> Large numbers of hikikomori said they had begun retreating from mainstream society due to relationship issues and after losing or leaving their jobs, the cabinet office said. A significant proportion – 20.6% – said their predicament had been triggered by changes in lifestyle imposed during the pandemic.
This really worries me—relationships are vital for so many people to have a happy and fulfilling life and for society to function that increases in the amount of people who simply choose to leave society from what seems to be relationship or economic troubles could have massive negative effects on society as a whole. Is society a happier place when people don't have constructive relationships? Are people themselves happier?
Also, this is a bit off topic but does anyone else feel that relationship quality on a societal level has gone down a lot? I feel that the majority of relationships and marriages say 60-70 years ago were happy and mutually fulfilling, but now anecdotally it seems that most people are not happy whatsoever.
> Is society a happier place when people don't have constructive relationships? Are people themselves happier?
As someone that struggles with trust issues due to childhood psychological trauma I have some experience with the intentional solitude perspective. I think the maths is that you get a more consistent outcome. You may be sacrificing the highs of relationships but you're also dodging the lows of if/when that falls apart. If you can scratch your social and physical itches in other ways (e.g. the internet can provide some of the most basic social interaction needs) then entering into relationships just feels like an unnecessary double-sided risk (to them and you).
> the internet can provide some of the most basic social interaction needs
This is an underappreciated point. Thanks to the Internet, you're probably still having social interactions even if you're spending all day in your bedroom. Those interactions are cheaper and more convenient, and they do come with significantly less risk; it's way harder for a psycho ex to destroy your life if they don't know your real name and you can prove you've never physically interacted.
Like, is it really worth it to schedule a whole evening and get dressed up and spend a few thousand yen on transit tickets and overpriced drinks, just to see a few people's faces in 3D instead of 2D? I'm not sure why we're so surprised when some people decide the answer is no.
This is more of a philosophical musing, but your comment did make me think-- is it also a reflection of the shallowness of a lot of contemporary social events and rituals? People used to get together, do a barn raising, work together, have debutante balls, welcome boys into manhood, have community spiritual occasions and rituals, and so on. A lot of modern social events are lacking in the meaning, anticipation, and social depth as before-- some people who crave it most still go out, but maybe it just isn't meaningful enough to pull in those whose personality doesn't lean towards social butterfly-ness.
Hard agree with the parent comment: In terms of dice, it's the equivalent of swapping out a 100-sided die (1-100) with a 10-sided die (41-50 or 51-60, depending on how you view the Internet). You're assuring yourself some minimum that you can hit, in sacrifice of the highs you could've gotten otherwise.
(This comes from someone who is extremely fearful of negative outcomes. It didn't help that my school practiced corporal punishment on us when I was still a child, just for getting answers wrong. (Note: Not from the US.))
> Also, this is a bit off topic but does anyone else feel that relationship quality on a societal level has gone down a lot? I feel that the majority of relationships and marriages say 60-70 years ago were happy and mutually fulfilling, but now anecdotally it seems that most people are not happy whatsoever.
I think this is a symptom, not a cause. Personal and economic atomization is largely outside an individual's control, unless they are making Fat Stacks Of Cash.
I can't speak to Japan, but I can to what I've seen here in the United States. There are people for whom the trends of moving further away from home have significant benefits--and I as a younger man was one of them, both for social and economic reasons. But they, along with the generally increased precariousness of what used to be a "middle class" and increased reliance on the information economy, are strong pressures towards personal atomization. "Both my girlfriend and I need to work to advance in our careers to become less precarious, but one or the other of us might have to move really far away and stop seeing each other" necessarily reduces investment in other people, at least a little bit. (This isn't saying dual-income situations or women with careers are a negative; far from it. The first weirdo to go on about "men were hunter-gatherers so of course their careers matter more" or whatever can get bopped.)
You see the same with friend groups. The friends I primarily knew online are the friends I stay more closely in touch with, because we're still in the same hangouts when one or the other has moved further away. The forces that are out of your control and thus able to pull you away from your social moorings are stronger now than in the past, and the natural coping mechanism for most people is to connect less.
I think it's natural for people who feel less connected and increasingly economically vulnerable to be "not happy whatsoever". It is only in the last few years, where I have managed some level of personal wealth (and not just income), that I've been able to entertain putting down roots, and feel more at ease and happier.
I have different degrees of friendships and people move in and out of them. I don't even really actively think about them; the level of friendship at the time largely relies on availability overlap, personal life experience overlap, and other factors. These things, like you mentioned, are more fluid these days.
I also think people are more accepting of social reclusion in the information age. It used to be some kind of red flag that very social people would use to wallop non-social people. It took the aggressiveness that people who prefer working in an office often show to remote workers. These kind of societal evolutions will also influence the normalcy of behavior as experiences become more ubiquitous. More people have experienced loss, financial strain, etc
> I feel that the majority of relationships and marriages say 60-70 years ago were happy and mutually fulfilling, but now anecdotally it seems that most people are not happy whatsoever.
