcement.
Besides the Korean age system, the nation additionally has one other technique principally used to find out the authorized ingesting and smoking age — it counts one’s age from zero at start and a yr is added on January 1.
And it additionally makes use of the worldwide customary for some medical and authorized data because the Sixties.
This implies that, for instance, as of December 9, 2022, an individual born on December 31, 1992 is 29 below the worldwide customary, 30 below the South’s system of calculating the age to drink, and 31 below the “Korean age” technique.
President Yoon Suk-yeol has been campaigning on the change, citing the executive and social bills ensuing from having a number of methods of counting individuals’s age.
Some South Koreans have been delighted by the news.
“I’m getting two years younger — I’m so happy,” one wrote on Twitter.
“I turned two years old so soon after I was born as I was born in December. Finally, I’m about to get my real age back!” —Agence France-Presse
