Constructing Everyday Well-Being: Insights from God-Saeng for Personal Informatics

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Song, Inhwa, Lee, Kwangyoung, Cho, Janghee, Rapp, Amon, Hong, Hwajung
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Song, Inhwa
Lee, Kwangyoung
Cho, Janghee
Rapp, Amon
Hong, Hwajung
author_facet Song, Inhwa
Lee, Kwangyoung
Cho, Janghee
Rapp, Amon
Hong, Hwajung
contents While Personal Informatics (PI) systems support behavior change, everyday well-being involves more than achieving individual target behaviors. It is shaped by cultural narratives that give actions meaning. In South Korea, the God-Saeng phenomenon, encompassing disciplined, collective, and publicly documented self-improvement practices, offers a lens into how well-being is negotiated in daily life. We conducted a 10-day probe (N=24) with bite-sized missions to examine how young adults engaged in God-Saeng. Participants relied on planning practices, accountability infrastructures, and datafication to stabilize themselves, yet these same routines also intensified pressures toward self-monitoring and performance. They navigated tensions between consistency and flexibility, authenticity and visibility, and productivity and broader values such as relationships, and reinterpreted ordinary activities through sociocultural contexts. These insights suggest design opportunities for PI systems that move beyond tracking, toward digital instruments that help users negotiate tensions, make meaning, and reflexively understand how technologies participate in their culturally and existentially situated well-being.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_00847
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Constructing Everyday Well-Being: Insights from God-Saeng for Personal Informatics
Song, Inhwa
Lee, Kwangyoung
Cho, Janghee
Rapp, Amon
Hong, Hwajung
Human-Computer Interaction
While Personal Informatics (PI) systems support behavior change, everyday well-being involves more than achieving individual target behaviors. It is shaped by cultural narratives that give actions meaning. In South Korea, the God-Saeng phenomenon, encompassing disciplined, collective, and publicly documented self-improvement practices, offers a lens into how well-being is negotiated in daily life. We conducted a 10-day probe (N=24) with bite-sized missions to examine how young adults engaged in God-Saeng. Participants relied on planning practices, accountability infrastructures, and datafication to stabilize themselves, yet these same routines also intensified pressures toward self-monitoring and performance. They navigated tensions between consistency and flexibility, authenticity and visibility, and productivity and broader values such as relationships, and reinterpreted ordinary activities through sociocultural contexts. These insights suggest design opportunities for PI systems that move beyond tracking, toward digital instruments that help users negotiate tensions, make meaning, and reflexively understand how technologies participate in their culturally and existentially situated well-being.
title Constructing Everyday Well-Being: Insights from God-Saeng for Personal Informatics
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00847