As a "towards the tail end" Gen Xer, basically it seemed like half my friends had divorced parents. The best explanation I've seen for this huge spike in divorce rates in the 70s and early 80s was a disconnect between men's views of marriage and the change in women's views of marriage as a result of women's lib. That is, many men of that era were raised in environment where husbands were "boss", they were expected to be the provider and women were expected to be subservient and manage the home. After women's lib, even women who would not label themselves as "feminists" still had an expanded view of women's role in a marriage, and this came in direct conflict with men's expectations. I've seen the subsequent reduction in divorce rates explained as a younger generation (a) getting married much later, and (b) having more balanced expectations of marital roles (even if they don't always act this way). Today, divorce rates are highly correlated with income and education levels.
> I feel that the majority of relationships and marriages say 60-70 years ago were happy and mutually fulfilling, but now anecdotally it seems that most people are not happy whatsoever.
It's the same phenomenon as people thinking that new music, movies, etc. is mostly terrible and the old days were full of nothing but amazing hits. Because we remember the good and forget the bad, both individually and as a society.
There is good reason to have such feelings about music, however. In the last 10-15 years autotune has really become common, and it has not done good things for mainstream music. At the same time, the quality of the masters from around 1970 and later are good enough that a modern re-master has quality as good as anything recorded today. This gives music from that era staying power it wouldn't otherwise have.
Only the best of the best is getting a re-master today. Of course it sounds great. Survivor bias in action.
And to the parent poster's point -- we only remember the good things. We tend to forget all of the alcoholism, abuse, and misery in relationships -- there was no divorce, or it was rare. Car accidents were just as common and your giant chrome landship killed you and the people you hit. Whole lotta institutional biases that were pretty blatant.
Let me guess: you were born in the 70s to 80s, and the 80s/90s were a formative time for you? That is because you don't remember all the shit that played in whatever golden time period you're imagining. You only remember the hits. You're not accurately remembering the broad distribution of what was on the radio and in theaters in the past, which also contained a lot of crap that you likely never would have wasted your money on. Terrible movies got dumped to TV specials or direct-to-video (today they get dumped to streaming platforms), so even if we filter to what was released in theaters, we're missing a lot of crap.
But how about we look at the top grossing films of 1983 [1], 30 years ago? Some of these hold up and are the classics you remember, like #1 Star Wars Return of the Jedi (still a franchise though), #2 Terms of Endearment, #4 Trading Places, #5 WarGames, #10 Risky Business, #11 National Lampoon's Vacation, #13 The Big Chill, #16 Scarface. Bonafide classics, no question there.
But go even a little down the list and you get middling sequels and formulaic franchise films: #6 Octopussy (formulaic Bond film, which was the Marvel of its time), #7 Sudden Impact (Dirty Harry sequel, not great), #8 Staying Alive (Saturday Night Fever sequel, not great), #12 Superman III (one of the worst Superman films of all time, but ahead of Superman IV), #14 Never Say Never Again (another Bond film, better than Octopussy, but still two in one year), #15 Jaws 3-D (one of the worst action films of all time), #20 Psycho II (another meh sequel).
And these are the top 20 movies ranked on how many people paid to see them in the theaters. There are hundreds of others that were regularly shown in theaters that I'm sure you can't recall. Some are classics now (Videodrome, Monty Python's Meaning of Life), but most are not.
> Most popular movies are rehashed boring superhero/avenger movies that blend into each other.
Nah, you're not wrong, highest-grossings are indeed in a rut. Top 10 highest grossing in 1990: 2 films that were sequels or otherwise an entry in an existing franchise. 2022? All ten are sequels (even the Chinese propaganda film at entry 9 is a sequel!)
There are tons of good movies released every year, but the top-10-by-sales are in fact mostly safe bets on sequels or entries in sprawling franchises, these days. Since those so consistently out-perform better, original films, it's kinda hard to argue that studios should stop. Theater-release films are in kinda a rough spot in the age of streaming and strong competition from TV. Tickets are crazy-expensive and people just don't watch movies in theaters as much anymore, so the lion's share of the money goes to safe, FX-heavy films where the audience basically knows what they're gonna get for their $12 (or, about the cost of having a whole streaming service for an entire month).
As someone who doesn't remember 9/11, my opinion is that most of the movies and music from the 80s/90s (yes, especially the popular ones) are terrible and that the majority of media I enjoy was produced in the last 20 years. I think people tend to like whatever they heard and saw during their formative years.
Well good, this gives me hope that I've just become the crotchety old guy that complains about how things aren't as good as they used to be (even though I promised myself I wouldn't become that guy when I was young), rather than the world is going towards more and more Idiocracy.
