I think this is really a spectrum and they are focusing on some more extreme aspects of it. But it is definitely not just an Asian thing and I believe to some degree this type of social withdrawal has affected perhaps a very significant portion of our society.
I have definitely been socially isolated my entire life to some degree or another. But much more so in adulthood. Again, I suggest that this is relatively common, not something that happens to only a few million people.
One aspect that is being glossed over is the amount of socialization or let's call it "pseudo-social" activity that is happening over the internet for these people.
I'm someone who generally does not have friends, leaves the apartment literally only a handful of times per month to take the garbage out and maybe buy groceries once or twice a month if I am trying to save money versus Instacart.
For me it comes down to money. I have a health issue that makes me fatigued etc. and don't have money for health insurance. I don't have money to go to restaurants or otherwise waste going out. So I stay home.
Because I'm always in a poor health and financial state, I feel uncomfortable trying to do any "real" socialization.
But I have always been trying one way or another to get to a point where I have a "real" online business that allows me to actually thrive. Such as buying a car and a house, getting health insurance and addressing my health issues, or paying taxes.
But what I have managed so far is usually just enough to scrape by. There have been some minor successes here and there but rarely have I ever felt like I had enough to truly meet my basic needs such as the health concerns or financial stability.
Anyway, I think it's easy to get in a position with health and financial challenges, maybe just a series of low-paying contracts, where some degree of social isolation is just practical and realistic.
I live in Iowa, and I had a roommate who just stopped going to work one day.
I learned after talking to her that she had done this before. In talking to her, it seemed to me a mix of anxiety and depression with a focus on agoraphobia.
Her family from several hundred miles came to retrieve her when they contacted me. She asked to move back in later, but I declined. I saw her start a new career some years afterwards.
I don't know if the "laying flat/tang ping" movement in China, or the issues of the people in the article, are completely separate from this.
tang ping is just an internet slang. Didn't expect it to have a wikipedia page.
In China, the "normal" is "to try to be the best". For example, less than half of Chinese students can make it into a "good college" (in China there's a very specific definition of a "good college"), but if you didn't make it, like more than 50% of your peers, that's enough to say that you're "bad at studying".
tang ping basically means quiting this kind of culture and accepting that one's normal. Buying a house and settling down in a city that's not Beijing or Shanghai, like 90% of people do.
the laying flat movement has mostly to do with lack of jobs/opportunity for young people.
- there's a societal trend to not hire people over the age of 30-35 in China. after months of looking for work, they've given up
- there's an unofficial 70% youth unemployment rate, and with 12 million new grads each year and intense competition for government work, sometimes hundred of applicants for a single stable government spot, the new grads give up
- the young generation has realized that no house/car/marriage/kid (没房没车没妻子) is a good way to live, and there's no pressure on them to create a life. so they lay flat. thus the abysmal marriage/child rate in China, which is near the bottom of world ranking
- the new grads don't want to work in a factory, day or night shift, for $2/hour.
- if the workers are in 1st tier cities, they can barely save up any money working and living there, due to the recent 50% reduction in wages ($1000/month -> $500/month) and increased spending on necessities. so it's easier for them to just not work and live off of parents.
Basically there is a trend of overeducation; China is producing millions more university graduates than it needs, without enough white collar jobs, and at the same time there are a lot of job openings in much more poorly paid factory work. This is not unique in East Asia, South Korea also has a lot of youth unemployment for similar reasons. https://keia.org/the-peninsula/low-youth-employment-in-korea...
Also, China is currently suffering from deflation because it produces many more goods than it can consume or export, and wages are also being cut.
Popping the residential real estate investment bubble was probably the root cause behind the collapse in sales of cars, luxury goods, and other consumer products. A lot of consumers who had made highly leveraged investments on unoccupied apartments in "ghost cities" were sitting on significant paper wealth for a few years and felt comfortable spending money. Now that has largely evaporated.
These people have always existed. In the 20th century we just called them “shut-ins”. People who socially isolate themselves.
As kids there would be the old run down house with an older man or lady who would rarely be seen. They would be dressed shabbily, and the house would be poorly maintained but livable.
Equally, I know plenty of "Bruce Wayne" types who don't live in crappy conditions, are highly in-demand for their skills and extensive knowledge, but are very much asocial when it comes to in-person stuff.
"Money" has also generally been the issue for me. Not simply the money to get to and enjoy activities. The money to meet (sometimes unrealistic) expectations of physical presentation (including clothing, grooming, the time and energy and diet required to work out) and therefore feel comfortable among people who will judge you for it - including, crucially and as a black man, authorities. The money to keep up with friends who might want to do things you didn't necessarily budget for. The money to feel comfortable with all of this while managing other necessary expenses (including, for some, supporting family).
When I had a job, I definitely didn't have the money for all of this, particularly while living in a hoity-toity resort town (and particularly when it became much more hoity and toity and white during the summer). Making rent was much easier (read: possible) when I just went home every day.
I have some other thoughts, particularly about how the modern job market makes it more difficult for young people to build durable relationships at work (which, as much as legal might abhor it, is indeed one of the avenues through which many young people make friends). Might edit/reply later with those. Suffice it to say, when layoffs disrupt the already imperiled process, you end up with a lot of people entering their late 20s/early 30s with social lives that are exceedingly fragile, if they're even extant.
At some point, I became so angry with this feeling that I stopped caring about what people would think of me altogether. However, this was somewhat destructive for me. Eventually, I seeked help.
It was a good decision for me. But I'm still in a process of learning to love myself and it's a hard task to complete. I understand now that I should value the opinion of people that trully cares about me. But what I think is more important.
Money vs. Time. If you need too much money to even be able to socialize that only leads to misery. The best way to socialize is to do projects on your free time with other people, there will always be some who are too tired to work much in their spare time and that is ok as long as you are invested. The big lie is that everyone is a Millionaire and that you have to spend money to socialize. Workers unions have historically in Europe and the US tried to create places where people could socialize without having to spend money. That is something I took advantage of and lent my time to as a young adult, I should spend more money on that now that I have it.
America has this too. It's homelessness. The drug abuse and mental illness makes it worse though. Unlike the comparably docile hikikomori, drug and alcohol use leads to erratic and aggressive behavior and makes accommodations and treatment impossible, hence homelessness.
100% this. I think the reason we see these people homeless in the US is due to the myth of the self-sufficiency. That if you can't succeed or fit in it's because you are deficient in some way. It makes it hard to ask for help and it's doubly so if you are introverted to this extreme.
Homelessness is the scariest thing for me. And actually I know that in many cases you became one without your actual influence on it. This problem breaks my heart.
I'm sorry for what you've been through and I hope your health gets better. However I believe you've phrased the following a bit poorly, although I'm sure unintentionally:
some degree of social isolation is just practical and realistic.
Unfortunately this leads to connotations that encourage people completely out of touch with the ordinary person's lifestyle (billionaires, CEOs etc.) make outrageous claims and dictating how they should navigate life with minimum wage and no insurance e.g. that CEO who said skip breakfast to save money, or HN's favorites that we should just shut up and be content with modern tech automating our creative abilities instead of assisting us with menial tasks.
Instead if you had written social isolation is inevitable without controlled financial and health stability, you'd be 100% spot on.
Human, social isolation and practical/realistic just don't fit together.
> we should just shut up and be content with modern tech automating our creative abilities instead of assisting us with menial tasks
This isn’t true. Dalle and ChatGPT are assists, they don’t really replace anything and make being creative more accessible. AI also helps with tons of menial tasks like code syntax
It absolutely is. I see plenty of AI art used to illustrate websites that would previously have used stock imagery for which someone got paid, even if only a small amount. Even in contexts where it is used as a free gift (ie adding AI art to social media posts that would have just been text before), it has the function of crowding out human made art by its very proliferation. It's like Greshams law for media files.
I know where you're coming from. Chronic ill health can be a really isolated life. I get out once per fortnight to the supermarket, once per month to the pharmacy, once per 6 months to my GP. Other than that I get away from home maybe once every 2 or 3 months.
I've had people say they'd go mad living my life. Well when your body works against you you just have to suck it up and deal with it.
As for friends, I have very few because I'm angry all the time. Being alone helps not face charges.
Those people have completely taken over the west. You suffer alone in hopeless isolation if you are not like them. It isn't that you somehow didn't succeed - the majority simply prefers to be alone. Only the fact that the majority is "individualist" like this makes it much less obvious.
There are emotional and mental support groups, churches, community events, and all manner of things you can do for free that may help break your isolation. It takes effort to do this. I know you are struggling, but ultimately no one will help you but yourself, which is a hard pill to swallow.
Yet in this article, they were helped without needing to reach out first (a crucial part for a socially withdrawn person). American/European society just chooses to ignore and not help the same kind of people here.
I think the main thing is the lack of on-ramps. Once you have fallen out of the social circulation, there is basically no way of going back. Unless you are able to stay within an extremely narrow range of behaviours (in terms of not being weird, basically speaking expected thinks in expected tone of voice and body language), nobody wants to associate with you. And since about the only way to learn these things is to be around people who already behave in the "right" way, a vicious circle arises.
It has nothing to do with debt, wealth or earnings. Completely independent things. People had it worse at every time in history in almost every place.
It has nothing to do with social media / internet. It just something people tend to fall into when they withdraw, and have no trouble abandoning as soon as the life outside becomes tenable again.
Social capital follows the same progression as regular capital. If you already have a lot of friends and acquaintances, it's easy to make more. You either get invited to things, or you can organise something and know people will come.
Loneliness is a big problem among recent immigrants. They all struggle to make friends at first, because they have no social capital to build upon. It's hard to break into established circles without being introduced by a member, and few people will show up to a stranger's party unless it's vetted by friends.
There is such a thing as being socially destitute, and the recovery can be quite difficult, especially when you have other things going on in your life.
Great reminder about immigration's social barriers.
Church and work are the lowest friction social spaces that I can think of outside of wealth dimension.
The problem still defaults to getting your foot in the door though. It requires a certain elevation of compassion and information in enough social circles for a single person to overcome cultural devides.
Indeed some of the most social times of my life was when I went to church despite not being Christian. They tend to be very welcoming and friendly in my experience. Sports clubs are great (e.g. badminton) as something less controversial
So about two years ago, we got my sister in law to move into our house, because she was graduating high school and we felt that there was more opportunity in NYC than in small-town-USA, at least for a younger person.
We like having her around, she's very nice, but she's also had trouble finding new friends/social-circles here, and I kind of feel bad for dragging her up here as a result. I've always been someone who is happy enough alone, and I generally find a few coworkers at every job that I become friends with anyway, it's never been too hard for me, but I realize that I'm pretty weird. I feel like I yanked her away from a relatively comfortable and established social circle, brought her to a place where she knows nobody, and then just expected everything to be ok, which makes me feel like a dick.
Doesn't help that I ended up yelling at her boyfriend a week ago, for valid-but-not-worth-yelling-about reasons, and now I think she's afraid to leave her bedroom, so I might have inadvertently given her hikikomori tendencies. I'm an asshole :/
[1] usually the especially geeky people who will listen to me ramble about math.
NYC is a tough place for a lot of people. When I moved here years ago I was lucky in that I had a lot of friends from college that were also in the city. It could be tough meeting people if you don’t already have that or a third space you enjoy going to.
Maybe find some classes she might be interested in? There’s art stuff at pioneer works, art/computer stuff at school for poetic computation, tons of music/language/cooking lessons, etc. I’ve met lots of good friends in yoga, meditation, or Muay Thai spaces in nyc.
