Japanese game developer hasn't left the house in 10 years | Hacker News Reader

Japanese game developer hasn't left the house in 10 years

thegamer.com

159 pointsuser_235711118 comments

> Per ITK, Nito only leaves his apartment to get a haircut and take out the trash, as well as any other activity that absolutely requires him to step outside of the comfort of his room.

So actually: "Japanese Game Developer rarely leaves his house."

I can see why they went with their own headline, though.

Also, it's an apartment, not a house.

Also, not his apartment, his aunt's apartment.

"Japanese Game Developer rarely leaves his aunt's apartment."

For those unaware, this is in the form of the old Radio Yerevan joke:

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev won a luxury car at the All-Union Championship in Moscow?

Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all it was not Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev, but Vassili Vassilievich Vassiliev; second, it was not at the All-Union Championship in Moscow, but at a Collective Farm Sports Festival in Smolensk; third, it was not a car, but a bicycle; and fourth he didn't win it, but rather it was stolen from him.[1]

[1]http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000810.h...

This was hilarious, thanks for sharing.

usually abbreviated to just ".. and haven't won but rather lost"

This thread is a brilliant example of CTR-centric articles, because you're right, why would I click that?

Id click that link in a heartbeat. It reads like a classic headline from the onion, mundane + surreal

OK, well now we can relate.

>"Japanese Game Developer rarely leaves his aunt's apartment."

sounds like the title of an onion article

I like your sense of humor. Very funny. I chuckled hard!

I’d say it still fits the NEET/hikkikomori definition.

Depends on how well the game sells, if it sells a million copies he's a strange millionaire who values his privacy.

If it sells poorly, he's just a strange guy with an odd way of living.

Edit : This game looks fucking hilarious , I might buy a copy.

I can't really hate on someone at least trying to be productive

Edit 2: Played the demo on Steam, what a masterpiece. It's a game about wanting to be left the fuck alone. If you like silly stuff like Goat Simulator, you'll enjoy this. I hope he sells millions, and then makes an American spin off.

Everything about this screams I'm trying my best. Even the kickstarter itself is amazing. English is VERY VERY hard to learn, but he still made the video without hiring a professional voice actor or relying on an AI voice.

I'm buying this day one !

Got bit annoyed strucken by the realization it's mostly just an ad for a game. But it does look like a decent time waster goof ball. Stay strong, Japanese weirdos!

I wasn’t making a value statement about whether it’s good or bad to be hikkikomori, just making an observation that he seems to meet the definition of one. Your presuppositions seem to me like hidden state variables which are projected into the future, and thus don’t really have any bearing on my characterization of him in the present.

Doesn’t “NEET” mean “Not in education, employment, or training?”

It does, but, as a colloquialism, it’s reaching a disassociation from its original meaning and is now used to describe “asocial” behavior. You will often see shutins called neets (and I think this colloquial case change further disconnects the word from its original meaning) as well as someone who has a job but lives with their parents.

The word police have not been enforcing the law, so unfortunately for any pedants this change in meaning is likely to stay.

I believe that difference is down to anime fans, and the more exaggerated shut in meaning nay have bled over a bit but has not overtaken the original meaning in all contexts.

There are still many contexts where if you say NEET people will just think of the original definition, and others where people consider it the shut-in anime one.

It does, he'd still borderline fit that definition. He raised an average one year's salary for a game after ten years of self training.

Run-of-the-mill unemployed people that are outgoing fit the "NEET" definition better than him.

Also in Japan it seems the definition is a bit more broad than the acronym (otherwise even housewives would be NEETs): "In Japan, the classification comprises people aged between 15 and 34 who are not employed, not engaged in housework, not enrolled in school or work-related training, and not seeking work."

Self-training is definitely "work-related training". And he was doing housework.

So he was in training for 10 years and now he's self employed.

I don't think that self-study really fits the definition of "training".

Selling your own stuff is definitely self-employment though.

> hikkikomori

hikkikomori are afraid of seeing other people, so they would not go to a barber.

It's also possible that there is no Nito and the whole article is The Submarine at work. Successfully.

> The upcoming Pull Stay is, as you would expect, modeled around his principles and requires players to protect their hikikomori master by basically beating people who try entering his house for whatever reason.

I detect anger issues. And apparently he's looking for a following so that he can upgrade his status to "hikikomori master." What else do you have to do to hit the rank of master, if 10 years dedicated to the lifestyle doesn't get you there? I guess in Japan, the answer is to develop a video game.