No-one remembers "The Brother from Another Planet" (1984) ... but everyone remembers "E.T." (1982). Similarly, the Marvel stuff will mostly shrink together into obscurity, while actual good movies (My money is on "La La Land" as the chick-flick musical and the "John Wick" Franchise as the action cornerstone, "Parasite" for the connoisseurs) will be remembered.
True, maybe we are just more able to talk about our problems in relationships, which makes it seem like we are more unhappy overall. Or, maybe most relationships are happy overall, but the subset of people who tend to post things online also tend to have less happy relationships, skewing the dataset.
50 years of living under "there is no such thing as society" is what has happened. That's why you see some people trying to retreat into nuclear families and wall themselves off. That can end up being their own hell if it goes wrong.
I think it's arguable that opportunities to build substantiative constructive relationships of any kind has been on a sharp decline over the past several decades.
For most of us, the bulk of connections we make are those made by way of circumstance — the people we meet in class, at the workplace, etc. While school connections have a decent chance of becoming more deep and real, it's much more unlikely for those at the workplace, particularly as job workloads have increased (meaning less downtime during work hours to talk) and it becoming more common for people to change jobs many times during their lives (not as much point in getting to know coworkers deeply when you'll probably be somewhere else in a couple of years).
Some have been able to make connections outside of work through group hobbies, but this is difficult to manage for the many who find themselves with little free time and/or too exhausted in the little free time they have to want to go out and do these things.
Really, what the pandemic has done more than anything has revealed how fleeting and insignificant most of our connections are.
I wasn't around 60-70 years ago, but that is about when my grandparents got married (the 50's). One pair of them divorced in the 70's and the other pair stayed married until my grandmother's death in 2008. I don't think they really liked each other for the last 20-30 years before that though - they rarely spoke to each other. If you're getting your perception of relationships from the popular media of that time, then I'd just say that you should probably look at the media's current relationship ideals and see how well they match up to reality.
The key joke and catchphrases for one of the most popular television shows of the era (The Honeymooners) was about a husband threatening to physically assault his wife ("One of these days, Alice, right in the kisser! Bang, zoom, to the Moon!)
And comedians today complain about losing half their money in divorce settlements (bill burr) and describe how expensive it is to date older women (chris rock).
Imagine living in a world where you can only wear a black t-shirt with comfort fit blue jeans. Since the beginning of time, that's all anyone has ever worn and nobody has questioned it.
Then one day, someone starts selling a red shirt in limited quantities. Man, wouldn't it be really great to be wear one? Someone else sells slim fit jeans. Wow, all the choices...
People tend to act on their unhappiness when they have additional choices that they can make, and deal with the situation as it is when they can't. Divorce used to be damned near heretical due to the vows involved until the baby boomers with their enlightened self-interest came of age and decided that marriage needed to be as disposable as their milk jugs and tampons.
"I feel that the majority of relationships and marriages say 60-70 years ago were happy and mutually fulfilling, but now anecdotally it seems that most people are not happy whatsoever."
It's possible this is true. But here's a little anecdote. 70 years ago is 1953. The American sitcom "Happy Days", produced in 1973, makes this era look great. I know British writer Alan Moore has said he's seen the TV show Happy Days, and things in Britain in his childhood were nothing like "Happy Days". The country was struggling with how the world had changed post World War 2.
I imagine Japan was going through some serious stuff as well.
The interesting question is: what could you change to improve this? What could you do to encourage prioritizing relationship forming, prioritization, and tending/maintenance? Is there anything you could do?
In my humble opinion lower people's expectations or make them explicit.
These days many people have perception that the society is having unrealistic expectations from them. They rather withdraw from society than risking being a disappointment. Japanese culture of indirect communication is making it more pronounced but the rest of the world is moving in the same direction.
Causes first (US-constrained): economic atomization and precariousness is the first tentpole. I mention that in a sibling comment.
The other is that political sorting and radicalization have rendered parts of the country unsafe for vulnerable populations to live in; my Massachusetts Republican neighbors might be uncomfortable with Pride flags bracketing their Thin Blue Line house, but they're not in danger of their safety unlike my LGBT friends in the South--or, at current rates, my "anodyne liberal" friends, too. Vulnerable populations or those sensitive to the treatment of vulnerable populations are going to leave if they can. They just are. And that takes a pretty big swing at the personal idea of connecting with people through offline methods, too. Hard to believe in community when yours does that.
The former has some solutions, though at this point they feel like really beating that dead horse. UBI, national health care, ways to make being not a white-collar worker less immediately terrifying in much of the country. That can help anchor people if they don't feel like they have to go elsewhere to live at least adequately. The latter--I don't know how you convince people to not be weird about vulnerable and marginalized populations. They're probably going to keep leaving, and while there's some found-family effects from that kind of diaspora, it's not the same thing.