I think you can’t be rough on yourself about bringing her here though. It’s a beautiful place to live if you can get over the beginning difficulty!
Yeah, as I mentioned, I've always been able to find someone I get along with in most jobs that I've had, and so I've managed to find friends, and I've also never had much of a problem being alone for long periods of time. I'm also married so I have a friend that's pretty much always in close proximity. NYC kicked my ass in a lot of ways when I first moved here, but not in the "lack of friends" category. My wife is similar to me in that regard; she's usually able to find one person who she gets along with, and she's also generally ok being alone.
Part of the reason we convinced her to move here was because we thought that she'd have a higher likelihood of going to college if she went to a bigger city (and the CUNY system is excellent and inexpensive). She did go to CUNY for a semester, but for reasons I won't pretend I fully understand, she decided to do online college after that, which she's still doing. I'm not sure how to talk her into some kind of extra IRL classes.
Her only friend here, as far as I can tell, is her boyfriend. Honestly I think most people can get by with just one friend, but he said he's not going to come back to our house ever again because I'm a dick. I don't really blame him for that, and they didn't break up or anything, but I think it's made her feel a lot more isolated I think.
I am a little hamstrung by my principles on that. I do feel like the reason I got upset was valid, so I cannot apologize to him for anything pertaining to that.
I can apologize for yelling and I probably will but I don’t know that I can apologize for the content of what I said itself.
Presumably she does have the ability to make a decision to move back though? I assume you've broached her options so she knows you're supportive? People need a lot of reassurance that it's ok to change course if something isn't working out.
We've tried to make it clear that she's welcome to move back if she wants, but that she's also welcome to stay here. Obviously we're not holding her hostage, and we'd help her move back (or anywhere else) if that's what she wants.
I think me yelling at her boyfriend made her feel like she was unwelcome to do anything fun here.
Yeah, I have no idea. I did apologize to the relevant people, and it was sincere but I have no idea if they believe me.
ETA: I thought about doing something like buying my sister in law a new iPhone or something, but that of course feels pretty dirty, like I'm just buying forgiveness, and frankly it's kind of selfish on my end, trying to convert someone's sadness into something transactional because transactional things are much easier to deal with.
It's a pretty difficult situation. What said has been said, the damage has been done and there's no going back.
The circumstances also matter, a period of emotional vulnerability. No friends, out of comfort zone. The current result is a breakdown of trust and feeling uncomfortable around each other.
How can one restore trust in such a situation? Would it even be better to say for them to go back to the small town? Being honest about how they seemed better mentally and spiritually there? Truly not an envious position.
Yeah, it doesn't help that I really dislike the boyfriend already [1], so there's only so much I can say while still being honest, and I don't really do apologies unless I feel there's something I should be apologizing for.
I suspect the only thing that I can do is be polite to her and just wait it out.
[1] He didn't do anything actionable, he's just kind of a dumb douchebag.
> Unless you are able to stay within an extremely narrow range of behaviours (in terms of not being weird, basically speaking expected thinks in expected tone of voice and body language), nobody wants to associate with you.
I'll agree on the lack of on-ramps but this is a pretty limiting view. There's all kinds of people, many who will share some of whatever you think your weirdness is. If you only want to associate with a certain slice of society, it is not so weird that only certain slices of society want to associate with you.
You need to live near a population centre to find them, that's true. It's the same reason other minority groups such as homosexuals urbanized so quickly.
I would say it's not just behaviors but isolation causes stress on the body that increases more irrational behaviors and fears.
So that can be crippling when trying to get back to a health state that can handle relationships again. On-ramps to help destress the environment would be helpful too. It's a challenge because we haven't really built many areas where people are welcome to just be, even with 3rd spaces that doesn't those people that are now rewired in their stress state. Some types of maybe community service (clean up, plantings, painting etc) or festivals events might be more helpful here as they can sometimes be lower stress, no required interactions etc. It's a tough thing especially as people have different reasons to isolate though poverty is likely one of the most major ones.
The US only has ~50 people / year dying of COVID, largely skewing elderly. There are more than twice that dying due to car accidents, so I assume you're not driving anywhere either?
My mistake, I meant per day, and the numbers reflect that. The January was not great, yes, but a few factors: greatly skewing elderly, even less likely in the blue areas OP most likely lives, masks have shown little effect in reducing covid spread, outside is nonexistent, and are they still driving when driving is much more dangerous? People got rightly fearful, but some people will always take things too far and become hypochondriacs, like some people are still by themselves masking in a car? Imo, by the stats, it looks like a tall order to be expecting everyone around them to mask when we estimate the actual effects that would have...
That's only counting deaths. Long covid is much harder to measure, the numbers are significant and daunting. My spouse is so afflicted; she went from being one of the most productive and active people I've ever known, to incapable of doing an hour of work per day.
The evidence that it has a lot to do with social media is very strong. See Jonathan Haidt’s work on the effects of personal phones and social media on young people’s mental health.
I see it in analogy to sugar free sweeteners. There's some evidence that the physical experience of tasting sweetness is an essential phase in triggering the body's mechanisms to deal with large sugar intake. And that triggering that mechanism without providing any material for your body to consume can actually do damage to you as it searches for something to metabolize (this is just an analogy, feel free to prove me wrong).
But just like that, online social interactions trigger some part of our internal mechanisms for reacting to actual community and belonging and healthy debate/conversation, but without the complete "meal" to digest that those things actually provide. Thereby triggering maladaptive behaviors and actually doing damage to the systems that regulate in person socializing.
Probably over complicated but who among us, right?
I think this relates alot to what other posters are saying about how it's difficult to break into established social circles without somebody introducing you in. After all, you're more likely to make friends with a room of individuals than a room of cliques.
What social media does is it greatly strengthens preexisting social circles that there is less incentive for someone to be open-minded and make new friends. Take video games for example, I can personally attest people were alot more sociable and open to friend requests a decade ago than today.
One perception on what is causing this would be Discord. In the past, most people playing would be individuals, and group activities would naturally force people to socialize with strangers. The friends you made in one game would not follow you to another. With Discord, nowadays it's more of alot of premade groups of friends playing these games, so there's no reason to socialize in public chat or care about strangers.
Now Discord isn't new, Skype or BBS existed years before, but they were harder to set up, so pre-made groups were less prevalent and the barriers of entry would naturally mean people with more of an open mindset would be using them. Discord in contrast is very easy to get started with, so the more "conservative" elements would take precedence.
Maybe social media catalyzes the problem but the point is that it’s not the root cause, in the same way that opioids did not in of themselves cause the opioid epidemic.
Iron poisoning and lead deficiency. They got it the wrong way round. They incorrectly packed every major cognitive process into the neocortex, instead of assigning them each to the correct part. They got the idea of intelligence the wrong way round: The function of the neocortex is dimensionality reduction - the more powerful it is, the simpler everything is. You can't improve anything that easily. You actually broke it.
Sorry, i cannot edit on mobile but i just realized maybe i read that wrong. Are you saying that as opposed to countries without safety nets, or instead emphasizing that even with security nets it can still be a very difficult experience?
Very much the latter. I was shuttled from incompatible job (skills and geography) to incompatible job, treated with utter contempt, and had to essentially beg for financial support to pay the rent.
I'm a top 10% earner in the country, paid more than my fair share of social security for many years before that.
It was a jarring experience seeing just how fine the line was between being on the right and wrong side of the system.
I went through something similar here in America very suddenly due to illness. Were it not for family, we would have been homeless.
It’s hard to go from Hero to Zero. Now that you’ve made it, all I can say is “never forget how that experience made you feel” - that way when you vote and you pay your taxes you’ll know why you do it. Ideally so that it’s not even worse for the next guy.
Possibly due to social stigma. I don’t know that what I’m describing can be attributed to the safety net itself, but many countries with excellent social safety programs also have a low social tolerance for failure. This is not limited to using social benefits - e.g fail in business and you’re a business failure who will struggle to get any financing ever again.
From a European perspective who made similar experiences: European countries all tend to be hyper neoliberal nowadays (despite Americans warped perspective) they don't want to offer social safety nets for ideological reasons but have to because of past, long since crushed leftist political movements having forced them into existence, making it very difficult to abandon them now by the ruling neoliberals.
The net effect is the more slowly, erosion of social safety nets and making it as painful and unpleasant as possible to use them (as a matter of policy), as well as mass corporate media propaganda against it's recipients. It's a miserable experience by-design.
It isn't that you're failing, they are the hikikomoris, who want to be alone, and the very fact that somebody tries to socialoze with them annoys them. It's just the norm in the west, so that it's you who stands out, and suffers alone.
Sounds like social coaching has all the attributes of an untapped business niche. The question is, if there is just a obvious pain, why there is such a shortage of solutions. I think it could be because of the stigma associated with this issue or because people affect by it lack genuine interest in solutions as people are usually happy to pay for all kinds of self-improvements.
> Sounds like social coaching has all the attributes of an untapped business niche
The problem is that most of the potential customers are well aware that the field is full of hucksters and certifications are largely meaningless. I'm not about to pay for services I don't believe will pan out.
Doesn't scale is a huge issue. Lack of evidence that it works is another - and anything remotely evidence based is given by somebody like a psychologist and is very expensive.
Social coaching is just another venue through which scammers do their thing. Eg the Andrew Tate-esque "schools" making men even more dysfunctional in the name of teaching them to be "attractive".
It's very easy to talk about some sort of coaching for these issues, but imo it isn't really that straightforward. The people being suggested to take coaching are often very easily manipulated, and there's also the issue of everyone having a different standard for a healthy level of socialization, and everyone also loves to force their standard onto everyone. Result is that "social coaching" is going to be more like brainwashing/indoctrination in practice.
From my personal experience (I also went through a very dark period in my life and just recently climbed out of the hole I dug myself) I guess people are realizing that working hard won't get you anything close to what previous generations had. Once that settles in it's hard to push yourself to do basically anything.
Additionally, I also believe that feeling is compounded by social media where selection bias only shows you cherry picked moments where it seems other people are living the life you won't get.
Finally, among the younger generations there is a lot of climate change dread going around.
For me it was a combination of all these factors and to this day I can't pinpoint exactly what was the trigger, but after COVID lockdowns I simply kept social distancing.
My pet theory is that social media isn't the problem, the always-on surveillance created by smartphones is.
When I was in university, we had nude parties. I'm pretty sure nobody would risk that nowadays. That cherry-picking you mentioned goes both for highs and lows. In this day and age, you always need to plan for your worst moment to end up in someone's picture. The ubiquity of cameras has made everyday living more risky in the sense that you're constantly at risk of losing social standing over insignificant mistakes.
It's a double-edged sword. Without that ubiquity, 4 years ago today, George Floyd would have just been known as a junkie who slipped a fake bill and had a heart attack, if he was known at all. Instead, we were able to see with our own eyes what actually happened.
There is certainly a hammer/nail aspect to the issue (which is itself one of degrees), but I do think that part of the blame that gets put on the technology and its use lies more correctly with the society that makes judgments off of that use's outputs. Ideally, in a functional society, no one would bat an eyelash at coeds sharing platonic nakey time.
> It's a double-edged sword. Without that ubiquity, 4 years ago today, George Floyd would have just been known as a junkie who slipped a fake bill and had a heart attack, if he was known at all. Instead, we were able to see with our own eyes what actually happened.
An important consideration there is that the areas immediately adjacent to police should be far more tracked than general spaces or around average people.
My grandfather said there were such parties when he was young. That would have been 1930s-1940s. And what's even more crazy is that this was in the countryside in Portugal.