> Since then, he's learned English, started up a YouTube channel and learned game development en route to launching his first game with the help of a Kickstarter.

Note to self. Creating a game from zero knowledge is a really long process. Maybe he should have skipped learning English.

ETA: Here's his Kickstarter link for quick reference.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1363912222/pull-stay

> Maybe he should have skipped learning English.

There are probably many resources available in Japanese to learn programming/game development. But, English is the foundation of almost everything in the information age.

Yup. No matter how much information you think is available in your native language, you will have more and higher quality in English, the vast majority of the time.

I've worked at a Japanese company and seen people who were ostensibly good at English gloss over the right result in a Google search because they didn't quite have the fluency to pick up on it immediately. People who aren't comfortable with English at all often get lost in native language articles that are just outright wrong or misleading, because when there's a vacuum of information to begin with it's very easy to write a bad article and still end up the top result for that topic in that language.

That's not to say most non-English content is bad - most content overall is bad or mediocre (or just obsolete), in any language, English included. Thus, the lower the density of content in any given language, the more likely that good content for any given search doesn't exist, and you're left with the poor stuff.

The exception is when you're looking for information on an insular tool or community that is primarily developed and used by speakers of a given language. There's a whole world of "Galapagos tech" in Japan that nobody uses elsewhere, and you won't find any English resources on it, and it might even be pretty good. But in today's globalized society, cooperation across borders ends up producing higher quality results (especially in open source) most of the time, so these kinds of insular projects are rarely the best option, unless it's a very niche thing or support and documentation in a non-English language is a primary concern.

Quick example of this kind of bizarre situation: I recently took a peek at reverse engineering a certain Japanese product that uses Android tablets and involves keeping a database on them and synchronizing it from a base station. Database updates are hilariously slow, taking hours to catch up on just a few thousand mutations. Turns out they were using an extremely niche database engine by Hitachi (if I remember correctly), in an embedded version; the only reference to this engine I could find was in the context of a full blown enterprise offering by them (think Oracle competitor). I bet it was configured to flush to disk after every mutation, for data durability in an enterprise setting. Had they used SQLite - which comes with Android, is free, and would've saved them a license fee - everything would be much simpler and DB updates would be orders of magnitude faster, since you can trivially configure it not to flush or just put the whole update in a transaction. They also could've just had the base station maintain the SQlite DB file and bulk transfer that, since it's not that large and it'd probably end up being faster and more reliable than the delta update mechanism with CSV mutation logs they were using.

(I'm a native Spanish speaker and my Japanese is good enough to understand technical content with occasional use of a dictionary, so I have a bit of experience with two non-English ecosystems)

One thing I noticed back when I worked in Japan 15 years ago is that, because a lot of software engineers there don't speak English (or at least not well enough), there was a big market for translations of English technical books. It was rather striking compared to what I had seen in France.

So, while I agree with your point, at least 15 years ago, there were a lot of resources for Japanese programers to read in their native language. Of course, another problem was the terrible, terrible state of education in Japan and the fact that good students would study Electonic engineering and that Software engineering was seen as being an unattractive choice.

The problem with books is that they're invariably obsolete, and almost always third party information (and thus usually at least a little bit wrong). I've never found the need to get my software engineering knowledge from books; online documentation is always more up to date and usually written by the authors of the project directly. In addition, only a tiny fraction of the knowledge you can find online in English will be collected in books, and it is much, much harder to search for.

Books are good for abstract knowledge (if you're that kind of learner) and to get an introduction to a particular technology, but not having access to the latest up to date information and a search engine over all the accumulated knowledge in the Internet is a major handicap.

This is one of the causes of a common pattern in SWE in Japan: always being behind the curve on tech, best practices, etc. There's just an inherent delay added by having to wait for information to be available in your native language. Add to that Japanese bureaucracy that discourages change (especially in big companies, but by no means exclusively), and it's even worse.

As a poor reader in several languages this is a very apt description of what it's like to use the web in non-native languages

Yeah, it's very important for reading the bulk of documentation. He's not making any mistakes to learn english for sure.

> I detect anger issues.

Regrettably, almost every game involves violence, but I would never imply the developers had anger issues. This may seem particularly personal, but it's just another use of a common game mechanic.

Full game development mastery is mastery of software development, graphic design, and storytelling.