You are part of the problem though? You are engaging into political sorting and assuming that because your neighbors are Republican, that they would be uncomfortable with pride flags. Do you even know if they are Republican? How do you know they are not in danger of their safety? What if they are LGBT and support police? What if they are Jewish and support police? So what if they are Republican and support police and they are uncomfortable around pride flags, but its because of their assumptions. The same assumptions and political sorting you are engaging in.
What is terrifying about being a blue collar worker anyhow? Also I fail to see how UBI nad national healthcare would solve it.
What would fix it is less hatred and animosity between groups, and less sorting into groups period. Less apocalyptic rhetoric from all groups. The world isn't ending, its actually doing pretty well for the most part. Being proud to be American. And honestly, people should stop flying a pride flag or a thin blue line flag or any other flag, but the one flag which represents all people in this great country: the flag of the United States of America. That is the only true, completely inclusive flag of this country.
How are the people trying to protect themselves part of the problem?
Republicans will often have relatives or friends that are hateful towards minorities (more than half my family). If you could minimize your chance of experiencing less violence or murder, wouldn't you? We're not being apocalyptic, we're being extremely serious. I personally had a close friend murdered for being a feminine gay man and have been told similar stories by friends.
The American flag is not a flag of inclusion and represents different things to different people. To you it represents all of us... but it has historically not represented all of us for most of America's existence.
It's disheartening that many died to fight for our social freedoms utilizing rainbow flags to represent peace and solidarity and you're saying it's an act of defiance. I personally fly both at my home.
> I feel that the majority of relationships and marriages say 60-70 years ago were happy and mutually fulfilling, but now anecdotally it seems that most people are not happy whatsoever.
It's because many women have bought into the lie that getting it all and bridging every perceived equality gap will somehow make them happy. Of course, when women are unhappy, their men are more likely to be miserable as well. Men are equally to blame for being passive and enabling these systems of inherent discontent.
The internet made the world a much smaller place. There's nothing left to discover; we've seen and done everything this planet has to offer by the time we're 25.
So we look to space, for a new frontier we can be miserable in. At least the struggle of surviving that will be a distraction for a while.
Could also have the implication that high-committal economic participation in the post WWII-era was/is also bad for men. It was always a raw deal, but it was also the only general marker of success/achievement/prosperity.
While I strongly disagree with that GP post, baseless speculation invoking conspiracy theories, just because you disagree with an opposing point of view, is one of the primary reasons I don't use Twitter. Please don't bring that to HN.
I've gone through a milder version of this since the pandemic.
I was laid off overnight and I moved back to my hometown, and have ever since worked remotely.
Property is extremely expensive in the area, so I'm forced to live with my family despite making more money than all of them combined. My also-employed-friends are doing even worse than me financially, and it has killed my social life completely.
I can see why these Japanese guys feel like that - after all they have always lived in a crisis that may never end. Some people simply give up when they face an endless grind (ironically, this may remind you of some Asian MMORPGs).
I think there are just so many layers at which we as a society are failing at, and it's forcing so many people to become "invisible".
You read stories about these recluses, and it's not a far fetch from most of us. Sure, some of them are suffering from severe disorders or are unmedicated, but for a lot of them they want to be part of society but feel stuck. Can't get minimum wage jobs because they have no work experience, no references. Can't go back to school because no money. Can't continue their social life because they feel such deep levels of guilt for having to live with their family.
So much of our social systems are based not on prevention and providing as much help throughout to reduce risk, but rather to wait until things get so bad it's near impossible to get out. Our health system works like this. Our school system works like this (bullying being dismissed was a big reoccurrence when I was reading these articles on hikikomori).
Don't even get me started on the online layers of failure, so many platforms are places where miserable people congregate and encourage others to become as miserable. They convince each other the "sky is falling, give up now". 4chan is an example of such a place, you don't believe some of the extreme absurdities keeping you from reintegrating on there unless you've already started to isolate yourself (again part of the above failure of our social systems not letting people get help early), and those miserable folks take advantage of this.
Layer after layer of massive failures.
I hope you can invite your friends over to your family's house, alongside their family and have a big social feast even if the feast is just whatever is filling and affordable. We should be pulling each other closer, providing more support and empathy, not pulling away.
> Property is extremely expensive in the area, so I'm forced to live with my family despite making more money than all of them combined.
It's weird how surreal this is but we kinda we just accept it as "the way it is". I guess there's not really any alternative in existence at this point, and if tabled legislation is passed it may become legally (and maybe even physically) impossible to bring something into existence.
What a tangled web we've woven for ourselves to live in, but I guess that was the will of the people so there you go, we got what we asked for.
>What a tangled web we've woven for ourselves to live in, but I guess that was the will of the people so there you go, we got what we asked for.
That's exactly what happened, at least in the US. I can't speak for other countries such as in Europe.