>Worried about climate change? In the 1980s it was nuclear war.
Yet they could afford _homes_. One of the most important things any human can have. A place to feel safe, call home, not be afraid month after month that your landlord will raise rent by 50% or 100% leaving you on the streets with all the stress that comes afterwards, etc.
Also we have that now as well. We are at the risk of a total war between China, Russia, USA, EU, India, etc. all with nuclear weapons. We have the worst of both worlds.
I’m not from USA, (so only educated guess whether statistics lie), but I wager that millions could not afford homes then and millions can afford a home today.
first graph has very sharp peaks and dips, but please note that the y axis has values from 62 till 70.
Based on this I would say that it would be misleading to state “in 1980 people could afford homes and today we can’t afford”
But I can see a lot of “outrage” in US media.
My unrequested speculation: more people got college and university degrees, but that did not change their ability to own a home. (But it did change their expectation, especially how pricey degrees seem to be in USA)
You're conflating 'having a home' with home ownership, even though the GP talks about the hassles of dealing with landlords and therefore clearly includes renting.
Rent used to be a lot cheaper in the US. I'm not sure about the 1980s, but in the 1980s I had a spacious room in a nice San Francisco neighborhood for $300/month.
Median family income in 1980 was $21k. Also San Francisco back then may not have been the San Francisco of today. So if you factor in inflation and increase in desirability and local wages, this would make for a more meaningful comparison.
Homes are overrated. Rented almost all my life out of desire for flexibility. Owned two houses for 5 years each, and regretted it both times. People divorce, move for better job, retirement and other reasons - all that is easier while renting.
I thinking renting works perfectly when you don't have kids. With kids, it's better to give them a place they don't just grow up but can come back to as well.
I grew up in my family house. Had all my childhood and school time there. All my nostalgia basically revolves around the house I grew up and played in. I see that in my dreams still.
I have been living in rented houses since my school finished with my parents and then now with my own kid on my own. Seeing how I don't have any attachment or those kind of memories from other rented places I have been through, my plan is for my kids to grow up in a place they can call their own.
> While climate change is happening, there is still a lot we can do to slow it down and mitigate its effects
Not to disagree with your general point but one of the most frustrating things about climate change is knowing how much we could do, while seeing how little hope we actually have of making those changes.
Yes, at the time it seemed like something that might happen tomorrow. You had TV movies like "The Day After" and constant discussion of it in school and in the media. It was a real fear.
Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963) has somebody in Sweden becoming depressed and withdrawn due to anxiety over China developing an atomic bomb. Then in 1982 Prince sang "everybody's got the bomb, we could all die any day". That's two decades of continual anxiety about sudden obliteration (or worse, near obliteration).
The solar panels that Carter installed were nearly useless, given poor 1970s technology. It was performative, showing that he was interested in doing something to handle the oil crisis, even if it was futile. And Regan's removal of them was likewise performative, signaling that there no longer was an oil crisis.
Carter's installation was actually then the latest in a long line of interested advocates who pushed for American adoption of not a particular device or system, but solar technology as a whole; his panels were better than what came before and worse than what came after, and might have prompted enhanced development, if not for the course history took.
Reagan, on the other hand, was one in a long line of what I like to call "Powerful White Men Whose Irrational Beliefs and/or Reckless Actions Ruined Millions of Lives", alongside the likes of Hoyt Hottel, an MIT chemical engineering professor who co-founded the Combustion Institute and who was somehow allowed to head (and thwart) MIT's solar engineering research efforts. (CEO Jack Welch, welfare reformer Larry Townsend, chemist Thomas Midgley, Jr, and urban planner Robert Moses are also on that list.)
I just think your scope is unnecessarily limited, I suppose.
Not a fan of Reaganomics, and people like Midgley are hard to defend, but I think you have the wrong idea of Hottel. Hottel basically invented solar energy as we know it in the 1930s -- he wasn't some guy trying to subvert it. There's a reason that the highest honor the American Solar Energy Society gives out is called the Hoyt Clarke Hottel Award.
And The Combustion Institute (which was founded in 1954, well after Hottel's solar breakthroughs) isn't the sinister thing you think it is. It's not about cars and their internal combustion, but about combustion science -- the science of fire.
Hottel expressed both explicit bias against solar research and implicit bias against one of his charges, who was actually a much more natural advocate for the technology (
https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/journeys-innova...). He headed MIT's solar research efforts, for sure, but again, I find this strange, since so many of his decisions reflected an undue skepticism for someone in that position. What a coup for his apparent ambitions that his name is on so many of the institutions whose purposes he stunted from the most advantageous perch imaginable: "leading" them.
Ultimately, he was a true advocate for combustion-based heating (solar also being focused on that rather than electricity generation through mid-century), which lead to the national status quo of high levels of airborne pollutants both indoors and in the environment, as well as the ever-present threat of one's domicile or business detonating with little notice. But, you know, worth it since hydrocarbons are cheaper. /s I apologize for the snark, but the way people like this get the benefit of the doubt in retrospect is quite frustrating. They made the world we were born into worse, and they did it on purpose (or negligently), for specious reasons. Fixing their mistakes means acknowledging that they sucked.
The solar panels (and the famous sweater Carter wore when turning down the White House thermostat in winter) wasn't done out of climate anxiety though. This was done because of the oil crisis (at the time the US was more dependent than now on Mideast oil and their organization OPEC raised the price dramatically leading to shortages in the US).
Again, that doesn't tell the whole story. As we've discussed, solar research predates the episode by quite a long time, and Carter's efforts were not just about the energy crisis, but also about setting the foundation for future pro-environmental efforts (which were not necessarily about climate change at the time, but that certainly bled into those concerns later on). Your characterization seems to try to make Reagan's later actions seem more rational, when they very well may not have been based on anything but his disdain for his predecessor and his policies. We don't really know.
That nuclear war deal sounds way too good. Can't do anything about it? Well you don't have to worry then, since the inverse is also true. I.e. you don't have to do anything.
The thing is, it is not about what you can do, it is about what you must do. Emphasis on must. You must, but you don't, hence the guilt.
It is hard to explain to people today how scary nuclear war was during the Cold War. It wasn’t so much just that we were in real jeopardy of starting a deliberate nuclear war: it was the fact that we were heartbeats away from doing one by accident, and nearly did a couple of times [1]. It was standard for kids in elementary school to discuss the implications (at least we didn’t bother with duck and cover when I grew up, since politicians realized that was pointless.) Maybe we’re still in the same place (or will be again soon) but today’s atmosphere is nowhere near as scary.
Sure, but after like only one decade of halcyon optimism 9/11 happened and thousands were killed on American soil, leading to over a decade of paranoia and political-infighting which then petered out to become… more paranoia and infighting, except even more self-directed. It seems like in America the fear is more personal than ever.
There's not been many studies, but no, it probably won't. A nuclear winter would involve heavy dust and soot, that won't stay up in the air for very long. After that settles down, the net effect is just more CO2 from all the burning, and CO2 is an oxide, it is very very stable...
well after the Ukraine stroke radar target inside the Russia. Risk of nuclear war might have gone higher,, at least temporarily. And nuclear war Means turning earth into Venus or Mars twin. USA can decide how much support is too much support and how small support is too small support, because too little support might lead Russia attacking NATO countries event without needing to occupate but the much support can just lead to termination of All life on earth.
Yet the new struggles are real too? explaining them away as more of the same does nothing. There are old problems and there are new problems and they're both problems.
Yes there are struggles today. But there always have been. This imaginary past where most people didn't live in fear of unexpected expenses, debt, struggling to pay all their bills, and not earning enough money didn't exist.
I think at the very least there was a sense that the struggles were leading to a better future. In America, it certainly feels like we’ve regressed from the optimistic “End of History” vision of the future of the ‘90s.
The world was going to unite and we would set our sights on conquering space- even the disaster movies of the time were about humanity collectively dealing with a planetary threat (asteroid collisions).
For a bit of context: people who were hit by the New Year's earthquake in Japan were living on small rice ball rations until aid could get to them. This is partly because Japan's 2.5 decades of economic consternation has forced the country to make hard choices about where investment goes - mostly to the dense major metropolitan areas, with their higher ROI, and not to the more rural ones that were affected by the natural disaster (hence, also, the long remediation process in Fukushima).
By way of comparison, much-less-dense America will find itself in trouble if it turns out that we're facing anything remotely similar in our weird will-it-won't-it stagflation.
The Strong Towns project has a ton of information about the looming insolvency of many American municipalities, and how infrastructure and aid - as in, water pipes and food access - are in the crosshairs just so that the whole shebang doesn't blow. Ironically, starvation may be back on the menu.
This is a weird take. Historically Japan has overinvested in rural infrastructure, because the ruling LDP's support base is rural, rural votes carry disproportionate weight, and when there's nothing going on economically construction is the best way to funnel money in.
In addition, Japan is exceptionally well prepared for disasters, probably better than any other country in the world. Those plans are regularly battle tested because it also has a lot of disasters. Yes, it took a while to get aid out, but that's because the tsunami wiped all coastal roads, railroads, airports etc, and AFAIK hunger was not an actual problem for survivors.
I'm not an expert, so I defer anyone who can present information contrary to my statements. That said, it would seem that "well-prepared" and "the tsunami wiped out all links" are contradictory. IIRC, many buildings and pieces of infrastructure were not up to anti-earthquake/fire/tsunami regulations due in part to their age. A quick check turns up an NHK article claiming that Ishikawa Prefecture's disaster preparedness plans were deemed insufficient by experts. https://web.archive.org/web/20240201140804/https://www3.nhk....
Additionally, I recall several documentaries and news reports that referenced the difficulty of delivering aid, including food, and the lack of preparedness for the extended period of dislocation.
In any case, I think it would actually be scarier to find that the conditions present after the recent earthquake were to be found in a country considered well-prepared for such disasters. Combined with the collective experience following Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, we as Americans might be, for lack of a better term, f*cked.
Japan is incredibly mountainous, of course the transport links are near the coasts because that's the flat part where people actually live. There are sea walls etc built to guard coastal towns, but the size of the tsunami overwhelmed them and at that point you're screwed.
And yes, many buildings are out of code, because Japanese earthquake standards are continually strengthened and virtually anything built more than 20 years ago will not meet the newest set. This is also a big reason why the Japanese prefer to buy new houses.
Of course the disaster could have been handled better, and eg the design of the Fukushima nuclear reactors was particularly bad, but (IMHO) they still did a better job this time than with the Kobe earthquake, where the Yakuza had to step in to help because the government was caught flat-footed by a disaster happening in the "wrong" place.
The Strong Towns project cherry picks data to push a biased narrative. If looming insolvency of many American municipalities was a serious problem, then we would see that reflected in their bond yields and bond insurance rates. That isn't happening. Some cities in economically depressed areas will go bankrupt but nationwide the vast majority will muddle through and patch their infrastructure well enough to keep it working.
> This imaginary past where most people didn't live in fear of unexpected expenses, debt, struggling to pay all their bills, and not earning enough money didn't exist.
I call bullshit... Debt. Bills. And for that matter, money. These are things that our species lived for hundreds of thousands of years without. Furthermore, there are tribes that even to this day live without these struggles.
> there are tribes that even to this day live without these struggles.
Instead of debt and bills, that moves the problem up to struggling to defend against tribes with better weapons who want your land/labor. Or natural disasters and no resilience due to trade network. Or dying from bacterial infections and childbirth complications.