Game design, 3D modelling, 3D texturing, general art direction, sound design, audio mixing... the list goes on. There's so much to a modern game and that's just implementation. You also have to market and sell the thing.

Has anyone told this guy that it's really easy to cut your own hair? Especially if you don't need to impress anyone.

If you don't need to impress anyone, why cut it at all?

When I first started my own consultancy, I grew my hair out. I never had long hair before and thought, "why not?" At the same time, our newly purchase house had a cockroach infestation (which the prior owners did not disclose).

One morning I decided to blow-dry my hair. The dryer had a hard time starting. Then a chunk, chunk noise occurred. Finally, a stream of brown paste shot out from the dryer. I threw it away and never used one again.

My coarse, gray hair was always wet morning, noon, and night. It was awful. That is the reason I get haircuts even if I'm not trying to impress anyone.

A microfiber towel works pretty well to get the bulk of the water out of your hair (you basically squeeze your hair between the towel, like juicing a lemon), and then it can air-dry over the next hour or two just fine.

Long hair dude here. A barber taught me another technique with a normal towel. It's hard to explain and counter intuitive, but you just have to "lightly pat" in different areas instead of shaking or squeezing.

The technique is mostly to avoid damage and to avoid frizz, but it is also surprisingly faster than the "shake" method. Maybe with a microfiber towel like you said it's even better.

Gee. So much effort, for something so mundane. I'd never manage.

Nah, it takes 5 mins. It's faster than blow drying (and no cockroaches involved). And definitely faster and more fool-proof than styling short hair with a hair product, something I'll never go back to.

Strangely appropriate username checks out

Either the daily maintenance for long hair is annoying, or the side effects from not maintaining the hair is annoying.

I find longer hair harder to manage than shorter. Easier to cut it very short every 6 months than wear it super long.

He has a youtube channel, he wants to look presentable.

Maybe he’s just doing it for himself? I personally don’t take care of myself in order to impress other people.

I hack my hair down with trimmers regularly because I find that to be the lowest maintenance option. Beyond a certain length is gets a bit greasy and feels “iffy” easily so needs more care, or starts to look messy unless I make at least a cursory effort with a comb. Properly long and I expect there would probably be other issues: drying it, getting it caught in things (I am quite a klutz)?

Why not even shorter? This time of year cold is a factor, otherwise mainly habit. And fully short (almost or entirely not there) involves blades, I'm not trusting myself not to cut the back of my head to shreds (again, I'm often not physically well coordinated!).

It gets annoying.

Because at some point you'll start tripping over it.

Aside from edge cases like Crystal Gayle, I'd bet few people can grow their hair long enough to trip over.

You’re right, because hair has a terminal length! Your hair falls out naturally and over time the chances are the hairs that fall out will be the long ones, you end up with a practically maximum hair length.

It wont actually happen. Hair length is genetic and they will stop grow for most people at certain length.

How does a hair root know it? Is it because of weight/tension?

It doesn't know, it just seems to because of the overall effect. There is a natural grow/stagnate/drop-or-die/restart cycle for each follicle. This varies from person to person which is why some can grow longer hair than others if they want to. It isn't all in sync, which is why we seem to have relatively constant growth rather than a grow/moult cycle as see in many fully haired animals (actually, they also have the shorter cycle like ours and moulting is just the drop/die part happening sooner for a time).

Because when they get long they are annoying, and high maintenance.

I was thinking the same thing - I've had someone cut my hair maybe 5 times since college - 21 years ago!

That very much depends on what kind of hair you have. Mine is extremely unruly to the point where some trained hairdressers can't make it look acceptable, let alone good. If I were to cut it myself, I'd be limited to either a buzzcut or looking like a shrub I guess. Might not be a problem he has, though.

Good point - been doing buzzcut all my life. Started going bald in my 30s so it now just a razor

or just schedule hairdresser to cut your hair at home, it should be actually cheaper considering rent, fairly standard service for decades, in China grocery delivery offer even taking out the trash service for years, since on the way out they are empty handed anyway, so it improves productivity

Just because you prefer to isolate doesn't mean you should min/max the lifestyle.

He has a youtube channel so he probably does need to impress people.

My father doesn't shower (hasn't showered to my knowledge for the last 10 years). He doesn't leave his property, although he does a lot of outside activity within the property itself. His last medical checkup was in 2001 (to my knowledge). Growing up, he would shower every six months to a year. I lived with him growing up and was ashamed to be seen with him in public. I would try to walk a couple of meters behind him at the grocery store so people wouldn't think we're related.

