[Abstract] The suffering of Korean youth is typically attributed to economic deprivation. Yet the persistence of disorientation, burnout, and existential emptiness even among materially stable young people suggests that its source cannot be reduced to material scarcity alone. This paper locates that source 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. Through state-directed education, labor, housing, and family systems, this narrative became not merely an aspiration but a taken-for-granted framework for self-evaluation and social recognition. After 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 became increasingly uncertain. The core problem is not simply that reality deteriorated, but that reality transformed while the dominant life-course narrative remained insufficiently adjusted. To theorize this disjuncture, the paper constructs a narrative-structure circulation theory and introduces a dual-axis variable framework composed of two analytically independent dimensions. The V-axis is a set of formal variables that describe the relational conditions between narrative and structure. V1 refers to the macro-level temporal gap between structural transformation and narrative adjustment; it is not directly observable but must be inferred from large-scale indicators such as labor market instability, housing affordability, educational returns, marriage patterns, and the persistence of normative life-course expectations. V2 refers to the degree to which a given doxa is internalized by individuals — the intensity with which a person takes the dominant life-course narrative as a self-evident standard of self-evaluation. V2 requires both macro-level indicators of collective behavioral patterns and micro-level evidence of self-evaluation, shame, guilt, and normative attachment. V3 refers not to exit costs themselves, but to the distributional breadth of a narrative across two layers: the proportion and social location of actors who take the narrative as a self-evident premise, and the share of institutions — in education, employment, housing, family, and evaluation systems — that presuppose it as the normal pathway. V3 is therefore a formal distribution variable; a high V3 means that a narrative is broadly distributed across both the actor layer and the institutional layer simultaneously, while a low V3 means that its distribution is confined to specific groups or specific institutions. The Q-axis is a set of qualitative analytic variables for examining narratives — both the dominant life-course narrative insofar as it continues to generate structural effects, and alternative narratives that emerge after the weakening or collapse of dominant doxa. Q1 evaluates factual adequacy: whether a narrative accurately grasps the transformed social reality. Q2 evaluates internal coherence: whether its explanatory claims, values, and practical prescriptions remain consistent. Q3 analyzes the objective structural effects a narrative produces or sustains — the forms of control, relation, recognition, exclusion, autonomy, hierarchy, resource distribution, and institutional possibility that the narrative tends to generate. Q3 does not directly determine whether those structures are good or bad; such value judgments are always mediated by an explicit evaluative narrative. The character of control — what kind of control structure operates and through what mechanisms — is analyzed at the level of Q3. The actual scope and intensity of that control emerge from the combination of V3 distribution and Q3 control structure: the same control structure operates locally when V3 distribution is narrow and pervasively when V3 distribution is broad. V3 and Q3 thus stand in a relation of combinatory amplification. Neither variable alone is sufficient; their structural effects are irreducible to either one in isolation. Under this framework, four types of suffering are systematically specified. Intra-narrative suffering emerges under high V2 conditions, when individuals continue to evaluate themselves against the dominant life-course narrative and experience structural failure as personal deficiency. Double-bind suffering arises when V1 expands while residual normative layers remain, producing a situation in which the old narrative is no longer structurally realizable but not yet socially abandonable. Anomic suffering appears when the old doxa loses credibility but no alternative narrative with sufficient factual adequacy, internal coherence, and structuring capacity has yet emerged. Suffering under structural compulsion occurs when individual internalization weakens — V2 declines — yet the V3 distribution remains broad and the Q3 control structure operating upon that distribution continues to function: individuals no longer fully believe in the dominant narrative, yet continue to perform it because the institutional, relational, and symbolic architecture that narrative has generated remains pervasive. The framework is applied to South Korean empirical materials from 1997 onward. Discursive naming events such as the N-po generation and Hell-Joseon are read as symptoms of narrative breakdown. The persistence of private tutoring expenditure, credential competition, and stable-job orientation amid deteriorating structural conditions is interpreted not simply as evidence of continued belief, but as a combined effect of residual V2 and a broad V3 distribution upon which Q3 control structures continue to operate. Intergenerational gaps in life-course expectations, the continued institutional centrality of credentials, and the scarcity of socially recognized alternative pathways are examined as indirect indicators through which V3 can be approximated. Youth NEET rates, social isolation statistics, and burnout data are treated not as proof of the theory in themselves, but as convergent evidence of suffering generated under narrative-structure disjuncture. The paper then examines currently circulating alternative narratives — the red pill, multi-income identity, FIRE, non-marriage, and local life movements — through the Q-variable framework. This analysis does not ask whether these narratives are intrinsically better or worse than the old life-course model. Rather, it asks how each narrative interprets transformed reality, whether its claims and prescriptions cohere internally, and what kinds of structural effects it produces or sustains. Methodologically, the paper adopts ideal-type construction and interpretive inference. Since doxa is not directly observable, its operation is captured through convergent patterns among indirect indicators — macro-structural change, behavioral inertia, intergenerational belief gaps, institutional residues, and self-narrative expressions. The theory’s explanatory scope is explicitly bounded to suffering arising from narrative-structure disjunctures; it does not claim to explain all forms of youth suffering, nor does it reduce psychological distress to social structure alone. Falsifiability conditions are specified: if structural change is accompanied by rapid narrative adjustment, if individuals no longer internalize the dominant life-course narrative yet continue to experience shame in a way better explained by another mechanism, or if V3 distribution narrows while Q3 control structures dissolve and yet suffering under structural compulsion persists, then the relevant variable explanation must be weakened or revised. This paper serves as the theoretical foundation — Grundlagenarbeit — of a research program spanning 2026–2036, which proceeds from historical generalization through systematic empirical verification 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.