It's hard to assess, especially from our position, which set of challenges the human soul prefers. But there's an interesting point to be made, touched in both "Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress"[0] as well as "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity"[1] that no 'savage' has been interested in non-coercively joining an 'advanced' society, whereas there are plenty of examples of 'civilized' people choosing the 'savage' life. I don't think the choice is as clear cut as it would superficially seem.
As is plainly evident, the vast majority of savages have chosen to incrementally create and join civilized societies. It’s a much larger challenge for an illiterate hunter gatherer to make a multi millennia jump into modern society than it is for someone to do the reverse.
well thats unhelpful, diminishing the concerns of people by implying: "back in my day we all had it tougher", just doesnt help and its just not true, back in the day it was a "different" tough but no less or more real than what people are experiencing now.
Well, I think whether or not people objectively had it worse or better is sort of beside the point. How well did people deal with adversity before? Are people lacking something now which is making them less resilient, and less capable of connecting? I'm not sure what the precise answers to those questions are, but it feels like folks are generally doing worse from a mental health perspective. That's a problem to solve just like the "real" problems of the world.
Your observation is neither novel nor helpful. People suffering are often not suffering due to a lack of information, or because they’ve never taken middle school history.
The article reports this happening in countries that are quite comfortable at the moment and have strong safety nets. This isn't being reported from Venezuela or Ukraine or even Poland or the UK.
China has something else - the "lying flat" movement.[1][2] This is just "dropping out", something China is now rich enough to allow. It's not about isolation, just not working much.
I wouldn't call what the young people lying flat in china "rich enough". There are stories of people in their 20s and 30s, after college or after layoffs, that they've either got a few thousand dollars saved up or from family. They couldn't find any jobs due to ~70% youth unemployment rate. Or they don't want to work in factories that pays out $2/hour and waste their degree. So they are moving to very remote countryside and renting a room for $50/month, and spending only $.50 a day. Or live off of parents, what's also known as 啃老族 or eat the old.
Remember the previous Chinese premier confirmed there are 700 million people living off less than $100/month a few years ago. so this living of standard is possible for young people. Especially now that there's widespread 50% reduction in wages/cost of living in China.
It's unfortunately the kind of thing where perception matters just as much as reality. People worried about the world ending tomorrow make different decisions than people who put nuclear annihilation out of their minds; this adds up and shapes the economy, and even feeds back into international policy.
> Worried about climate change? In the 1980s it was nuclear war.
During the Cold War, they were at least telling kids (at least in the USA) that the nuclear holocaust might be avoidable "if clear heads prevail," or "if we beat the Russians," or "if they back down." There was at least hope. With Climate Change, we've told two entire generations of kids that there is no hope, it's inevitable and irreversible, and that there is no way to avoid catastrophe. So is it any surprise they're all doomers when it comes to Climate? If you tell everyone that everything is hopeless, then don't be surprised when a few conclude that it really is hopeless.
I was told as a kid that there was hope for climate change as long as we could scale back our carbon emissions. Watching the opposite of that happen over a lifetime is what made me into a doomer.
That's true, it's a big difference. With nuclear war, every day that the sirens don't ring is the status quo protected, doom delayed by another day. With climate change, every day that the status quo is protected is another day of accelerating doom and increasing inevitability. They are different in that way.
>With Climate Change, we've told two entire generations of kids that there is no hope, it's inevitable and irreversible, and that there is no way to avoid catastrophe.
If that isn't bad enough, the final nail in the emotional coffin is telling them there is a way out: the lifestyle of a Dravidian. Eat the carbon neutral bugs in BlackRock's leased pod. Some of us would rather die.
The doomerism rhetoric is coming more from one side of the political isle, the one that was in denial about climate change, generally votes against legislation that helps deal with the consequences because they’d rather their perceived enemies suffer, and them along with than do good.
The on-ramps for fulfilling activity (not even necessarily jobs) are disappearing. If you want to learn something new, you're not looking at a nominal fee at a local community college; maybe the suggestion is to watch (flawed, unfinished) tutorials on YouTube, or to buy a creative influencer's course pack. Maybe that gets you basic skills, maybe you waste your time. But let's assume you picked up [skill]. Someone's probably not going to hire you for it. Do you try to make something by yourself? Here's the list of other skills you should probably pick up in order to compete (yes, you're competing) with the wunderkids who can produce [project], and also the associated devlog and Patreon and streaming schedule. Or, maybe you try to join an existing project that needs your [skill]. That's going to be a decent amount of time lurking the Discord, trying to keep up with a group of people who might not even like you because you're the weird new guy. If the goal is prosocial socialization outside of the house, this might be counterproductive.
Did I mention that the increasing focus on "problem-solving," driven by the tech Cult of Productivity, seems to have predisposed people to the kind of skepticism and pessimism that makes finding problems to solve easier?
I don't understand at all. Because you (in my opinion, erroneously) believe that you need to work some X% harder than the last generation to accomplish the same thing you're just not going to try?
What about pretty much every generation prior to the last, who had to toil in hard labor most days, who often didn't have indoor plumbing, who often didn't even have electricity, who went off to war, did they have any easier time being "successful" than you? Did they just give up and not try? Do you honestly believe you're worse off in 2024 than they were? That you're working harder than they were?
I'm not even going to touch the climate dread stuff as climate change is a topic that can not be impartially discussed anymore.
> you need to work some X% harder than the last generation to accomplish the same thing
And this is the contrasting bit from the comment you are responding:
> working hard won't get you anything close to what previous generations had
The difference is that your sentence says they have to work harder to achieve the same, while their comment says that even if they work hard they can’t achieve the same. That is two very different things.
The reason that ppl give up now is not that it is worse now than before, but rather the opposite. Now you can do almost nothing productive and still survive. Before, you would simply starve to death.
> I guess people are realizing that working hard won't get you anything close to what previous generations had.
I hear this a lot. It’s also untrue. If you are open to anecdata, it’s trivial to prove this is untrue.
What people constantly miss and fail to consider is what they are working hard at. Hard work is a requirement for success and class mobility, but it is not sufficient. You must also work hard at the right things.
The truest thing I have learned about life is that you need to do three things to be successful:
1. Identify places where you can add value /for people who can compensate you/.
2. Learn how to articulate the value you add.
3. Ensure you get compensation for that value added.
If you do these three things, your hard work will pay off, maybe in a big way.
#2-3 is where I would say the majority of people get stuck. I sure have, I volunteer to help people whenever I can but that doesn't mean I'll get paid or compensated for it. Not that I mind but I can get burnt out.
#1 can really be hard when #2-3 never seems to come into the picture for long. It can make anything you do seem like a waste of time. Can you add value, sure, is it worth it? That's where it can be tough.
I think a problem with a lot of this too is lack of real long term community too. But I think some people are just better at managing that naturally.
I think also in men there's the expectation of being a provider as your only role in life, and the fork in the road is either this (reclusion) or unfortunately suicide (apparently work and financial pressures are 2/3rds of reasons for men's suicides).
I've had friends go like that, it's not nice. But the saddest thing is that it happens and the n we all just kind of...move on somehow?
I've recently finished reading "Civilized to Death"[0] and I can't help feel there's some truth to some of the ideas.
One idea that stuck with me is that shit zoos have concrete cages for the monkeys, and they're miserable in them, showing similar signs to modern humans (depression, addition, anger), whereas nice zoos try to keep the monkeys in similar environments to those that they evolved for, where the monkeys are pretty much chill. The author argues that we're constructing concrete zoos for ourselves and in the process making ourselves miserable. We're so far detached from what our bodies and minds evolved for, that it's an alien environment for our species.
If this holds truth, it's really no wonder that the more we pile on and the further we stray from our true species' preferences, the more horrible we will feel, and this hikikomori is a fine illustration of that.
As some comments pointed out 'what about the great depression', 'what about 'nuclear war', "don't you like your electricity"? These are all human patches for human made problems. I don't think the correlation between progress and wellbeing is as clear cut as some would like to see it.
I think even if we lived in a green paradise, there would be those who would measure themselves to others and still find themselves "short" to their more vocally successful peers
I think inequality and toxic competition from an early age demanded by our soceity is a much bigger factor
People feeling increasingly crushed by the daily grind to keep one’s head above water is almost certainly a bigger factor. So many people are just one unfortunate event, or even worse, one paycheck away from financial ruin with little in the way of an institutional safety net (and in the case of many, even a friends/family support network) and that takes a massive toll on one’s psyche.
Speaking for myself, if all needs were guaranteed to be met I’d probably be happier living in a walkable metropolis than idyllic countryside. The part of the city that sucks isn’t the city as much as it is the rat race.
Depends on the checks and balances you have in the 'society'. Are vocally succesful peers lauded? Then perhaps you could run into this situation. Are they mocked for having a big mouth? Maybe the chances are slimmer.
> I think inequality and toxic competition from an early age demanded by our soceity is a much bigger factor
Yeah, I tend to agree with you in that these are important factors into how things are playing out. And the scale. My God. We used to have inequality and competition between a small subset of people, now we're competing with 7+ billion.
I think the “by the way our planet’s dying” just adds to the framing of despair. It’s not the root cause but certainly compounds to it. Independently of this phenomenon, it almost feels like we’re reliving the ‘70s (pollution, urban decay, political breakdown).
I said our ecosystem, not the ecosystem. It's very unlikely that we are able to cause a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth like what happened on Venus and there's no evidence that this is happening anyway (as we'd be unlikely to be able to stop it; we have about 2 billion years to figure that out). So we'll wipe ourselves out and a good chunk of life on Earth today, but we won't kill the planet.
I'm pretty sure the declining birth rate (or "fertility") is among the consequences of the change you are describing. The difference with past misery is the lack of stories to cover it up, or to give hope that this is temporary and it will get better.
I haven't read the book, but I think "concrete zoos," for humans, is more metaphorical than literal. Humans find comfort in much wider ranges of environment. If it were available, I'm sure many would find spaceships to be comforting environments.
IMO, the problem is that we're at this stage of social development, where capitalism, and the antiquated culture of jobs, management and deadline, is actively incentivized to limit human potential and creativity. Why? Because that's where competition comes from.
I have a job and I don't live alone, so I don't think I fall into the hikikomri definition in any real sense of the word, but I will say that remote work kind of made me adjacent to it. I sort of have a strong distaste to leave my house a lot of the time since 2020.
I still do leave my house, I have a job that requires me to be in the office for two days a week, but it's something I dread every single week for a variety of reasons. There's something bizarrely comforting about just staying in your bedroom all day and pretending the rest of the world doesn't exist, and it's kind of addictive.
Going outside and having a social life is usually worth it, but it's also kind of intimidating; I have to take a shower, get on the train with a bunch of strangers and not do anything too weird because of course I care a tiny bit what these strangers think about me for whatever reason, go into an office with people who are not-quite-strangers and work extra hard to not be too weird or say anything that might upset someone and keep my desk clean and have meetings with managers who could fire you immediately for any reason they want...it's all exhausting.
I still try and make an effort to leave my house sometimes, but I kind of get why hikikomori do it.
Kind of same, except add a wife and a kid under way. There's plenty of us. Most people absolutely do not regularly "go out" if they work and have a family.
We maintain the bare minimum social interaction because we have to but we'd happily skip it in a heartbeat.
> Going outside and having a social life is usually worth it
Doubt.
The biggest reason for me not to attend social events is that 99% of people are useless from my perspective and it's extremely rare for me to come across someone I actually enjoy spending time with.
Well yeah I think OP means hanging out with those few people you socially enjoy being with. Despite being worth it, even that is sometimes an uphill struggle if you lose energy from it.