Nowadays he lives alone, I visit every couple of months due to COVID. I would still be embarrassed to be seen with him in public. When I got married, he I managed to get him to wear a suit but not to shower.

What goes through his mind to do this to himself I don't know. He says he doesn't sweat much (false) doesn't have body odor (false).

Right now he's over 80 years old, but all this started in his forties. I feel bad for him and know I've probably never felt happy being with him in public.

Wait, hasn’t showered in 10 years?? Does he clean some other way? Like a wet towel or something like that? Does he swim?

This is super weird. How has he not developed any skin condition, especially if he is working outside and sweating?

I can understand not going to the doctor though. There are lots of people who go to the doctor only if absolutely needed. It is even more understandable if he lives in the U.S and doesn’t want to deal with insurance companies

You do realize that not showering/bathing was the norm for most of history? There’s no reason to develop skin conditions because of it.

I can feel for this guy. I just spent 8 years without seeing the sun or breathing fresh air. (Jail) I hope he's taking some vitamins. I'm assuming he's doing no exercise?

Welcome back! Weird question- anything you found enjoyable in jail? I sometimes think I’ll thrive in isolationism of sort. Obviously jail is not voluntary but curious how you manage to stay sane.

Interesting question. You could also ask - is there anything positive about jail?

It gives you a lot of time to think about your life, that's for sure. I finally had time to think that while I believed myself to be a good husband, I realized I'd actually been a pretty shitty one. It gave me a chance to finally understand and self-diagnose my mental health issues.

I lost 90lbs in the first six months of jail. I went from an overweight 260lbs to a sane 170lbs. That was from being able to strictly control my diet and do a bit of exercise in my cell each day.

If you love reading, like I do, then you can do a lot of that. The biggest problem was access to books. In some jails, e.g. Cook County Jail, you might have almost no access to books unless someone sends them to you from the outside. And if you read a book in three days like I do, then your friends and family might get exasperated at constantly sending you $20 books for eight years. Also, the guards are going to take all your books off you as fast as they can and throw them away. I read over 800 books in jail.

I went to the Hole three times for 10 days a piece, once for telling my wife in a letter that I'd traded a packet of coffee for a stamped envelope, second time for taking too long trading my rice with someone for a chicken nugget, and third time because the jail had a secret intelligence operation running against me (I got all the documents under FOIA eventually) and so the guards threw contraband into my room, right in front of me, and then arrested me for it.

For 10 days at a time, the Hole isn't so bad. I don't know if I would hate it more if it was longer. My first trip there I wasn't prepared and didn't know how anything worked. They had a great selection of books in the Hole if you could get to them. The next two times I went I distracted the guards and managed to grab books before I got locked into the cell, so my time went a lot better. The first time I went they had a policy of putting you in there naked for the first day, but I sued over it, so the next two times I didn't have to suffer that indignity.

You can usually get some peace in the Hole. Jail isn't good for people like me who don't mind isolationism because 99% of the time you will have a cellmate to start with. If your cellmate cannot or does not want to read, then they will try to talk to you for the 16 hours a day you are in the cell awake together. And when you are out of the cell you are likely in a room the size of a standard living room, but with 50 other guys, so you will get no peace there either. Going to the Hole might be your only chance to get a few minutes of quiet.

Thank you for sharing your unique experience! What are best books you read in jail and/or in your life?

Ooo.. hard question. I read a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. There were only fiction books available in the jail libraries, so that was the bulk of my reading. In fiction my favourites were probably the Southern Reach trilogy and the 3 Body Problem trilogy. I also really liked Shantaram.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shantaram_(novel)

In non-fiction some of my favourites were several biographies of people who had conquered Everest. Superhuman by Dave Asprey. And this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Irresistible-Addictive-Technology-Bus...

I did make a list of every book I read but the jail destroyed it. I feel for the author of Shantaram: "His manuscript was destroyed twice by a prison guard, each time after he had written between 300 to 400-odd pages. Referring to this in interviews, Roberts said the guard was "a very harsh critic", remarking that "if you get past something like that, you can take some criticism when you get it from book reviewers.”"

Oh, these books look interesting! Thank you for the answer. I will try them someday :)

> I sometimes think I’ll thrive in isolationism of sort.

How did you find the Covid-19 lockdowns?

