Nobody Knows What to Do About NEETs | Hacker News Reader

Nobody Knows What to Do About NEETs

melmagazine.com

19 pointspaulpauper36 comments

I don't think judging things by such subreddits is a good idea in general.

Any community centering on the negative seems to devolve into being a complete cess-pit. This makes sense; it takes a lot of obsession to post day after day about how your life sucks, or how the world is horrible, or how women don't like you. People having something better to do than to wallow in negativity don't do that.

The most prominent members in any community tend to be the ones that are the most dedicated, and when your top users are being dedicated to doom and gloom, it doesn't make for a nice place.

Anybody remotely sane will run away from such a place or not join to start with, making the situation even worse over time.

At some point the community becomes about the negativity -- anybody who managed to make a positive change will be deemed a traitor to the cause, and shouted down or expelled. Add to this that the rating systems and often the moderators will exert pressure on selecting for the worst of the worst.

I'm not sure that looking at such a community is very helpful for understanding the actual problem (NEETs or whatnot). I think if anything it gives an insight into how socialization can go wrong, and it seems to look most the same regardless of what negative thing people form a community around.

It's worth thinking about that such "communities" can only exist because of online technology. Once people are out of high school, if they are just moping around the house and aren't working or in college or vocational training or anything, there's no automatic group of people they are around enough to fall into cliques of any sort. People can still be individually mired in depression and nonproductive lives, but there isn't an easily-found community of like-minded people IRL.

This "NEET" phenomenon is something that just could not happen prior to the current century.

I don't agree. Socialization is socialization. Being online makes it easier to connect with people, but this isn't a new issue. In real life such things also happen, even if it manifests differently. Some people fall into groups of friends that are more interested in getting high, drunk, or getting into fights. Don't remember your parents speaking about "bad influences"?

1. Find some obscure subreddit

2. Scroll until you find a slightly sexist/racist etc. comment

3. Paraphrase and make a few vague connections based on your cherry-picked reddit post

4. Conclude with more sweepimg remarks and the assertion that "nobody knows what to do", despite there being no material in the article to back up that statement.

First four paragraphs were a neutral introduction to the issue.

Fifth paragraph, the author goes really far off the rails of the article's own stated purpose (explaining the NEET phenomenon and lack of possible solutions). He takes extreme exception to one of the subreddit's rules, "No signposting of gender," but he refuses to accept "Running a gender-blind subreddit...[is] good-faith moderation."

Basically, he starts off with a neutral summary of the NEET phenomenon in general, but then gets really angry at a particular subreddit. Insisting that its clearly gender-neutral moderation rule (that literally says "Don't talk about gender here") is indicative of unforgivable gender-based toxicity.

I got sucked in, hoping for an insightful analysis of a tricky social problem, and five paragraphs in, it turned into politicized garbage. Sigh...

you need to keep reading. author moves onto other neet-related topics

> If you call yourself a NEET, you spend plenty of time on the internet, because the term really doesn’t exist offline

Eh, not really. I'm pretty sure the term existed before reddit. UK stats going back to 2010 [0]

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-neet

reddit launched in 2005

It was coined by the UK’s social exclusion unit in the 1990’s

https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/15119/2/bridging-the-gap.pdf

People bumming out of life is nothing new. That parents afford to house them forever, is.

It's very sad, but some people always aim too high, don't grow and learn from their situation and have mental handicaps or trauma preventing improvement. It's not all on the individual, but society externalizes costs on the weakest.

The combination of aging populations and automation slowly reducing the pool of careers even skilled workers have available is a vicious feedback loop.

- You can import skilled labor, which if done in sufficient quantities drives down wages for the natives - You can import unskilled labor, for which there is less work, apart from perhaps taking care of old people.

And once there's a Mars colony, I think there's a legit chance that a bunch of young skilled people will yeet themselves off this planet.

An appropriate initialism will be created to represent them in media. I'm thinking Young Emigrated Extra Terrestrials.

There isn't going to be a Mars colony of any impactful size for at least a century if ever.

I’m not sure why the downvotes, for Mars to become anything more than say Antartica would require a fundamental shift in human society that isn’t likely to happen within 100 years.

Technology needs to advance considerably more before a new gold rush that could give an opportunity to people and even then It would be probably only attractive and possible to a select few.

It’s also a bit weird to think that somehow the “NEET” problem can be solved with that as if there are no more opportunities on this planet right now.

We're not used to having frontiers any more.

But a couple hundred years ago it was normal for families to yeet themselves off to another continent to start new lives.

This trip could take months, in some cases years (some of the stories from early Australian colonisation are crazy).