I'm still bracing to see how much better/worse language models will make the situation on a global level. So many times I find myself talking to them instead of actual people because there's no chat latency and they're nicer to talk to anyway.
Yeah. I'm similar too. I guess I was almost a hikikomori at one point. I was basically nocturnal and really afraid of social situations. But I was kinda forced into society by having to get a job and stuff; my parents weren't going to look after me.
I haven't been single for very long at all over the past 15 years, but I have very little social interaction. In the past I would force myself to go out to avoid being single and lonely. But every single time I've been in a relationship I shy away from this. I used to think I should force myself to do it, like how some people force themselves to exercise, but now I think why should I force myself to do something I don't want to do for my whole life? It's clear at this point it's part of my nature and won't change. Who am I trying to impress? I just want to be alone most of the time. It's as simple as that. I work from home 5 days a week and I've never been happier.
It's not that I hate every second of socialising but it's just not how I want to spend my life. I often tell people it's like going into a sauna. Yeah, you'll go in and enjoy it, but the most important thing is getting out. Nobody wants to spend their whole life in a sauna.
Yeah, I get it. I have friends, I like my friends (else I wouldn't be friends with them), and I like socializing with them, but it almost never even occurs to me to invite them out to do something. Stuff like that kind of makes me a little anxious.
It's also gotten worse since I completely stopped drinking alcohol for the last few years. I wasn't a huge drinker anyway, but the liquid courage of even a tiny bit of alcohol did relieve that anxiety, and made it easier to do stuff with friends. Now that I don't drink alcohol I'm a little boring.
You can see about getting a benzo like Xanax or Ativan. Similar effects to alcohol without some of the downsides. They do have downsides of their own but are fine when taken sparingly.
Initially I taught myself how to be social ("normal") by reading stuff online. For finding partners and dating in particular the "seduction" type subreddits etc are good. There's a lot of bullshit and misogynistic stuff but if you can deal with that the underlying truths are sound.
Meanwhile I improved my appearance by eating right, dressing right and getting a good haircut. Again, also tons of useful info online.
Then I just forced myself to go out and practice being social. Before long I realised I could do it, to some extent. There are still some things I can't do. I hate large gatherings and "mingling". Just can't do it and never found any good advice on how to do it. But it doesn't matter, it turns out you don't need to for finding a partner. There are plenty of women who are compatible with my social preferences.
Losing my virginity seemed like a huge deal at the time and it wasn't as easy as it should have been, but afterwards I realised I'd built it up in my mind to be something much bigger than it really is. Literal idiots have sex.
I've also used online dating a lot, but it wouldn't have been as fruitful if I hadn't done the above first.
I appreciate the detailed response though I was just thinking about your question about what “the problem” being solved for is so to speak. I think judicious use of benzodiazepines could be useful if one finds them so, but certainly they deserve great care. That said, they beat alcohol for safety and alcohol use is very common.
I suppose I’ve been through a similar process as you described above but I don’t think I ever really understood what I was supposed to get out of it and why I was doing it.
Yeah maybe. I don't know anything about benzos, but I did use MDMA once or twice. It did help quite a lot actually, and I haven't had to keep taking it or anything. I haven't touched alcohol in years. I would be cautious of anything that requires continued use, which is basically any pharmaceutical.
In my experience, life-experience increases the self-isolation. To the point that the old-folkshome are often halls of quiet, as everyone knows what horrible behavior perfectly normal people are capable and do not wish to interact. The guy who conspires against everyone at work, that manager that harvests others laurels, the longer you life, the more you understand how many will flip on you in this prisoner dilemma of a society. So they all barricade themselves in suburbia, sniper one another through HOA letters and claim to do it for the family, till its time to inherit and even the core family falls apart.
Maybe some hiki is just more aware of what a lonely hellish life it is to be part of western society. And chooses to opt out. Lay flat. Assumes the party escort position. If he would at least consume drugs in there, but its just ramen and colored light.
I couldn't agree more. I think many of the people who choose to isolate just have more self-awareness and more defining bad experiences that makes them avoid too many social interactions that are not strictly necessary or truly beneficial in an obvious way.
In fact, I believe that the nicer and more honest you are in our modern world the worse it is for you.
At heart I'm a rather social person, I like talking to people and doing stuff with them. Yet, all my life I have been abused both verbally and physically, I got stuff stolen many times (often I was actually trying to help) and I get manipulated/used all the time without getting much in return.
All of this comes from being too different (not weird in a bad way, just different in the way I speak/handle myself) and abusive narcissists parents (one in particular) that destroyed my emotional self, teaching me to avoid all conflit at all cost and not stand-up for myself even though I would be capable.
All this is made worse in our bullshit job world, where every business pretend that they are a family and require you to give a lot of your life (like for example forcing you to eat with coworkers even though it should be a break for yourself) while still not giving any kind of security (you can be fired/discarded regardless of the quality of your work) or a real sense of being part of a larger cohesive group that stick together.
Because at the end of the day, even inside a small business, it's all competition, lies, exploitation, anything is OK to get ahead regardless of consequences on individuals, they are expandable.
That being said, drugs make everything worse in the long term, they are a relief/distraction but if you don't manage to kill yourself with them, they will cause more problems on top of the already existing ones. In a way, you could say that the users of hardcore drugs are somewhat ahead of the curve, because if they manage to OD it is sort of a salvation without having to deal with all the implications of suicide...
When you are a teenager it is so easy to treat your time as if it is unlimited and start sinking 1000s of hours into some MMO or other games that before you know it you are in your 20s with no girlfriend, job, skill or self-confidence.
Then you got Japanese entertainment like Hatsune Miku, idols and visual novels/anime that take advantage of lonely people with make-believe girlfriends.
It may not be accurate to paint large amounts of time spent MMOs and the like as a net negative, though. Speaking personally as someone who grew up in a tiny town where there’s nothing for young people to do, WoW and the small nerdy circle of friends that came with it almost certainly kept me out of serious trouble in my teenage years and I think ultimately helped steer my trajectory in such a way that allowed for a more successful adulthood, even if it was a distraction from shorter term development.
Of course this is something that will vary greatly between individuals, though. For some the depths of obsession are much more deep and destructive.
Lots of visual novels/anime are about shut-ins tremulously venturing out into the world and eventually making friends, usually after a lot of anxiety and misunderstanding. I think they'd probably have an encouraging effect. I remember one where a woman confesses her condition to the person in the next apartment, and is advised to start small by visiting the convenience store. She manages it, and is incredibly proud of herself. Soon she is making lists of convenience stores, and has visited every convenience store in a five-mile radius! And now her problem is to diversify, but, you know, it's a start.
How encouraging is it really if there is lots of VNs about shut-ins? Seems like just more escapism. How many does the average person play before they start going outside?
I guess somewhere in the region of twenty, sixty-two, or maybe five? How could I possibly know the answer to that question? But it seems good if the stories you're consuming discuss your issues and inspire some cognition about your life.
OK, so you were rhetorically saying "this can't often help", and I was rhetorically replying "maybe it sometimes does", but neither of us really knows, except I don't think they're bad.
Note: Miku is a vocaloid, basically a voice bank licensed to producers who generate and tune a pre-existing voice with their own lyrics/music. Some of the music produced by these artists are actually amazing and it gets even better when a human singer covers the songs. (See supercell+Ado 恋は戦争)
Yes I know about the Idol part and I couldn’t care less.
It’s the people like you that generalize a whole culture that ruin it.
Yikes dude, stereotype much? Anime actually got me out of my "hikikomori" phase by encouraging me to study and get a gf. You can laugh but it's true :).
Considering the strong inability of modern women to show interest in the average man, I find your comment offensive. The thing is, these people wouldn't get girlfriends either way and now you're just here to bully them. Some people simply aren't cut out for having a girlfriend or having children. Forcing them into doing that just to satisfy what a literal "random" person on HN said is absurdly cruel. You don't care about their lives so just shut up.
Those 1000s of hours are what got me my job, skill and self confidence. It's people like you who hate it when others are self confident.
>with all of the negative pejorative that word entails
Maybe try engaging with the people instead of lumping everyone together? ACG culture is not niche anymore. There are literally big concerts with Hatsune Miku all over the world.
Sad I have to disclaimer this: I am not a fan of Hatsune Miku.
> weeaboos
What a sad, reductive take. (Not to mention most of the fans are Japanese themselves.) It would do good by you to go outside and get to know folks who have dissimilar interests than you.
In all the cases in the article it looks like shame plays a big role. I wonder if hikikomori is caused by a loop of [adverse circumstances that cause the person to feel shame] -> withdrawal to avoid shame -> being ashamed of having withdrawn [loop]
Shame of educational pressure might be causing this, as mentioned in the article. But why do we as society place kids under so much stress? Let kids be kids and learn by exploring.
I'd bet it's because the parents are feeling a lot of stress. Especially without a robust community support network/string external role models, children tend to inherit their parents' emotional states.
As a parent I also thought “I won’t repeat these patterns” but reality is, that is so hard. Often parents want the best for their children and use any possible technique to make sure they are successful.
I am not giving an excuse but rather want to point to our society and our behaviour. When an expat at work asked me yesterday where to move to make sure that his 5 year old will have the best schools of the country… with such an elitist behaviour, I can only facepalm and see this is going to be much worse in the next 5-10years.
Problem is, the world is an economic slugfest today unlike it was at least when I grew up. When my High School class graduated a long time ago, most of us were competing for jobs with people in our own small town. At most, we were competing with the surrounding counties. There was university for A students, community college and/or middle class office work for B students, normal working class jobs for C students, and tougher lower-paying jobs for D students. As for university, we were competing for entrance with mostly other people in our state.
Today's kids are competing with the entire world, and the middle class is disappearing. So it's much higher stakes. And it's bimodal: You're either one of the few winners and get to live a comfortable life with a professional job, or you're off to WalMart or an Amazon warehouse, or Prison. The "kind of comfortable middle class life" is shrinking quickly. So it's not enough to just get straight A's. You need extra credit, get a 5.0 GPA, take all the "right" AP classes, have the "right" extracurriculars, and the "right" community service and so on. Otherwise you risk landing on the bad side of the career bimodal distribution.
> You're either one of the few winners and get to live a comfortable life with a professional job, or you're off to WalMart or an Amazon warehouse, or Prison. The "kind of comfortable middle class life" is shrinking quickly. So it's not enough to just get straight A's. You need extra credit, get a 5.0 GPA, take all the "right" AP classes, have the "right" extracurriculars, and the "right" community service and so on. Otherwise you risk landing on the bad side of the career bimodal distribution.
This seems a little hyperbolic. The requirements you describe are probably true enough for top 20 universities, but they aren't true for top 100, and there still seem to be plenty of random white collar office jobs that hire people from merely medium-ranked universities.
Problem is, with growing inequality, the 80th-percentile school and the 20th-percentile school is vastly different, whether that is in school resources or the life trajectories of graduates.
Frankly I think it's more sensible than putting up with an unjust system in a rat race that goes nowhere, although eventually one has to get into the work game to survive.
I know everyone is different, and saying things like "just get a job" or "just go outside" are easy to say and very hard to do when you're stuck in that type of loop. But, I will say, things that I've found will help are having some purpose (work, taking care of someone or a pet, anything), exercise (even walking outdoors), and even just getting your biological clock where you wake up and get exposed to sunlight (vs sleeping all day and staying up all night).
Getting enough activation energy to do any of those things is difficult, but I've found that if you can muster it, it can help break the cycle.
Not to mention that "getting the job" is often far more difficult and/or stressful than doing the job or showing up to work or being seen by others on your commute. No one wants to admit how much talent is wasted due to the job application & interview processes.