I’m not in US (and neither the person you asked), but I felt very nostalgic when covid situation only began in my city. It wasn’t a lockdown, only an advisory statement and a common fear of unknown. Empty streets, almost no cars passing by, which I could count on my fingers from a balcony back then. I wanted to just walk the city and feel it. Now that it got back to normal, it pushed me back to my apartment. Because when it’s “normal” I rather feel like a bug in an engine full of whirring cogs.

>I’m not in US (and neither the person you asked)

I'm actually in the US, wasn't born here but I've been for 24 years now.

Pardon my english please, I only meant that you != me.

Didn’t mind at all. Moved to rural / country side 15 years ago - so it wasn’t a radical change for me.

I was in the Cook County Jail for the last three years and that was stated to be the epicenter of the entire pandemic at one point. I think it was the end of March 2020 when a guy on my cellblock said that he couldn't smell anything. When my cellmate and I got back to our cell my cellmate started opening any packets of food he had and shoving them under my nose "SNIFF THIS!" Neither of us could smell anything. We all got it bad. I was on an "old man's" deck, so everyone was vulnerable and everyone got sick. The guard from our deck went home and died it from it.

They weren't doing proper tests. They would do very occasional temperature checks, but everyone wanted to avoid being moved to the COVID wing that had been set up as the conditions there were atrocious, so if you had a temperature you would drink a cold drink just before you put the thermometer in your mouth, and that seemed to get you through.

A thousand of us got sick in that one building alone, and ten of us died. They took all the soap away from the facility shortly before things blew up. Someone had beaten their cellmate to death with a soap-filled sock, which is a standard method, and they decided to stop that by removing socks and soap. So we didn't have soap for washing our hands for weeks, and then only a bar the size of your finger to last you for showering and washing your hands for a whole week. Plus, the workers were supposed to sanitize everything, but if you're paying people $1 to work 16 hours a day you can imagine how good a job you get.

I think it was about 9 months into the pandemic when I got my first COVID test. I didn't go to court for a whole year. They keep you in a county jail "to ensure your appearance at court", but I could not go to court because I was in jail. Basically everyone was quarantined, so jail detainees were not allowed in court. We weren't even allowed to use the laptops for Zoom appearances lest we infect the laptops. So, if I had been out of jail I could have gone to court by Zoom, but because I was held in jail I could not go. So COVID took a year of my life that way.

They eventually decided to move to single-man cells and get rid of all the double-bunking, but this requires twice as many cells. They didn't have working cell blocks to house everyone. Doesn't matter. They just opened up all the cell blocks that had been shuttered for years. Oh - none of the electrics, plumbing and heating works? Well, I'm sure someone will fix that eventually. I remember at one point my cell being 3C (35F) for three days. That was really cold. They did move some people when their cell dropped to 19*F. We went for weeks at a time with no hot water, so I was the only one brave enough to take a shower. [I was working on my Wim Hof method]

Basically, it was a fuck-up from beginning to end. Everything in jail is a fuck-up because there is no real oversight of anything. There's no conspiracy, it's just that is institutional laziness, and in jails the "customers" (detainees) can't complain about anything being fucked-up or you'll be punished for it. So as a jail employee you can easily get away with not doing anything that your job requires.

LOL. I've not even scratched the surface with all the things that went on during COVID in the jail. We were also locked in our cells for over 23 hours a day most days. Sometimes we didn't come out for days at a time.

"The jail in Chicago is now the nation’s largest-known source of coronavirus infections, according to data compiled by The New York Times, with more confirmed cases than the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, a nursing home in Kirkland, Wash., or the cluster centered on New Rochelle, N.Y."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/us/coronavirus-cook-count... (and bear in mind that the NYT had to work with inaccurate data supplied by the Sheriff)

Also:

https://patch.com/illinois/oaklawn/burbank-gang-member-accus...

Thank you for telling this story, I find it enlightening.

This guy probably didn't even notice the pandemic.

I first read about this lifestyle in World War Z, a decent book for zombie lore with no connection to what ultimately became the movie.

There is a character in the book named Kondo Tatsumi who is described as an “otaku” which I presume has some approximation to hikkikomori.

Yeah, there's a "dark triad" of Japanese-bred terms for given behaviours that usually occur together.

-Hikikomori is a shut-in.

-NEET is someone who is "Not in Employment, Education or Training".

-Otaku means basically a "super-geek", an enthusiast about something.

They happen a lot in Japanese society and the terms got recognized and coined here, but they are not exclusive to Japan. I believe, as a foreign resident, that the more "Tokyo-like" the conditions of life in a place get, the greater the pressure is to embrace this dark triad.