Americans wanted Euclidean zoning, subdivisions, no walkability, giant yards, a car-centric society, NIMBYism, and racism and classism baked into land-use laws, and now they're living with the effects of all that: unaffordable housing.
Talking to Americans about this is futile and exasperating, and pointless. You might talk to one and they'll agree about a few points, but then suggest changing laws to let someone build a multi-unit building next to their single-family house and they'll freak out. Suggest eliminating parking requirements and they'll scream. Suggest improving public transit and cutting back on road budgets and they'll cry about "socialism". It's hopeless: Americans simply don't want to live in the kind of society you see in urban Europe or Japan, because they all want to have their own castle, but that simply isn't sustainable. It only worked as long as it did because of the postwar economic boom and America's huge land area, but now the chickens are coming home to roost.
> Talking to Americans about this is futile and exasperating, and pointless.
I would say: it depends.
Doing so in small quantities I can certainly agree with the sentiment, but if you talk to people in massive quantities, especially in certain ways, over time you start to notice patterns in their speech, and it seems reasonable to presume that this reflects patterns in thought.
It may not seem like it, but we live in a system, and like all systems it can be analyzed. It doesn't have to be though....one can go through their whole life just taking all of this weirdness for granted as most people do, but imagine if the pioneers of science decided to just shrug their shoulders at all the patterns they saw around them? Where would we be if not for anomalies like them?
I've been a _lot_ more reclusive since the pandemic simply because the social activities I used to partake in ceased to exist.
Even as someone who's quite extroverted, it's far more difficult to convince Zoom crew to go to the pub or hang out in person. There is an activation energy vs. just walking outside and oh, you're in the city centre and there it all is.
This headline should have read: 2% of Japanese self-report living as recluses
And there is no link to the actual report, which I can't seem to find anywhere. I wanted to know if they had some definition or threshold of reclusiveness that was needed to be considered 'hikikomori', or if they just asked people if they self-identified as hikikomori with no definition.
In any public opinion survey, a response that is only 2% is nothing, it is outside of the margin of error.
Margins of error for binomials only really work in the center of the distribution, of which 0.02 is pretty far away from. Also the survey size was 30000 people, which means the error bars should be well under 2%.
There was a post on here maybe a few months ago (couldn't find it right now) about how a certain percentage of people will just answer polls randomly/adversarially/jokingly, and I think the number they gave was something like 7% (I think they ran a poll with one nonsense answer and 7% of people picked it, something like that). Anyway that was just one data point, and I'm sure there are cross-cultural differences, but I think the idea still stands that there is an absolute margin of error in polling that is independent of the true percentage and sample size.
We can be a bit more specific. Towards the extremes a binomial distribution gets a variance close to the mean (it basically becomes a Poisson distribution). So that would be a variance of around 600 in this case. All in all a standard deviation of about 0.1 percentage points.
This is only a rough estimate but it should give the right order of magnitude.
The economy is ricocheting from giant boom to bust.
Inflation is causing a cost of living crisis all over the world.
We are risking a large banking crisis.
We are experiencing massive layoffs in our own industry.
Cities are being hollowed out.
We have an epidemic of loneliness.
Is anyone who supported the Covid response now willing to put their hand up yet and agree that the cure was worse than the disease now that the costs predictably become clearer?
Considering Covid wasn’t a risk to most of us, I haven’t wavered in my belief that it was never worth shutting down the economy and terrifying everyone into compliance.
You're blaming this all on the shutdowns, but really, much of what we're dealing with right now is due to a response by the federal reserve that lasted a lot longer than it should have.
I don't think 'the economy' is worth millions of deaths. The fact that over 1m people died in the US is an absolute disgrace, but had we done nothing, we would have had another 3-4M dead. You really think it's possible to have a functioning economy with that sort of death toll? The actual 'shutdowns' were very short lived. Much of what you're discribing is down to natural human behavior in the face of risk. Even if covid only has a 1% death rate, the rates of long term side effects of infection are what? 10%? That's huge, and 'long covid' is something we're still grappling with today, and will do so in the future.
China is an excellent example of what not to do. After years of zero-covid policies they've effectively given up, let the chips fall where they may, and their economy is getting ravaged as covid burns through their population.
How would we have had another 3-4 million dead? All any restriction did was delay exposure. Yes, a vaccine arrived but one which has questionable efficacy and which wanes in effectiveness (hence the booster programme). All we did was spread out any Covid related deaths at huge costs.
I don't know if it would have been that high, but the whole (initial) idea of "flatten the curve" was exactly that. Saturated systems stop working as expected. When hospitals reach capacity then neither covid nor non-covid patients will get adequate treatment.
"Questionable efficacy" in what sense? You can argue that possibly for transmission, but certainly not for endpoints like death. See the recent Lancet study, for example.
