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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

At this point the men you discuss are sitting around playing video games and doing oxy. They don't seem to be threatening society in any way.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...

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Both of which are inventions by very skilled people that can only exist in an industrialized society.

Those skilled people are still working and are still marriageable.

Speculating about a scary future dystopia works less well when we already live in that world and it's not so bad.

Except dystopia isn't "everyone lives in a bad, mean world". It's societal dislocation. For some, the dystopia is real, right now. For others, it never will be.

The phenomenon is way too recent. A few more decades of this, and let's see.

As someone who's always been employed, this confuses me. How do the permanently unemployed afford video games and drugs, in addition to rent and food? Sponge off their parents? Their partner? The state? I'd love to see a real study.

If you are permanently unemployed, you don't pay taxes, you get subsidies for food, for rent, for health care, for heating, and for a plethora of other services, if you know how to game the system properly. You may be on "disability", and if you're smart about it, you probably work a little bit off the books, cash-only.

There's a whole system of perverse incentives and interacting welfare programs that produce income cliffs where it is suboptimal to work more and have greater income, because that small increase in wages results in a much larger loss of services.

These are often not kids of the lower-classes, who are more likely to end up on the streets caught up in crime than in their bedroom playing video games. It's the middle or even upper middle class children often doing this, not just for economic reasons.

It is discussed in this article:

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...

Take away their video games and drugs, and see what you end up with. Their video game addiction is obviously a sign of deep, fundamental and overwhelming distress. I think you're going for the "they're victims too, not violent inhumane monsters" which is true, but doesn't take away from GP's point that they're potentially volatile and therefore a threat to stability.

Unless they go to syria. Or vote for a populistic president?

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