Honestly, my dog is my savior. I take her to the park every evening. This gets me out into the evening sun, walking, and around like-minded people. The fact that I can interact with a group of people without scheduling an "event" is great. We just show up. For me it's mostly the other dogs (puppy therapy), but it's nice to exchange a few words and talk to someone about their day while the dogs run around.
The two mile walk to the lake is also key. I find a morning stretch and kettle bell routine, and an evening walk keeps me mentally and physically in tune. And it's practically free, unlike modern healthcare.
Yeah, it's much easier for me to leave the house when it's a situation in which I don't need to care about the potential of other people's opinions. Running quick errands, walking the dog, etc.
For some reason taking out the recycling is a heavier lift for me mentally due to the risk of chaos with the bins, potential for bags breaking, bins being full, etc. even though there is less social interaction than grocery shopping.
I think what's missed in a lot of these discussions is your upbringing. Our society changed very quickly in the last 30 years and parents may not be providing the proper "foundation" for their children since they didn't grow up with all this stuff. Even if you had shitty parents before, you'd probably do alright since all of society in past times was based on in-person interactions and there wasn't endless media consumption at your fingertips.
Personally, my parents were very immature, divorced, and generally didn't set me up for a healthy/balanced social life. I haven't completely given up; I work, maintain loose contact with a few friends, and basically just "doing my time" until I die.
At this point, my biological urge to stay alive. Other things interest me like new game releases or OSS projects but I wouldn't say that there is anything that makes me look forward to waking up.
I'd ask you to look for a deeper purpose. Purpose that goes beyond your individual self (the ego), your family, your society, your nation.
The Bhagavad Gita explains that this material existence is basically like a prison. We're all doing our time so you're right about it. The Bhagavad Gita gives a beautiful analogy. It says, as you go from childhood to adulthood, your body is changing constantly but the identity or the self remains the same. Have you ever thought about it how strange it is? You don't go from identifying as John to James, but the body, each cell in the body is replaced multiple times throughout your lifetime. The consciousness remains the same, the "I" remains there. It says that we're born out of karma (action and fruits of actions). The consciousness is eternal (always is, never is not), the material nature is not (as evident, has a beginning and an end). So it asks you to look deeper into the Self. Inquire what is it that you're here for and what you're made of.
The idea that the whole universe was made just so you could work and die, is born out of a feeble mindset, forced by an extremely materialistic society. You can go deeper and find something invaluable. Read into philosophy (not the depressing kind), read books like the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Bhagavad Gita, Upanishadas. Learn about sāṁkhya, nyāya, vedānta. It can give your life a whole new meaning and direction.
It doesn't have to be this way, your current mental imprints want you to believe there's nothing beyond this life, nothing beyond who you are. If there's nothing that makes you look forward to waking up, then that just means you have to look for it, instead of it being handed to you.
If there really is nothing to look forward to, there's no harm in giving this wildly different life-changing thing a try.
Some links to get you started if you're interested:
As someone who identifies with the commenter you’re responding to, this kind of response can be really difficult to hear. It feels like philosophy 101 arguments against a straw man.
> The idea that the whole universe was made just so you could work and die, is born out of a feeble mindset…
Nobody was arguing that, and it baselessly assumes that the universe was made for a purpose.
> If there really is nothing to look forward to, there's no harm in giving this wildly different life-changing thing a try.
Most people make decisions based on things other than what they look forward to. Like just because I’m not looking forward to my day tomorrow doesn’t mean I should set my bed on fire, even though it would make me appreciate getting out of bed more.
As far as I can tell life doesn’t come with a meaning to be discovered.
It can be difficult to hear of course. Everything is difficult to hear when all we see is death in front of us.
I only commented because I have been in a similar situation in the past, so it's not coming from a state of feeling superior but a state of empathy. I know what it feels like when life has no meaning left and all you're doing is passing time, waiting for the last moment.
> assumes that the universe was made for a purpose.
You're assuming, without any good reasons that it's not made for a purpose. If that's the case, please let us know your arguments to believe so and why you think teleology is non-existent
> As far as I can tell life doesn’t come with a meaning to be discovered.
and you know this because...?
Unless you have looked, you do not have the right to claim such a thing. When one hardly knows who they really are behind all the identities, how can one even claim to know about the purpose of life and creation?
This is why I suggested reading nyāya and sāṁkhya from the links, because you do not even know what you do not know and yet you claim things.
Also, OP said that they do not have anything to look forward to. If you don't look into this, what would you even do? Continue with the same lifestyle and mindset that makes you feeble? How's that working out?
The same Bhagavad Gita says that everything has a beginning and an end: consciousness too by that logic. Even the gods, including
Vishnu/Krishna, during Maha Pralay get destroyed and rebuilt. There is no escape for anything. Ethernal consciousness is an illusion.
> The same Bhagavad Gita says that everything has a beginning and an end
I can tell that you have not read the Gita. It never says such a thing. You're confusing the material nature with the nature of the Self.
2.12: Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be.
2.16 Those who are seers of the truth have concluded that of the nonexistent [the material body] there is no endurance and of the eternal [the Self] there is no change. This they have concluded by studying the nature of both.
2.17:That which pervades the entire body you should know to be indestructible. No one is able to destroy that imperishable Self.
2.18: The material body of the indestructible, immeasurable and eternal living entity is sure to come to an end.
8.20: Yet there is another unmanifest nature, which is eternal and is transcendental to this manifested and unmanifested matter. It is supreme and is never annihilated. When all in this world is annihilated, that part remains as it is.
13.27: O chief of the Bhāratas, know that whatever you see in existence, both the moving and the nonmoving, is only a combination of the field of activities and the knower of the field.
13.33: The sky, due to its subtle nature, does not mix with anything, although it is all-pervading. Similarly, the soul situated in Brahman vision does not mix with the body, though situated in that body.
I was referring to the phrase you wrote "...The consciousness is eternal..."
None of the verse you cite says that that indestructible thing is the consciousness. That's what I was referring to. For everything that has an opposite, there would be a beginning and an end: consciousness vs unconsciousness; happiness vs sadness... . Could be something else beyond consciousness?
Even if there is something eternal, then that also has an ending, because in my experience that doesn't exist now, hence it has ended. It may come back, but doesn't mean it is eternal. Something that comes and goes means that is not eternal: it is changing too.
> None of the verse you cite says that that indestructible thing is the consciousness
The Self IS consciousness. It is sat - real, that which always is, never is not. cit - It is conscious. ananda - blissful.
Consciousness isn't what you think it is, maybe you're referring to the western definition of it which is as unreliable as anything. It's not your memory, it's not your ego, it's not your mind. These things are a part of prakṛti, or material nature and they're born of the three modes of material nature as explained in the Gita. This metaphysics is a part of the sāṁkhya philosophy.
This is subtle knowledge, it's not easy to understand these abstract ideas without a good teacher to explain it to you or some good amount of self-reflection and study. I'd highly suggest you to read Nyāya sūtra and the Bhagavad Gita (preferably with a teacher who practices these things) for a logical understanding.
> For everything that has an opposite, there would be a beginning and an end
Only the things in the material nature are composed of duality. Gita's whole point is about you, the Self, who is different from material nature, is only covered by it.
> consciousness vs unconsciousness
You're confusing the mind with consciousness. Mind is a part of material nature. There's no such thing as unconsciousness in the Gita philosophy. There are material things and there's the eternal Self, the consciousness.
> Even if there is something eternal, then that also has an ending
That's a philosophically invalid argument. Eternal by definition means that which always is. The concept of cause and effect does not apply to 'eternal' things, it is beyond time and beyond our understanding.
> because in my experience that doesn't exist now, hence it has ended.
In your experience, the future doesn't exist either, has it ended? This argument of yours is called 'hasty generalization fallacy'.
How can the Self not exist? It's literally You. The Self exists right now, it will always exist. If you think the observer dies with the material body, how did the observer come to be in the first place? An observation exists only in relation to an observer, not independently of it.
> It may come back, but doesn't mean it is eternal.
Eternal means existing forever, without beginning or end. The Self can go through different bodies, different experiences, but it 'never not exists'.
> Something that comes and goes means that is not eternal: it is changing too.
That is material nature. Intelligence, ego - false identity, the mind, sense organs, organs of actions, subtle senses and the material body and the elements that make up the material nature, all have a beginning and an end. Consciousness is even subtler than all of these things, it is not a part of the material nature, it's only covered by it.
I'd highly suggest you to study these things in detail, from a good teacher, with logic. Mental speculation is pointless, philosophical speculation provides a better understanding.
Edwin Bryant has a fantastic 8 part series on Yoga Sūtras where he goes over each thing in detail. He also has a series on nyāya sūtras which explains everything using logic. You can refer to that: https://sites.rutgers.edu/edwin-bryant/yoga-sutras/
Consciousness as the word is commonly used is a descriptor of the material processes that happen in your body. It’s not clear what you’re referring to as consciousness.
The common understanding and the philosophical understanding of consciousness are different.
While most people refer to the state of being awake and functioning as consciousness, in philosophy consciousness is the entity that is immaterial. It is the subtle life force that makes dead matter animate, It is the observer that observes. It is the irreducible immaterial entity which is mutually exclusive of material nature.
our baseline entertainments are better than the long tail of negative interactions one persists through to get to the great ones. in doomscrolling vs. disappointment, more people are picking doomscrolling.
older than the examples, but I have done this. live alone on a large rural property, walden style, tech comp no family, have online interactions for remote work, old irc channels, take some sport, fitness, and music training as kind of weekly rhythm, family lives in other time zones. it was an ideal I thought I could achieve and then have it to share with others. relationships and friendships with any personal connection or intimacy still manage to fail, lots of reasons but I'm the constant. only way to sustain anything is to keep it at a polite distance with no expectations.
issue i suspect is that meaning comes from the cohering and persistence of relationships, and without that persistent mutual understanding, meaning just seeps away and leaves a flat state of inertia. no advice other than to avoid this example. I sympathize with these young people, it's as though they don't see a present or future in which there is meaning for them, or in which they are a participant, and so they are just withdrawing and waiting for the next life instead of engaging this one. it's a unique and recently invented trap, avoid it as best you can.
I think a lot of black sheep personalities feel like this, pretty safe and smug in calling all the patterns we see in others that make them not right for us. And we know too much of ourselves will try their patience too, which makes us resent their love as a thin weak thing.
>lots of reasons but I'm the constant
Sad face. I don’t know if admitting this helps or hurts, but a long while ago when I kept seeing your username on so many of my favorite comments i thought about emailing you to flirt, but the more I kept reading thru to look for hints (to confirm that ur straight, not married, etc ) the more I psyched myself out… In sober assessment, I likely wouldn’t meet your standards of, like… spiritual vigor, agency, having ones adult shit together, strength of character in a flailing sham society, etc. You already seemed too complete an image on your own. It creates admiration for sure, but in a way that challenges me to get to your level rather than come closer…
Resonating with someone’s deep judgements of the world also means I can’t fall short or claim ignorance later, there’s less room to play. “I agree with everything this guy finds virtuous yet i lack these qualities even after all this time… sigh, better just go work on becoming my best self…“
Catch22, if I already was my ideal self would I still be attracted to philosophical types on hn? (I kinda hate this place ngl)
Not sure if any of us with these dispositions really want another human up close or if that ‘trying’ is just part of the aesthetic if I’m honest with myself.