Going out to spend time in a crowded noisy polluted modern city space full of judging eyes is unsettling, so living as a hikikomori offers some shelter from that. Long work hours and demanding extra expectations, and things like academic anxiety are exhausting so NEET life gives an expensive way out. We are all wired to love to learn about and play with something. In a world where people don't communicate positively with each other much passing by in the streets, and you have to sit in institutions all day with other people suffering these pressures and not communicating positively with us, it's not so strange to lean harder on a fascination with something to cope.

> Going out to spend time in a crowded noisy polluted modern city space full of judging eyes is unsettling

Tokyo really isn't that, though. Of big cities it's probably one of the most comfortable to live in. I live walking distance to Shinjuku station, which is the most transited train station in the world, and rarely does a car pass by my apartment. Other than the occasional ambulance there's basically no audible noise from indoors. Sure, you can walk towards the center and end up in the middle of a big crowd - or you can just not do that and spend most of your time in smaller neighborhoods. Convenience stores provide all basic necessities a minute or two's walk away, you have supermarkets within walking distance without having to delve into any dense crowds. You can take main streets to travel around the city and pass by a bunch of people, or you can step 20 meters into a side street and rarely cross paths with anyone. There's parks to relax in all over the city. And if you don't mind taking a few detours and avoiding rush hour, you can get anywhere in Tokyo via the train network (or even buses!) while getting to sit down the whole way, never ending up in an uncomfortably full car.

That said - yes, people don't talk to each other in Tokyo by default, and that takes a toll. I've had more random people talk to me on the street in my visits to Osaka than in 7 years living in Tokyo. To socialize here, you need to find groups with similar interests. It took me a while to figure out how this all worked, but for three or so years now I've been going to anime music and jazz jam sessions and related events, and I even play in a couple amateur bands (modulo COVID). If you don't put in the effort to find these kinds of groups, you can certainly end up quite lonely in Tokyo.

I'll give you that there are cities that can be worse for this particular part of the problem, but you can't package a product without polluting some. And Tokyo is a city with millions of people-products.

It is a shame that the hikkomori is a trend and becoming popular with COVID.

Eh, I doubt many people become hikikomoris because it's trendy. In Japan, it's usually understood to be a reaction to social pressures, basically dropping out of all the various societal rat races (work, dating, "adulting") simultaneously.

I don't think this was meant as "trendy" as in, people see it as an attractive lifestyle. But rather "it is becoming more of a thing".

> adulting

Is there a word for the opposite? A desire to escape the pressure of being a child/younh adult? The pressure to be a child and do childlike things always annoyed me so...

"Wishing to grow" or "thinking he is already adult" or "being mature for his age" depending on how you want to spin it.

I'm actually attracted to it - the more I get older the more I think it's a lifestyle for me.

I am generally fine only interacting with people face-to-face once or twice a month. All my close friends live states away, so we text or talk. I have my dog who I take on walks. And if I absolutely get tired of being alone (about once or twice a month) I go to a bar and strike up conversation. Sure I do vacations and concerts and the like, but in general I prefer being solo.

I've been this way my whole life. I like it, I definitely don't like doing stuff with people more than once a week, too draining on me. Amazingly I even have a girlfriend. She lives two hours away and we switch off who drives to stay the weekend each month.

I think the relevant question is “why are people dropping out of society in greater numbers than ever before? What changed?”

And another relevant question, is it actually happening more or are we just noticing it more and calling attention to it?

The concept of a hermit is very, very old. Some percentage of humans have always opted out of communal culture for a more isolated experience. Whether that percentage is rising, by how much, and why, is tough to analyze.

Also, the "why" of that question is ripe culture war fodder, which makes any discussion difficult.

>Some percentage of humans have always opted out of communal culture for a more isolated experience.

Society's perception of these people has varied over time too. At one point what we'd consider a shut-in might well have been considered a holy man in certain specific circumstances.

We reached the level of socio-technological development when a single person can happily live without a safety network, such as (extended) family or a community.

Why should one stay in the society, though? Was it ever intrinsically good? I mean slavery/serfdom, wars, racism, social inequality builtin in the culture multiplied by general narrow-mindedness. People love to ignore these inconveniences. The leader considered "the great" conquers the city and kills/rapes/enslaves everybody? Oh, that was normal. But now it's not, and it will never again repeat itself even on the smaller scale. Now society works perfectly. Yet fundamental physical constants and human biology remained the same. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

>why are people dropping out of society in greater numbers than ever before? What changed?