I think you're conflating a whole lot of nuanced causes and effects, some that started well before covid hit, all in the name of score keeping (which only helps people put up nuance-blinders and just go for the 'win')
The covid response in the US was varied. I live in Arizona, we had minimal lock downs and a high death rate. I don't know anyone who's died of the flu in all my years, I know 3 people dead from covid (not elderly sick people either) - at least one of those purely because he felt he had to spite the libs. Statistically that likely means nothing, but neither does your hunting around for everything negative you read with a post-pandemic timestamp to try to get the win over a group of people who were just trying to do what was best to save their friends and family and neighbors from a very real threat that was still being understood.
Japan did not have forced lock downs. And they already had plenty of recluses before. The rest of what you say is only very loosely connected to covid, if at all.
Perhaps you should put your hand up and say you are wrong?
HEALTH IS CONNECTED TO THE ECONOMY.
]
- when people die, the economy tends to suffer
- if people suffer from serious long-term post-viral fatigue, the economy suffers
- if the health service implodes because it is completely saturated and cannot service demand, (you guessed it) the economy suffers
People, don't pretend that "the economy" and "health" are separate factors.
Oh also
> Considering Covid wasn’t a risk to most of us
Even if this is true (i.e. even assuming that though you're unlikely to die from it you're unlikely to suffer any adverse effects) then there's still a problem: if all the hospital capacity is taken up because there are suddenly twice as many patients owing to COVID if you have a non-COVID problem (e.g. fall down an escalator and need surgery) then you're in trouble because there's nobody there to treat you!!!
I wonder what may have caused that large spike in energy prices in the beginning of 2022 and what other non-covid events might have caused that.
> We are risking a large banking crisis.
True, but if banks are only sustainable at 0% interest rates, is that not an issue already?
> We are experiencing massive layoffs in our own industry.
IT employment is dramatically up since 2020, even after layoffs.
> Cities are being hollowed out.
If housing policy hadn't been mismanaged so much in the west over the last 30 years, I'm sure there'd be much less pent up demand to leave now that people have the option.
> We have an epidemic of loneliness.
You think this started in 2020? Never heard anyone discuss NEETs, the frankly dismal prospects of anyone graduating without a qualification in one of the few popular fields these days, the negative effects of social media, etc, before 2020? Must be a nice bubble.
Everything you listed has more to do with inequitable economic policy than covid response. Blaming public health for bad policy driven by shareholders and the financial system seems short-sighted.
I mean older people that might have been holding families together also died during the pandemic. Things would have been easier if pandemic measures would have been done on a pro-active basis - and I'm writing this from Europe where measures where a bit stricter. Maybe the pandemic could even have ended sooner.
That said, the general problem of the "loneliness epidemic" was already there before Covid.
You forgot to add a generation of children who will be a little stunted - socially, intellectually, even physically - because of 2.5 years of isolation.
A 10 year old in 2023 has already spent nearly 25% of his life without regular social contact or proper in-person schooling.
Although some of this might be accurate I think it is important to look at this being our first internet-based pandemic. We aren’t ever going to do things 100% right the first time as humans, but we can try harder and better next time using all this valuable information we’ve learned about ourselves and how we can cope with virulent outbreak, for better or worse.
This issue at hand with Japan having folks who “evaporate” seems to have been around much longer than this particular pandemic, though the recent lock downs seem to have exacerbated the problems.
>This issue at hand with Japan having folks who “evaporate” seems to have been around much longer than this particular pandemic, though the recent lock downs seem to have exacerbated the problems.
Interview with some of these people is really tough. The main person they follow through this talks about that choice between life or sadness through shame and even says he “…doesn’t have the courage to honorably kill oneself” during that interview. I can’t imagine having to contend with that belief structure. I would choose life and sadness, and I do daily. I can’t fault someone for not wanting that but especially so when I cannot understand the approach or belief.
This is retconning. Covid was a huge risk to all of us before vaccines were common. Even with vaccines, covid infection remains a serious (non-deadly) health risk, causing many neurological sequelae in millions of people.
You also can't attribute the majority of the other problems directly to the covid response.
It also wasn't a "cure", many many many people were infected that didn't need to be because of mismanagement.
What on earth? Sweden had ~ 2x as many deaths per million due to covid. Their 'no lockdown' plan failed, and they basically had to go back on it an institute measures:
??? type sweden, norway, and finland in the search box on that page. Note the differences in deaths / million (total). It's pretty clear sweden mishandled covid compared to its peers
Sweden is at 42th place when sorted by Deaths per million (total). The article I linked shows death excess, where in Sweden the least extra people died.
I remember watching the arch-hiki anime “Welcome to the NHK” 15 years ago. That’s a long time for behaviors to become entrenched. The pandemic was merely an accelerant of long term trends.
I don't see a problem with this so long as it is by choice. At least in japan there is a place for people like this unlike in the west.