Anyway, if u want to talk to a misanthropic fangirl, my username is LimeOregano on Telegram, and when you’re in the woods and very lonely, you can feel free to send me ponderous voice notes without overthinking this polite distance that you’re obliged to maintain with real friends. We can ghost each other if the long tail of negative interaction proves too much!
(Afterall, if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of getting your hopes up 100 times lol)
Regardless, i hope youre flattered to know that some strangers like you based on the quality of your thoughts alone
Unexpectedly kind and brave, and well timed, thank you. Writers have the unfair advantage of getting to refine everything before presenting it, so if you've tried to get better at something as the result of reading about it, you're probably more successful than you know. :)
Thanks again. If we're in touch, here's a hash I can prove to show it's me and not someone trolling you: e84c316700f608de4b536be10a3119530b617d0d
I want to apologize, I'm very sorry. Reread over the messages today and i sounded awful, nothing actually made sense in the tone I had intended. Between half paranoid suspicion I was talking to someone else, and just some self-loathing need to crash and burn, I'm not sure how to explain myself.
I think at the end you thought I was trolling you somehow, nope, just grown adult woman saying all the wrong things in some weird unrelenting negative vibe.
I'm just embarrassed and feel guilty that I began this in a wholesome tone and ended in a immature obnoxious way. No need to respond to this, I don't even mean to bother you again, like how annoying is that???
it just felt dishonest to the universe and to readers to leave only the good side showing :( take care bye
This is my favorite interaction I’ve seen on HackerNews and this made me smile.
Maybe I’m just a hopeless romantic, but like, follow up on this. You’ve got to email OP if this is how you feel and if you’ve got his email, you’ve got to reach out. I mean, sure it’s a little unorthodox and strange, but yah, you gotta go for it. Fuck it, we’re all weirdos - we’re on a site called HackerNews ffs. Who gives a shit? You can never know if you don’t try. So try! Life is so damn short.
One beautiful part about this crazy life thing is that we put ourselves out there and risk disappointment so that we can look at our selves in the mirror at night when we’re old. So that’s pretty damn cool that you posted this and I hope it works out. That’s very brave.
When you are old what will you regret? Not trying to be with the people you care about - people say that time and time again on their death beds. Even if it’s not romantic love there are other ways you can enjoy the company of people you care about. It is better to risk the transient shame of failure than to suffer the permanent shame of never trying, so, kudos for having the stones to try.
I don’t want to turn this into a thing about myself, but look, I’ve had a rough few fucking years. I developed a chronic illness a few years ago (and became visually impaired), this winter I slipped on ice and I had to get surgery while in my last semester of grad school, and I’ve had to totally rebuild my career from scratch into this new programming one during a tech hiring desert. I’m fucking tired - but I’ll tell you this, even though I’m tired, I just want to say, life is really short. It can be over so fucking fast, so live in a way to minimize your regrets and try to make connections with people whose company you enjoy. Anyway, I’m cheering you on. Go out there and try to enjoy the company of others in spite of all the shit that makes us want to curl into a ball and ignore the world. The antidote to hikkimori pits of despair is defiance of the world that wants us to ignore each other. Fellowship and love is a bit of a revolutionary act on its own.
> He dare not come in company, for fear he should be misused, disgraced, overshoot himself in gesture or speeches, or be sick; he thinks every man observes him, aims at him derides him, owes hint malice.
Several adults in my friendship circle (retired or semi-retired) have evolved to spending nearly their entire waking lives online. They're able socialize normally, but they don't make the time to do that as often as in the past. This is tantamount to hikkormoridom.
One friend went to visit two other friends who live together in New Mexico. He imagined they'd be out and about doing stuff during his visit, but the hosts remained preoccupied by their online activities. The visitor could have stayed home and texted.
It’s fun to watch mass media inflict so much harm on people with irresponsible reporting designed to terrify, outrage, and misinform you for profit, and then turn around and report on the fallout.
A lot of discussion in this thread assumes that hikikomori are a very new phenomenon. I see that they appear in the psychiatric literature as early as 1978. I also see that the number of hikikomori in Japan varies by survey, and is hard to measure, but still seems to be roughly the same as it was in 2010, if not a little lower.
What to make of that? Because the most obvious and most common explanations for them seems to be the internet, smartphones, and anxiety about the future (global warming, the economy, etc.). But if those were the reasons for hikikomori, I'd assume that the number of hikokomori would have increased significantly in the last 15 years, not stayed roughly the same, as it has. The gravity of the internet in our culture feels like it has increased exponentially. Climate fear doesn't feel exponentially higher, but subjectively it still feels a lot more widespread to me. Why not commensurately more people living as hikikomori, if the phenomenon supposedly tracks these factors?
Hmm, no one is talking about the enabler for this - modern wealth. In the not so distant past, refusing to get up and face the world would result in starvation. Survival required people to be more social.
As a parent of two adult children who are both working, I can't imagine enabling this (even though I could.) Sure, if my kids were truly disabled that would be another story, but it seems the hikikomori are just unhappy with the world. Enabling them to spend their lives doomscrolling or playing games is actively harmful.
Modern wealth is potentially a double-edged sword.
There's enough of it that "hikikomori" is a viable strategy to stay alive.
Yet, "modern wealth" is also the reason many things previous generations took for granted such as housing are effectively unreachable for many people nowadays, plus inflation/cost of living.
This makes "hikikomori" the rational strategy for some people. Enough money to scrape by and live online, but not enough to actually climb out of the hole.
True, the internet is a cheap, endless, addictive supply of distraction that didn't exist until recently. But someone still has to provide it - a hikikomori staying in their room all day will not be able to pay the utility bill without an enabler...
In South America it's become common to hear about adolescents and young people (mostly men) who spend all their time on video games and neither work nor study.
I imagine this to be a very different phenomenon from Japan, because the culture is so different. In South America I think it is just general disengagement and disillusion with society and work environments in general. For most people life is having a bad job that pays very little and you have to spend hours on a crowded bus to get to a pretty horrible part of town. Living in the virtual world is much more comfortable and pleasant.
In Australia there is a pretty good welfare system, but they will basically give you a job to work while you keep applying for a real one. Usually it’s something like sorting clothes in a charity store. I imagine it helps to keep people engaged in society somewhat.
People aren't stupid. What we have in the world in general (not just Asia) is a crisis in hopelessness.
People are facing crippling student debt (depending on your country), one bad medical incident away from being homeless, crippling housing costs and wages that barely cover costs such that you need 1-2 "side hustles" just to make ends meet.
It's really no wonder people are checking out. It's also no wonder that people aren't having children either. They simply can't afford to.
One common counterargument to this is that consumer spending is up but that really makes my point: people are spending now instead of saving because they have no future.
Perhaps tangentially related, but today my landlord gave the final inspection of the place.
He told us that it pained him that we could only live there for a year. We were his cash cow. The year before, his wife had died, and he needed more family support and his daughter wanted a place near him. He told me that only a few years ago he would have simply built her a house next to the one he was renting us, but even building costs have skyrocketed so much that the only option he had was to kick us out and let her in.
He said he was sorry, and the thing is, I believed him.
Stock of accumulated capital is growing healthily which means savings rate is healthy too, even if most of savings is just reinvestment of profits from previous ones.
Consumption of almost everything is growing in real terms too in almost all countries.
GDP keeps growing just about everywhere save for a few most unlucky places like UK.
Even inequality is falling for the first time in decades so the poor people actually see most improvement (especially in the US).
That 'hopelessness' is what people call 'vibecession'. People just taught themselves - probably by going through too much doomscrolling - that things are bad. But they aren't. We are probably living through best times in our lifetime - especially the common folk, poor and working class (some highly educated, high income occupations might be on shaky ground). MAYBE, just maybe, upper middle class is a bit fucked indeed, but this is a small group numerically and hikikomori do not come from there.
I'm glad i'm not on social media but whenever i'm trying to read so-called 'news', i also get depressed for a bit. People are trying to present absolutely everything in the most negative sense possible probably because otherwise it's not clickbait-y enough...
> Stock of accumulated capital is growing healthily
How are you defining "accumulated capital"? Because in wealth and income terms, inequality has only been growing [1]. Specifically, does accumulated capital include paper gains in housing values of your primary residence? If so, that's misleading.
Housing is a basic need. If you buy a house for $200k and it has gone up in value to $500k, you might say you've accumulated $300k in unrealized capital gains. Thing is, what would you do if you sold it? You'd still have to buy a house somewhere. And if every other house also costs $500k, what have you really gained? You might be paying higher property taxes, higher insurance costs and possibly higher mortgage costs.
> Consumption of almost everything is growing in real terms too in almost all countries.
I addressed this. People aren't saving for their future.
> GDP keeps growing just about everywhere
And who benefits from that? Let's say your wages have gone up 25% in real terms, where is that money going? If it's just more rent to your landlord, then you'e gained nothing and someone else is simply exploiting more of the value you've created.
> Even inequality is falling for the first time in decades
No, it's not. See the link.
> We are probably living through best times in our lifetime
By pretty much any objective measure, we peaked in about 1972. Since then real wages have largely stagnated and the quality of life has gone down.
That's the thing. Inequality quickly dropped in the last 4 years. Over 40% of inequality growth accumulated since 1979 has been cancelled out in just 4 years.
And, sure enough, by every possible metric, in 50 years, quality of life has improved everywhere, for every income bracket. It's utter lunacy to suggest otherwise. With the U.S. real GDP per capita growing 2.5x since, there is simply no way for any place or any social group to feel worse, by any possible metric, even if cherrypicking. And, it's not worse than world average. Even since 1991 when situation has probably been strategically the best for America, it did not fall behind the world economically (China made a quantum leap, but Latin America and ex-Soviet sphere, has fallen way behind)
As for housing, well, housing never grew in price above average inflation and it does not grow that way now, either. Inflation-adjusted square foot price in US and almost all Western countries have remained stagnant for ~50 years. In UK, yes, it is different. Australia too.
If people are unhappy with economic situation today, nothing will ever be enough for them.
Quality of life has not dramatically changed in already first-world countries over the last fifty years. We already had plucked a lot of the low hanging fruit for human comfort by 1974, so developing countries are seeing bigger changes because those things are being introduced.
> If people are unhappy with economic situation today, nothing will ever be enough for them.
Utter nonsense man. Things are not going well economically for normal people on the street, and wages have been stagnant for decades.
Not a hikikomori, I work and kind of look forward to the office and do fun stuff rarely... but I wish there was an easier way to find a "way in" in the bay area
Also another weird thing I realized after moving: cultural distance and ethnicity matter. The schools spend a bunch of time forcing people to sing songs about it not mattering, but psychologically it matters a lot to people. I'm a secular jew but am considering becoming a religious one just for that
I think it may be due to some sort of "outcome compression". The life of working a bottom tier-job isn't materially better than a life of not working at all.
One solution I've been thinking of is that maybe there needs to be some kind of state-provided minimum life. Almost like opt in communism.
If you opt in then you get an 8h/day job automatically. Doesn't matter if you don't have any skills at all. The job will be guaranteed safe and non-humiliating (no sex work and if you are a vegetarian you don't have to work as a butcher etc). In exchange you get enough food, clothes and shelter to provide for yourself and children (assuming two incomes), entertainment (exchangable for cash equivalent), pension, health insurance, upskill opportunities, and some money on top. If you have negative net worth when enterring the program, your loans will gradually decrease (this could be done as some combination of the state paying them off for you and the loan giver being stiffed).
> I think it may be due to some sort of "outcome compression". The life of working a bottom tier-job isn't materially better than a life of not working at all.