On arrival, the incomers were often left to their own devices in a hostile land.

If we manage to get the transport costs to Mars down to the kind of level where selling your parent's house will pay for it, we can expect the same response - people will want to go there and start new lives.

And that would take at least a century, it’s not just transport costs it’s about what would there be to do.

I think betting on Mars being anything more than a scientific outpost and possibly an automated mining station down the line at least for the next 100-150 years is highly unlikely.

There is huge difference between us being able to put people on Mars with a 6-9 months journey and it becoming a new Australia or the American west.

It’s also not just the cost of transport these will be marginal compared to the cost of literal life support there.

Australia has and atmosphere and a biome hospitable to life (well hospitable by Australian standards at least...).

People could sleep on the street if push comes to shove, they can claim their own land in the outback and build an emu farm or w/e.... you can’t do that on Mars without considerable resources.

Sticking people on boats works on earth it’s not the same when it comes to Mars.

You can sleep in the bush, but early colonists had no idea what local plants were edible. Lots of them starved, died of thirst, drowned, were poisoned, burned to death in bushfires, etc. It was stupidly dangerous.

Yeah, obviously, Mars is going to be more dangerous than (even!) Australia. But that's never stopped people before.

> NEET stands for “Not in Employment, Education or Training.”

Exactly my first thought. Nobody knows? It's right there in the name!

Seems to be a what to do about this bad thing rather than what to do about the causes ... As such the article lacks depth but it's lengthy so might be informative to the authors ingroup audience and probably a start towards real positive change and empathy.

Plenty of people know what to do if the author actually wanted to find them...maybe a reader will start based on the article.

> "Some are struggling to integrate into society because of past trauma..."

The challenge of reduced ability stemming from trauma is much larger than is commonly understood. More importantly it's unlikely to improve while even mentioning the causes of trauma (eg: systemic mistreatment of women) receives so much widespread push-back and deflection.

TL:DR; The article is not actually concerned about what we're supposed to do about NEETs. It's concerned with what we're supposed to do about the fact that NEETs are not concerned with gender issues.

Tell me if I misinterpreted that...

You are correct. It's a pity they didn't focus on our society is affecting men and women differently- for example 90% of men being excluded from online dating, or many small liberal arts colleges being 70+% women, or women unable to find a man to have children with (sperm bank stats are super interesting), or both sexes having zero expectation they will own a house, or retire, ever- and how this is going to shape our society in a decade or two.

I posit that the lack of economic future for most people is the driver- same as in Japan and Europe.*

* For example, the labor force participation "of the population age 25 and over fell for all education groups except those who had not completed high school": https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/educatio...

Where can I find info about the online dating situation? I had never heard of this.

Sayeth OkCupid's blog: "As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh." Unfortunately was removed, presumably due to being bad for business!

* https://web.archive.org/web/20091122135400/http://blog.okcup...

* https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027277571...

* https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8370535/Woman-cre...

The medium article was really throughout... Thank your for these!

The large group of undesirable men also suffer further stigmatization as incels. Here's the same research discussed from their perspective:

https://incels.wiki/w/Tinder

https://incels.wiki/w/Tinder_experiments

it's a real shame that conversation about how our system hurts lots of different people gets left out in favour of splitting into an oppressor/oppressed divide. In reality almost everybody is held down by the system in different ways, some individual and some by demographic.

Pointing out a group of 'bad people' to pin societal ills on is as old as history itself (scapegoating), but it's never actually helped to solve those ills. We need to look at the structures in our society and how we can reshape them if we are to make life better for people.

Yeah, it's basically "world ends: women most affected"

We're getting downvoted for this but I'm not convinced that most people read past the first few sentences. The article was clearly not really about NEETs. Anyway, yeah - to level these sorts of complaints against society's self-described losers - seems a bit "punching down" to me.

I downvoted this post for lamenting being downvoted and accusing the HN audience of a specific crime with no evidence.

Reminds me of the "Women are most affected by war, they loose their husbands and sons."

- Hillary Rodham Clinton

I came away from the article with the same feeling.

The article came across to me as a bystander criticizing a hoarder for the colour of their trash. It comes across as "look at this mess" rather than something helpful or interesting.

with more and more automation it'll become more and more of a problem. we can be proactive or... ah who am i kidding, we won't be.

The fundamental problem with the world today is that there are too many people it. Just as with anything when something is less scarce it is less valuable, all else held equal. Obviously hunter gatherers or even agricultural societies had virtually zero NEETs. Human labour was more or less fully utilised until the last century. Now we are able to provide basic human wants and needs using fewer people.

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