K-POP

For years, BTS had one obvious goal:

Become successful.

That sounds simple enough.

Seven young men from a relatively small company wanted more people to hear their music.

They wanted better stages.

More recognition.

Bigger audiences.

And eventually, they got all of it.

Then they got something much bigger than that.

They became BTS.

A name recognizable far beyond Korea.

And that makes me wonder about something we don’t talk about nearly as often.

Can success become so enormous that it creates a new kind of problem?

Success Solves Problems — Then Creates New Ones

When BTS were young, many of their problems were obvious.

Would people listen to them?

Would they survive in the industry?

Could they compete with groups from larger entertainment companies?

Could they sell enough albums?

Could they win?

Those are painful problems.

But they are also simple problems.

You know what you’re fighting for.

You want to make it.

Then BTS made it.

And eventually the questions changed.

How do you follow a No. 1 song?

How do you satisfy millions of fans who want different things?

How do you experiment when every new release becomes an international event?

How do you make a mistake when millions of people are watching?

How do you even know what you want anymore when so many people want something from you?

Those are very different problems.

The Higher BTS Climbed, the Less Ordinary Anything Became

This may be one of the strangest costs of extreme fame.

For most of us, doing something ordinary is meaningless.

We go to a restaurant.

Meet a friend.

Take a trip.

Say something stupid.

Change our minds.

Try something and fail.

Nobody cares.

For a superstar, ordinary behavior can become content.

A photograph becomes speculation.

A comment becomes a headline.

A mistake can travel around the world before breakfast.

Even years before their peak global fame, BTS members acknowledged this kind of pressure. In a 2019 interview, RM and SUGA both said it would be untrue to claim they felt no pressure from global fame, while Jung Kook described becoming more conscious that his words and actions could create controversy or disappoint people.

That’s an extraordinary way to live.

And it makes me question one of the easiest things people say about celebrities:

“They’re rich and famous. Why should we feel sorry for them?”

Money Doesn’t Make the Trade-Off Imaginary

I understand that argument.

BTS members achieved extraordinary success.

They received opportunities most musicians can only dream about.

They became wealthy.

They traveled the world.

They performed in stadiums.

Success brought enormous rewards.

That shouldn’t be ignored.

But acknowledging the reward doesn’t require pretending there was no cost.

Those two things can be true at the same time.

BTS can be extraordinarily fortunate and extraordinarily pressured.

We don’t have to choose only one.

And in 2022, the members themselves gave us a rare glimpse of that tension.

The 2022 FESTA Conversation Changed How I Saw Their Success

When BTS sat together for their 2022 FESTA dinner, some of what they said was surprisingly candid.

RM talked about struggling to understand what BTS had become.

He said that through “ON” and “Dynamite,” he still felt he understood the group’s identity, but around “Butter” and “Permission to Dance,” he became less certain about what kind of group BTS was.

More importantly, he talked about something success couldn’t give him:

time to grow as a person.

He described the idol system as requiring artists to constantly produce content and music, leaving too little time to think about who they were becoming.

SUGA talked about another problem.

Writing lyrics had become difficult.

He felt drained and sometimes struggled to find something he genuinely wanted to say rather than forcing words out.

Jin used an even more striking expression: after so many years of group activity, he sometimes felt as though he had “become a machine.”

Those statements stayed with me.

Because these weren’t seven unsuccessful musicians complaining that nobody would listen to them.

They had already won.

And yet winning had created another problem:

What do you do when the machine of success moves faster than the human beings inside it?

Maybe BTS Became Too Successful to Stop

This is one of the paradoxes of enormous success.

When you’re unsuccessful, stopping is easy.

Nobody is waiting.

When millions of people are waiting, stopping becomes much harder.

There are fans.

Employees.

Business partners.

Concert venues.

Contracts.

Schedules.

Media.

Investors.

Entire commercial ecosystems can form around a successful artist.

And the bigger the artist becomes, the more people are affected by every decision.

That doesn’t mean BTS had no control over their careers.

It means the scale surrounding them had become enormous.

Sometimes success creates freedom.

But sometimes success also creates responsibility.

And responsibility can become another kind of cage.

Fans Can Become Part of the Pressure Without Meaning To

This is where the subject becomes uncomfortable for fans.

Because love can create pressure too.

One fan wants another hip-hop album.

Another wants another “Dynamite.”

Another wants BTS to write everything themselves.

Another wants more solo music.

Another wants OT7.

Another wants world tours.

Another wants them to rest.

Another wants more livestreams.

Another wants privacy for the members—but also wants to know everything they’re doing.

Most of those fans aren’t trying to hurt BTS.