I mean, I get not having a place in social circles, communities and even things like never marrying or having kids and not having friends. Whatever, Those are all great but no one deserves them. But if a person, for whatever reason, cannot socialize or interact well with others should they..what? Die or be institutionalized? Should that human potential go to waste? If they can wfh or in any way function I think they should be supported.
I don't think I am a social recluse to that level myself but I am constantly frustrated and fail at being expected to be socially-competent. And it isn't for a lack of effort, so I feel like I can relate to this a bit.
Some people truly have a mental deficiency (and maybe I am one but I don't know) but in many cases it is similar to obesity in that everyone from the outside can easily suggest that you work out and diet but in reality, for many people this is like saying "climb mount everest while running a marathon".
People in general first and foremost must be allowed to exist in their current state before they can improve their situation, so long as they aren't causing harm to others.
I am suffering from this too, and I am not sure who to turn to or what to do about it.
I work remotely and all my interaction with coworkers is maybe half an hour everyday where we talk about work and nothing else. If I challenge myself to go to office, I find that its only about 33% occupied.
I have few friends but they don't call me anymore and live far apart.
Tried to meet women but it didn't work out.
I think the silver lining of loneliness being so prevalent is that other people are feeling it too and want to do something about it. Knowing nothing about your situation I would guess that statistically if you're feeling lonely then your friends are also likely to feel lonely -- maybe they also say that their friends don't call them. I think this is a great opportunity in that there's desire from other people to connect with you that you could tap into.
Speaking from my own experience, it's very uncomfortable to be forward about trying to make friends / strengthen friendships. It reminds me of the stigma that online dating had when I first did it circa 2010 -- it has a connotation of being "desperate", and maybe that cool people wouldn't have to be desperate. But in my personal experience I've seen this shift a lot in the last year, where there is a lot of relief and appreciation when I mention wanting more friends and hint that I want to be friends with the person I'm talking to (they often respond by saying that they want more friends too). So I personally decided that I would rather risk looking desperate than feel lonely, and I recommend that tradeoff, especially because it's not perceived negatively like we worry it will be.
That's not to say that I think there's some easy option that I think you're avoiding; from my experience it has taken a number of incremental steps (and it's not like I've fully "solved" it). I guess I'm just trying to say don't get discouraged by the magnitude of the situation -- it might seem like a single phone call to a friend could never make a difference, but things like that add up over time.
As for practical suggestions, I've found video games to be a good activity to do with people that I don't live near. I've also found Buddhist meditation to be a great option for this -- it has the same sort of social structure and benefits as organized religion, but without requiring any particular sorts of beliefs or devotions. A lot of that has moved online these days -- I haven't tried this out but there are things like this https://www.sit-heads.com/
There are a lot of group sports (like run clubs or pickle ball) and art classes that are open sign ups where you don't need to know anyone to join, and you can just casually meet people. They might not become friends outside of the activity, but it's an easy entry point to feeling like you're part of your community. There used to be a lot of board game meet ups like this too, but the pandemic kind of killed the scene.
I feel that is an answer for americans.
There is no sports or arts classes where I live. Most people work and go home to watch TV.
A lot of places in the world don't have such option with activities or outdoors.
(Now I'm a bit confused on the difference between Gurugram, and Gurgaon, so I'm hoping I did not mix the locations. If I did I'm terribly sorry. Also, understandably I haven't tried these, so I can't say if they are any good. But there is really only one way to figure that out :) )
I just want to second the recommendation for the board game meetup. Those can be a lot of fun, and a good way get out of the house and socialize. It's also good to bring your own favorite game in case the selection there isn't to your liking; you might find others who love your game but never tried it.
Same city. India is trying to replace British era city names. Bombay/Mumbai. Bangalore/Bengaluru. Hard to get people to stop using an old name they like though!
You have a pretty good variety of coworking spaces nearby at many different price points. Some pretty upscale ones in horizon center! Plenty of decent ones down golf course road. Why not join?
Sounds like you need a more drastic change to get you to snap out of your patterns. Maybe try moving to a new place? I suspect that if you move to a place that has been seeing a lot of population growth in the past couple of years (like Austin or Denver), it's probably easier to meet friends because there will be others in the same situation. You should also try to find an activity or hobby that you are into that has a social component to it. Or even something like volunteering or mentoring-- anything to get you out of the house and communicating more with people in the real world.
I had basically the same problem, and it doesn't help that I'm picky about the people whose company I enjoy, I found going to the mosque more helped me start developing an irl social circle again.
If you're not religious maybe something like a library or a hackspace could help? Going to hackspace helped alleviate some of my loneliness, even though I never managed to develop a social circle out of it.
The article doesn't mention this, but does anyone know how they make a living? If it's just living with their parents and family, what happened to these people when that family or parents pass away? How do they survive ?
I am not Japanese but I am a recluse and I strongly believe that this type of thing is not even slightly limited to Japan.