Why not?

You grow being told that you go to school, you get the high grades, you get the good job, make friends, marry the girl, pop a few kids, and you're happy.

But it's never enough. There's always something you did wrong, always more you need to do right. You force yourself to do the things you're expected or you're forced to do the things you're expected to be happy about even when inside you're inside you scream and weep and want it all to just go away. Always more you must be doing it.

Hold on, they will tell you. Things will get better if you keep going, they will tell you.

You look at all the fighting at home. There's never any laughing or fun talk; you dread coming home because one wrong word or a wrong look and it's more shouting. This is what being with the girl you love is like? Turning home from a refuge into a place of fear and terror?

Hold on, they will tell you. Things will get better if you keep going, they will tell you.

Ultimately that turns out to be fine for you. You can't really get bring yourself to really befriend anyone anyways. You have nothing in common with anyone else. You have nothing you can say and nothing you can do that would make their lives just that little bit better. So you say nothing. And you do nothing. You just keep going on and on to the next thing and the next thing after that.

Hold on, they will tell you. Things will get better if you keep going, they will tell you.

But five years later on, and it didn't get better. Ten years on and it didn't get better. Twenty five years later and it never got better. On that day you realize what a sham it all was. It never got better, and it never will get better. They were lying to you all along. There is no better tomorrow.

And then you realize something else. Maybe that's fine to. The sun rises, other people laugh and play, and the world moves on whether you're there or not. So you just keep doing it. No hopes. No dreams. No future. Just never ending Now where you just survive the day, only to wake up and do it all over again until you don't.

So... after all that. Why not?

I realize that it might not help answer why more and more might choose to do so. I can't really offer answers to that. I can only answer why one person might choose to.

Honestly, the reason is really boring and it probably won't be fixed.

When an economy reaches stagnation/saturation people still want to play the capital accumulation game. So they start accumulating money and land that they never intend to use. Money is needed as a medium of exchange for the division of labor. Shelter is a basic need so people absolutely need land.

Because this is an accumulation game, owning more just means you demand more. If the interest rate (or gains from land or whatever financial asset) were 3% then some people end up unemployed because they cannot clear this artificial profitability gate. Employers want to hire whole individuals for as long as possible (ideally a 60 hour week). This means some people go without a job because 2 people working 60 hours can do the job of 3 people (on paper). People (especially the youth) are scared of ending up long term unemployed, so they skill up. They now have to compete with their peers for an artificially limited number of jobs. If they win the competition then they win big. If they lose, they lose big. The government must (they have no choice) intervene. Predictably, there must be an expansion of welfare. Remember how 2 people are doing the jobs of 3? Well, that means a small portion of that extra 1/3 will go to the person that ended up unemployed. It's extremely counterproductive but that is just how things are.

So now you have two options. Play the game, suffer, win and pay welfare for others or never play and get paid welfare (it's not like they want you as their competition anyway).

I have to put emphasis on the fact that the welfare is just a symptom to avoid a rise in extremism. If you get rid of it without treating the symptom then expect to see lots of angry people on the street who have nothing better to do than hate you.

What's the alternative? I mean you buy a house to live there. But in modern (western) society, especially in SF companies, start-ups, and FAANG, it's somehow normalized that you should be spending most of your time at work. 10-15 years ago, Google was praised for offering three meals and a fully equipped gym to their employees.

But why do you work? For work, your employer, and the office's sake, or so you can live comfortably?

I for one bought and live in a house so I can live comfortable. It's where all my stuff is.

Similarly in Japan, there's the work culture and the 'salarymen' culture where you don't go home before your boss does. Since your boss has a boss themselves, it quickly becomes a chain where people 'work' at all waking hours.

But that's not a lifestyle to aspire to, I think.

Anyway TL;DR, think about your life, what you want to do, why you do what you do, why you work, what you spend your time doing. I for one really appreciate owning a house during this pandemic times. I'd be in a much worse place if I either had to go to the office, or if I still lived in a shitty apartment on my own. (fwiw, the hikkomori lifestyle is not for me, but the WFH one works)

From what I heard, the problems with Hikikomori often start in late teenage years. At first the person closes the room doors and refuses to leave. I guess this is the diverge point between Japan and western societies. I in the west no sane parent would allow child to stay in their room without leaving for a week. Be it breaking the doors but no way, I would allow my children's to do that. In Japan looks like the parents allow it, and what's worse it can continue for years. One thing that I learned is that the faster psychological problem is addressed the better. Otherwise something quite small can snowball into life damaging persistent disorder.