Quite the opposite.

They want more because they love them.

But imagine millions of people loving you in millions of slightly different ways.

At some point, even affection must become heavy.

The Company Has Expectations Too

Then there is the business surrounding BTS.

BTS did not remain seven young men working inside a small entertainment company.

Their success helped transform the scale of the business around them.

That inevitably means commercial expectations exist alongside artistic ones.

This doesn’t require a conspiracy theory.

It’s simply how entertainment businesses work.

Successful music generates demand.

Demand creates investment.

Investment creates expectations for future returns.

The bigger the machine becomes, the more difficult it may become to make decisions as if the machine doesn’t exist.

And that connects to the question I asked in my previous article about BTS’s changing music.

Seven members have their own artistic desires.

Fans have expectations.

The company has commercial considerations.

International collaborators bring other influences.

The global market adds another layer.

At some point, making “a BTS song” becomes much more complicated than seven friends entering a studio and asking:

“What do we want to make?”

Maybe the Solo Era Wasn’t a Break From BTS

This also changes the way I interpret their solo period.

At first glance, seven members pursuing individual projects can look like a group moving apart.

But listen to what the members actually said in 2022.

J-Hope’s view, as recalled during the FESTA discussion, was that spending time on individual activities could allow them to reunite later with stronger synergy. RM said he needed time for his own work and reflection. Jimin spoke about the members beginning to think seriously about what kind of artists they individually wanted to become.

Perhaps the solo era wasn’t primarily about escaping BTS.

Maybe it was about rediscovering the people inside BTS.

That’s a very different interpretation.

Fame Can Even Change the Meaning of Freedom

There is another irony here.

Young artists often dream of success because success represents freedom.

If I’m successful, I can make the music I want.

If I’m successful, nobody can ignore me.

If I’m successful, I’ll finally have choices.

But extreme fame may produce the opposite problem.

Suddenly every choice matters too much.

A small experimental release isn’t small anymore.

A casual statement isn’t casual.

A friendship may become gossip.

A private relationship can become public debate.

A musical failure isn’t simply a bad song—it becomes an international discussion about whether BTS is declining.

That’s an extraordinary amount of meaning to attach to ordinary human choices.

Perhaps extreme fame doesn’t eliminate freedom.

But it certainly changes its price.

Reddit Fans Still Debate This

The tension hasn’t disappeared.

Recent Reddit discussions still ask how BTS has managed life at such an extreme level of fame. Some fans emphasize the members’ apparent groundedness, relationships with one another and ability to protect parts of their private lives; others point to the pressures the members themselves have discussed publicly.

Older fans also describe something interesting when looking back across BTS’s career.

Some say the members seem fundamentally recognizable despite becoming vastly richer, more famous and more experienced; what changed most obviously was their maturity and professionalism.

I find that perspective important.

Extreme fame doesn’t automatically destroy a person.

Nor should we romanticize suffering and assume every famous person must secretly be miserable.

We simply don’t know their private lives.

What we do know is that BTS themselves have publicly acknowledged that the scale and pace of their careers created real pressure.

That’s enough to make the question worth asking.

Maybe the Greatest Luxury Is Becoming Ordinary Again

When people imagine celebrity luxury, they think about expensive homes.

Cars.

Private flights.

Designer clothes.

Exclusive restaurants.

But after reaching a certain level of fame, I sometimes wonder whether the rarest luxury becomes something completely different.

Being ignored.

Walking somewhere without being photographed.

Meeting someone without people asking who they are.

Making bad music without millions of people analyzing what it means for your career.

Changing your mind without somebody saving the old statement forever.

Falling in love without turning another human being into international news.

Failing privately.

For most of us, these things are free.

For people at BTS’s level of fame, they may be among the most difficult things to obtain.

So Did BTS Become Too Big for Their Own Good?

Maybe that’s still the wrong question.

Because becoming successful wasn’t a mistake.

Their achievements opened doors for themselves and helped expand what Korean artists could imagine internationally.

Millions of people found music that mattered to them.

The members gained opportunities that would never have existed otherwise.

There is no reason to pretend that success was some tragedy.

But there is also no reason to pretend that every additional level of fame automatically makes life better.

At some point, more success stops solving the old problems and starts creating new ones.

Perhaps BTS reached that point.

And maybe the real achievement of their next chapter won’t be becoming even bigger.

They have already demonstrated how big BTS can become.

The more interesting challenge may be something much simpler:

Can seven people who became one of the biggest groups in the world build lives in which they can still be seven people?

Because success can give you almost everything.

Except, sometimes,

the ordinary life you had before anyone knew your name.