The Hikkikomoris in Japan are all sustained by their parents. There's actually a growing concern there about the first generation of Hikkikomoris who are getting into their 50s already and their parents are starting to die, leaving them with no life skills and no source of income.
That might be a more palatable name for it. But a key feature of my proposal is that you actually get the goods you need rather than a lump some of money that may or may not be enough to buy them.
As a man with a full time job (remote), a wife and a kid under way I cannot really fathom having energy for more social activities (except meeting some friends or family at most once a month, reluctantly). Am I a hikikomori? I kind of relate to them.
My wife also doesn't meet anyone else ever.
Now that I think of it - neither do our parents or most people living in their village. It's all work + church at most.
Maybe as humans we don't really need social interaction THAT much? I mean how do you explain people who seem to thrive living off-grid?
We do need jobs and some basic communication skills for sure at least to maintain the current standard of living but maybe not for socializing.
Some comments here kind of sound like "extrovert propaganda" - same people who cry for the return to office because they cannot imagine that people can live differently.
As a man who spent a decade living as what is described as a hikikomori, no, you're not. I think you are massively underestimate just how much socialization you have, and underestimating just how many other issues come along with living that lifestyle. I would likely need many hours to properly illustrate them all.
The social home is a great idea and I am glad to hear that it works. It would be interesting to compare social communication styles between people in the social home with social communication among extroverts (in another situation). I expect they are quite different but it would be good to know how they differ.
> He said he didn’t respond to friends’ messages or confide in anyone, feeling like nobody would understand anyway.
I feel this. I think people would call me an introvert, but I'm probably just an over-thinker. It's casual conversation that seems to be exhausting (or uninteresting?) to me. Once I'm in a space where I can talk openly about more abstract topics I start to enjoy it. Getting there just often seems like too much work though.
I tried therapy, meditation, 'wellness' apps. It all either felt too 'me' focused, or too detached. I like this site because people here seem to share what they are actually thinking, and are eloquent enough to capture interesting nuance. I don't always agree with it, but there's a level of authenticity to where I always learn something about the human condition. I wanted more of that.
[This is kind of a plug, but whatever]
I've spent the last few years in a deep-dive around why we seem to be collectively getting lonelier over time. I started a non-profit[0] to house this research. It's evolved into a platform where we host these support groups. Anyone can join, it's free, and as long as you stick to the community guidelines [1] anyone is welcome to join.
For me, it's a place to get out of my head. To hear from real people who don't generally feel like their voice matters. I know from years in tech management that these are in fact the most interesting people to talk to.
I've never really talked about Totem here because I think it might be too 'woo-woo' for this crowd, but if any of that landed for you, come check us out. If you don't like it, I'd love to know why. My personal email is in my profile.
We are a non-profit, grant-funded, and open-source[2] organization. Feedback of any kind is welcome. My hope is to become something like a public utility for these spaces. We're also looking for engineers to help make an app out of this.
Can’t stand small talk either. I get it, it’s required at the beginning of meeting people, but don’t stay too long in that mode otherwise it gets boring.
Your site looks beautiful, kudos to the design team.
Im curios if population desnsity may have any corelation to this or not. Im also thinking that the culture is shunning a certain personality type or people with some mental struggles that their only way to adapt is to withdraw.
Key sentences (1:30): "Young ones found themselves born in a world with far more mice than meaningful social roles. Males faced a lot of competitors to defend their territory against. Many found that so stressful they gave up. Normal discourse within the community broke down and with it the ability of mice to form social bonds."
Population density is absolutely the driver of all of this. It increases competition, decreases personal space, and limits access to nature.
Humans are social animals, but we aren't ants. We're not supposed to live in concrete jungles. As others have said, hikikomoris are one extreme of a continuum of negative outcomes caused by modern life. A low birthrate is another, which is correlated with urban living (there are other factors but this trend is unmistakable).
I believe this is a natural outcome of very high population density, a negative feedback mechanism. When life becomes unbearable because of too many people, we withdraw and don't reproduce.
I think I came pretty close to ending up like this kind of person a few times. Each time I got out it was by basically taking a hammer to my superego and doing some shit I used to consider "unforgivable", like being long term unemployed, or engaging in long term substance abuse, or moving countries basically on a whim.
And, if that's what it takes, then I stand by it. If your life choices are "hikikomori" or "scumbag", you'd be an idiot to not choose scumbag. Ideally you can get out of it through less destructive means, but let's not pretend like closing yourself off entirely from the world is better than having a problematic but loving relationship with it in all its colors.
Sometimes it is just too much to handle for me too. And I just shut down. For a week or two. And then trying to come back. And that period is a painful one
If their parents are not doing anything about it when it's their direct responsibility, how can anyone expect anyone else to fix it?
If the culture allows for this, the problem is with the culture.
In America, they'd be kicked out of home as soon as they turned 16.
In Russia, they'd be just beaten up by their dads. Probably badly and regularly.
They do it because they can. Key is to make it impossible and force them to take up productive activities. No one in adult age should be kept at home funded by their parents unless it's short term with definite plan to fix it, or they are seriously disabled.
Of course, when it's about schoolchildren, it's different. Serious psychiatric help is needed. It's again parents' fault for not providing it.
> In America, they'd be kicked out of home as soon as they turned 16.
This is a lie. Are you american? I've never met a single person who was kicked out at 16. This include kids who were drug addicts, high school drop outs, pregnant teens, etc.
> In Russia, they'd be just beaten up by their dads.
I highly doubt that. Are you russian?
> No one in adult age should be kept at home funded by their parents unless it's short term with definite plan to fix it
Ideally. Unless they are writing poems like emily dickinson?
Getting kicked out at 16 or 17 is (or used to be, when I was a young adult) pretty common for gay youth, and tends to be glossed over. This is in the US, though, where toxic fundamentalism is unfortunately prevalent.
I don't know about Russian dads, but in America it's very likely they'd be indulged. I don't know anyone who would kick their teenage child out of the house because he or she was depressed. Especially when you see the sort of life the homeless have in most places.
I'm sure it happens, but at least from my perspective it would not be common.
Yea, but the acceptability of adult children living at home with their parents has really changed since when I grew up. We were pretty much all kicked out at 18 to go live on our own. That was just what we did in the USA. Some had a little financial support from parents--maybe the parents paid for car insurance or gas or something. But never the rent-free home for 10-15 years like we see today. The culture has changed massively. My old man would have never accepted me living at home after high school, but I look at my kid and think, well, she'll really struggle to afford rent, and she'll never own her own home, so I guess we have no choice.
> Yea, but the acceptability of adult children living at home with their parents has really changed since when I grew up.
For nearly all of american history, children ( adult or not ) stayed at home with their parents until they got married. Especially the daughters. Emily Dickinson's parents didn't kick her out when she turned 16 or 18 or 30 or 50. Emily Dickinson famously died in the same house she was born in.
> That was just what we did in the USA.
This is simply not true. At least not for the vast majority of american families. It is actually the opposite. Where parents wanted their kids to stay at home while changes in popular culture made kids want to venture out before they got married.
> My old man would have never accepted me living at home after high school
Even if that mean you sleeping in the streets? I doubt that.
If what you wrote is true, we'd have a far greater homeless population than we do. The idea that americans kicked out their kids after high school is nonsense. Sure parents would want their kids to get a job, go to college, etc after high school but only a tiny fraction of parents would kick their kids to the curb once they finished high school. Especially the daughters.
Just ask yourself, would you kick force your kids to live on the streets at 18? Of course not. Which parent would answer yes to that?
> Just ask yourself, would you kick force your kids to live on the streets at 18? Of course not. Which parent would answer yes to that?
That was the point of my post. My parents’ generation would and mine won’t. I don’t know anyone I grew up with who would have been allowed to live in their parents’ house for a decade after graduating high school. It would be unthinkable. Times have changed and what was unacceptable in the 80s and 90s is more acceptable now.
I'm coming up on 60 years old. Though I don't know anyone of my age who stayed at home after high school (I was a college-bound kid and all my friends were) I do not think my parents would have "kicked me out" at any point.
I did know some kids who got jobs and moved in with friends or got their own apartments, but never heard it was because their parents kicked them out, they just wanted to get away from their childhood and live on their own.
I just don't remember getting kicked out by your parents being a common thing. But maybe I was just never exposed to it.
> That was the point of my post. My parents’ generation would and mine won’t.
And the point of my post is that it's a lie. That parents are parents no matter when or where.
> I don’t know anyone I grew up with who would have been allowed to live in their parents’ house for a decade after graduating high school.
A decade? Now you are moving the goal post. The comment you quoted was 'Just ask yourself, would you kick force your kids to live on the streets at 18'. So you are saying everyone in your high school got kick out of their homes at 18? No? Fine.
> Times have changed and what was unacceptable in the 80s and 90s is more acceptable now.
Times always change and yet things always stay the same. I grew up in the 90s and I can say your description is not reality. Either we grew up in completely different countries or you are lying. Plenty of people stayed at home after high school or even after college to save money for their own house. Do you think it was the norm to dump your kids on the street as soon as they turned 18? What are you talking about?
You wrote the following: "We were pretty much all kicked out at 18 to go live on our own." I wasn't. None of my friends were. None of my cousins were. Nobody I know was.
Maybe you were kicked out at 18, but that's not representative of much of america. Why lie about something that is so demonstrably false? I don't get it.
Though you could probably argue the degree to which its right or wrong, they way I look at it is: I brought this person into the world, if he isn't self-supporting at age 18 (or 22, or whatever) then why is it fair to society that I make that society's problem? He's my kid, and I should own the responsibility for that.
Forcing people to work hasn't been historically successful. That includes stacking the incentives up to work or death. A large fraction of people simply choose death because no one wants to be forced to do things.
For overwhelming majority of human history people had either to work or die of starvation. There's absolutely no evidence to suggest that any significant fraction chose death.
"Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk - that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh - a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs."
...
"Vashanti's next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? - say this day month."
Japanese and south Koreans are canaries in the coal mine for end stage urbanization.
There really isn't free roaming and a lot of greatly reduced activity compared to rural areas.
Exercise counteracts depression, imposes a routine of physical mental social interaction with the real world under controlled circumstances.
But end stage capitalism doesn't value replacement level population growth, so associated programs for child development in urban settings are even less valued.
Being an environmentalist I always dislike capitalism economics and it's inability to value preservation even if the future of the human race, but it seems that the end state of consumerism and urbanization is demographic collapse.
It's strange. We know that instincts, hormones, and other aspects of our biology have a tremendous influence on our thoughts and behaviors, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of effort to use that to problem-solve. There's evolutionary psychology, but given the fraction of human problems traceable to maladaption to the modern world, one would think "evolutionary anthropo-sociology" would a foundational pillar of science. Like, why doesn't "humans didn't evolve to sleep in a room by themselves at the age of four" carry as much weight as "don't let your kids eat lead paint chips"?
Probably because evolutionary psychology is an incestuous pseudoscience of just-so-stories, small sample sizes, bad extrapolations, non reproducibility etc.
It's an interesting article I don't know why it had to be presented in such a cumbersome graphical style. I tried the trick of changing "www" to "lite" in the URL but it didn't work for this one. I stopped reading about halfway through.
This presentation is surely intended to convey a sense of spatiality related to the idea of "A shrinking life". I enjoyed the graphics and photos, and I definitely got a feeling of constriction and isolation that added depth to my reading experience—YMMV.
Alcohol is legal pretty much everywhere, and is measurably more damaging in just about every aspect compared to weed. But we don’t say it’s a booze problem.
https://archive.ph/lt04t