The other thing that I heard is prevalence of bullying in Japan, not only in school but in work live too. I was never in Japan so I cannot verify these claims. But in one book I read that this is the cause for most of the hikikomori cases, bullying either by their classmates or by their coworkers in early 20s.

As for this guy, he get a free marketing from this article, so I hope his game will sell well for the time being. But I hope he will try therapy, as I don't see how this could work in the long term...

As I can't see it having been shared before, here[0] is an interesting look into his daily routine that was posted on Youtube roughly a year ago.

It is a nice calm interview and video footage taken by him self on why he lives the way he does.

It got recommended to me after watching a video on the hikikomori phenomenon.

[0] https://youtu.be/pu9Ty9fxTHE

This awfully sounds like me during my high school and college years. Go to school or college, get back home, do stuff for school or college and go to my computer to research software topics that interest me. My health suffered but I learned so much. I wouldn't recommend anyone doing it because essentially you are trading your health for knowledge. Go out for a walk everyday.

> Per ITK, Nito only leaves his apartment to get a haircut and take out the trash, as well as any other activity that absolutely requires him to step outside of the comfort of his room. He gets all of his groceries and whatever else he needs delivered, eliminating the need to go shopping.

Huh, I thought Japan is more developed, in China delivery companies offer taking out the trash service for years, they deliver you groceries and on the way out they take out your trash.

Also what's up with out of home haircuts? That's pretty standard even in poor European countries for hairdresser to come to your own place, it's actually often cheaper than having rented place, because it saves them tons of money plus it's very difficult to tax it.

So as European who lived in China I say meh at taking out the trash and doing haircuts as absolutely required activities to leave the house.

>Huh, I thought Japan is more developed, in China delivery companies offer taking out the trash service for years, they deliver you groceries and on the way out they take out your trash.

You mean a guy comes into your apartment, puts groceries in the fridge or puts them on the table and then proceeds with collecting your trash for you?

they deliver you groceries to your apartment door, where they will also pick up your trash and throw it outside in the bin, they don't enter apartment

years ago when living there used this to deliver groceries to my air purified apartment I didn't leave sometimes for days, it was always nice punch in the nose after opening door and smelling the burning (smoggy) air

In Japan you need to sort all of your trash and then put it in bins before the truck comes. In my apartment complex it was forbidden to put out trash before 22 the night before, and the truck would show up at 8:15~ everyday for different stuff.

As for home haircuts - it's not a thing there as you would rarely invite even friends into your home. It's a space for you and your family.

Japan has very strict and specific garbage disposal rules.

If meticulous sorting is not required and labor cheap, it is easy to offer this kind of trash take out service.

so people are sorting trash at trash bins outside? I see no reason why this service would not be provided, you give the guy your sorted trash and he just put it in correct bin, or am I missing some rocket science here?

Whenever I hear a bit about the hikikomori phenomenon in western news I'm always left wondering how they support themselves. Are these trust fund kids or something? If they're just living in mom's basement or whatever, that seems pretty selfish and pathetic. I guess this happens in the US also, but it's not something people talk about and we don't have a specific term for it.

It may seem selfish from the outside perspective, but there's always more than meets the eye: inability to cope with societal demands?, perhaps the internet has simply just given certain individuals greater capability to connect with ones own "special" interests/people?, hence the disinterest in the outside world: why bother with the "real-world", when all the things that you love about life itself are virtual?

Again, it's a peculiar mode of thinking if you aren't conditioned to it. If you've been the popular kid, smart, social, you've been handed most things to you, or people were always quick to help you, in whichever way. Some never had that.

And well, some just really like their alone time. And aren't we happy for the time that we live in, that such behavior is empowered for those people? If we disregard an active interest in the contribution of others to something, if X is happy, let's be happy for X.

It's parents supporting them most of the time and the only expense is food. I think there is an implicit (and sometimes explicit) understanding that if pushed those people would just commit suicide, so the family is stuck in limbo forever. There is also a lot of shame involved on all sides, so getting outside help is problematic.

We do, they're NEETs. "Not in Education, Employment, or Training".

That’s a very nice aunt he’s got there.

Yeah! That or he has delivered to his door more than just groceries.

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