For the last ten years or so I generally avoid going out and rarely attempt socialization. Not even online. But I think that it is very stupid if people think that someone is a recluse to the same degree if they do a lot of online socializing but don't go out. The online world is part of this equation.
I think that this is wrongly painted as a psychological problem. I think it is an economic problem first with a psychological component that it probably a lot smaller than people realize.
I have been doing freelance programming contracts for most of my adult life and/or bootstrapped startups (my own or individual's). Contrary to the false information that may be spread by privileged people on HN, the vast majority of such contracts available have relatively modest budgets. And it is vastly easier to get this kind of work online than projects that are well-funded.
So it comes down to a few factors for me. I have always had some socialization problems. I am usually pretty broke. Going anywhere is going to end up costing easily $20-30. On the weekend it could be closer to $40 just for the Lyft rides (I work remotely and sold my car in 2013).
When I am broke it doesn't make sense to go out. It's very unwise in fact.
But beyond that, even online I am tired of saying something to the affect of "I have a lot of hope for the income from this latest startup". So telling people honestly how it's going is kind of a bummer for them unless I lie.
Now I am trying hard to get my GPT4 powered VMs out. But even though I have plans for a lot of controls and screening, I believe that people will try to cancel this effort due to supposed safety concerns (again mediated by prompts and screening). And then others with better connections and funding will replicate the effort with inferior safety controls but better marketing for them.
HN is the closest thing I get to a real social effort. Most of my comments aren't appreciated much. But I am authentic if nothing else.
I'm one of them, so I can answer you first-hand. Currently living off my parents, will probably kill myself after they die --- that's the only reason why I haven't killed myself yet after all. (Even though they only considered what was best for them when they decided to breed, I can't bring myself to hurt them)
I used to comment similar things 10y ago, today I couldn't be happier and consider my life precious. I hope you manage to find your own purpose and meaning that will make you feel alive as well. In any case, wish you all the best, good luck in whatever you decide and do.
Ever thought about changing continents? There are large Japanese communities here in Germany (and other places in Europe), perhaps you would get a more positive outlook on life there.
I know how you feel. I'm not a lock in like you, I work and am relatively successful and well respected in my job, but I hate the stress and anxiety that goes with it and most days I just want to quit. I wouldn't kill my self though, I'd just get a lower paid, less stressful job. Stacking shelves or cleaning, where I can be by myself and not have much interaction with people. But I carry on working here even though I hate it because commitments.
You might want to consider whether you don't suffer from any chronic ailments. I've always had this attitude, and in the end it turned out I've got a bad case of UARS and gut dysbiosis, compounded with on-and-off deficiencies of iron and vit D.
have you read emil cioran? i find hope in his dire hopelessness, oddly enough, but also a friend, a companion, someone who is there with you, sharing analogous feelings
But understanding the issue intellectually does not necessarily mean making peace with it.
Especially when it comes to the key question, why should I bother struggling today so that I can struggle tomorrow again so that I can struggle the day after tomorrow again etc.
What do you do when recovering from surgery? You watch TV to distract yourself from the pain, you don't touch it.
I’ve heard that those folks will typically stand in areas of a particular city where day labor is sought after - and most can get day labor through this process at meager wages. Lots of hotels with low daily rates that attract the “evaporated” people there to work daily and be done with work daily. Watched an interview with an older gentleman who was well-spoken, had been “evaporated” for like his whole life, such a beautiful spirit laden with regret. The whole “evaporation” movement has this weird reset ideology baked in too - so I’d imagine some folks come to this place to start-over, not realizing what a trap it can be societally. My understanding is few people if any go from “evaporated persons” back into structured society.
The NEET grifter play is to feign hardship/trauma to be allowed to couch surf and pretend to be doing remote work while secretly living off of inheritance money (or misappropriated college tuition-- how dare you ask to see my transcript!).
Bonus points if you publicly spread rumors and malign your hosts the whole time. When they catch on to you and kick you out, you net an invite to repeat the cycle with the next sucker by telling them you were kicked out for being gay.
I honestly don't believe that this is an actually common archetype. I have met enormous amounts of people with undiagnosed or undertreated chronic issues manifesting as varying degrees of fatigue preventing them from functioning, and your take just sounds like an attempt to justify the systemic discrimination against them that I see everywhere by vilifying them.
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This really worries me—relationships are vital for so many people to have a happy and fulfilling life and for society to function that increases in the amount of people who simply choose to leave society from what seems to be relationship or economic troubles could have massive negative effects on society as a whole. Is society a happier place when people don't have constructive relationships? Are people themselves happier?
Also, this is a bit off topic but does anyone else feel that relationship quality on a societal level has gone down a lot? I feel that the majority of relationships and marriages say 60-70 years ago were happy and mutually fulfilling, but now anecdotally it seems that most people are not happy whatsoever.