[Abstract] The suffering of Korean youth is typically attributed to economic deprivation. Yet the persistence of disorientation, burnout, and existential emptiness among the materially stable suggests that its source lies at a different level entirely. This paper locates that level in the structural collapse of the social narrative that has long answered the question: what kind of life should I be living? In South Korea, the life-course narrative linking quality university admission, stable employment, marriage, and homeownership was institutionally consolidated from the 1970s onward, becoming—through state-directed education, labor, and housing systems—an unquestioned experiential reality. Following the 1997 financial crisis, however, the structural conditions this narrative presupposed progressively eroded: labor market stability weakened, housing costs surged, and the causal pathway from credential to livelihood ceased to hold. The core problem is that reality transformed while the narrative did not. To theorize this disjuncture, the paper constructs a narrative-structure circulation theory and introduces a dual-axis variable framework comprising two independent analytical dimensions. The V-axis (V1–V3) measures the temporal delay of narrative adjustment relative to structural change, the individual intensity of doxa, and its social-distributional density. The Q-axis (Q1Q3) evaluates the quality of alternative narratives that emerge in the wake of doxa collapse: their factual adequacy, internal coherence, and the structural character of what they produce. The two axes operate independently. Whereas the V-axis describes the geometric conditions of the narrative-structure relationship, the Q-axis evaluates the substantive character of the narratives that inhabit those conditions. Under this framework, four types of suffering are systematically specified: intra-narrative suffering (high V2 conditions), double-bind suffering (V1 expansion with residual normative layer), anomic suffering (post-doxa Q-absence), and suffering under structural compulsion (high V3 density). The framework is applied to South Korean empirical indicators from 1997 onward. Discursive naming events (N-po generation, Hell-Joseon), the non-simultaneity of doxa adjustment across generational cohorts, and the behavioral inertia that persisted through structural deterioration (private tutoring expenditure, credential competition) are read as converging patterns from which the expansion of the V1 gap is interpretively inferred. Youth NEET rates, social isolation statistics, and burnout data confirm the resulting suffering. Alternative narratives currently in circulation—the red pill, multi-income identity (N잡), FIRE, non-marriage, and local life movements—are then evaluated through Q-variable criteria to distinguish those that function as harmful alternatives reproducing anomic conditions from those that hold open the possibility of less harmful narrative construction. Methodologically, the paper adopts ideal-type construction and interpretive inference, capturing the workings of unobservable doxa through the convergent patterns of indirect indicators. The theory’s explanatory scope is explicitly bounded to suffering arising from narrative-structure disjunctures, and falsifiability conditions are formally specified to ensure that the ideal-typical analysis remains open to empirical testing. This paper is designed as more than a single-case study. It is the theoretical foundation (Grundlagenarbeit) of a research program spanning 2026–2036, which proceeds from historical generalization—testing the theory against Weber’s empirical materials on Calvinist and Confucian narratives—through systematic empirical verification via textual analysis and interview research, to macro-theoretical extension across narrative ecology, political sociology, and comparative sociology. All subsequent papers in the program share the V-Q dual-axis framework formalized here as their common analytical scaffold, each building upon it as floors upon a foundation. Key word: Youth Generation, Narrative Collapse, Anomie, Life Course, Identity, Meaning System