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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

A neat thing about today's society is that you can be a participant and contributor entirely without ever stepping outside your room. Work a remote job or side gig (doesn't have to be "real work"), order everything from Amazon and Instacart, do check-ups online.

In an emergency (medical, natural disaster, house issue) you'll need to go outside, but otherwise everything is in your room and all interactions are virtual.

You can even get fitness equipment and artificial sunlight so you can stay healthy, and VR googles if you want to experience "outside". That is, assuming you're introverted enough that zero human interaction doesn't affect your mental health. Besides that, you have the entire internet, so it's easy to entertain yourself.

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Never mind human interaction, but I couldn't imagine living without getting a breath of fresh air once in a while - a (real, not simulated) walk or bicycle ride through a park, a forest, by a lake or the sea, a hike in the mountains etc.

you could just open the window to get fresh air, and simulate, via treadmill, the hiking!

Great idea if you want to get someone very depressed. Humans do need to go outside and touch grass from time to time.

humans are already becoming more and more depressed. Makes little difference at this point.

We had very strict Covid restrictions in my country (France) back when it started. Going outside for anything other than walking the dog was complicated, you had to sign a form that said that it was an absolute emergency. Yet, some of my friends told me that those few months were among the best of their life. Some of us really don't need to go outside to feel fulfillment, just the confort of their home.

I spent two years not going outside during this time and I honestly wish it never ended. It was absolutely the best time.

I don't think you can simulate an experience, in a way that it ends up being profound. Reality is always more complex than our understanding, because understanding works by selecting, limiting information. So what these simulations often end up with is an incomplete, hollow imitation of the real thing, often missing a key ingredient yet to be identified. The efforts in human nutrition is a good example of this, always discovering something that was crucially missing from diets.

Simulations work for some, though. But they don't work for others, and this is what I wanted to hopefully make a bit more understandable.

You don't get fresh air in cities. It's different to deeply breathe in air on a trail surrounded by trees with no cars in sight than to stand on the balcony and breathe in the contaminated air of even smaller cities.

I used to only go out to do grocery shopping, but then I started exercising by cycling, and now, when I don't get out near the woods for three days, I get a real crisis. After breathing in fresh air for 30 mins or so I feel much, much better.

All it takes is for other things to overpower this feeling. There are some days when I have a hard time leaving the house. What I feel then is that there are people outside, and their presence and stare and their perfectly friendly greetings feel like a performance in front of a huge audience. I also have a burning feeling inside, like what I have in my eyes when staring into the summer sun. I can bare it for some seconds, but it's really unpleasant, and while it's happening, I can't think about much else than to just flee from it. These strong, acute feelings make it hard to appreciate the subtle joys of the outside world, so I stay inside.

I have a good therapist so these are not huge issues anymore, but I wanted to share the experience. That it really is just a question of incentives.

Some of us vastly prefer being indoors to out. In most places on Earth, I find being outdoors to be intolerable at any time of day/season.

Part of it is my general disdain for humidity, bright light, and temperature excursions. I hate being too cold or too hot, and the sun is almost always far too bright for me. I can’t imagine wanting to go outdoors or preferring it to being indoors, with the single exception of the mojave desert at night in the summer.

I wish I could live deep underground, or in space.

If you are a participant in society, then you aren't a shut in. Nothing of significance happen. No promotion, no falling in love, no completion of a project, no failure but also no success either. That is a shut-in.

To be a shut-in is the inability to access the full spectrum of what life has to offer.

Beside, as anyone familiar with using the internet, there may be so much entertainment, and yet there's nothing on the internet either.

That's your definition of the term. Most people have a broader spectrum they'd classify as shut-in, which you can discover by clicking on the provided wiki article.

Personally I think your definition doesn't actually work, tbh. Where do you draw the line for "no participation in society"? Wouldn't that mean any interaction? Now they can't even order through a web portal, can't comment on social media like reddit etc. You'd need to create an incredibly controlled environment to make that viable, which would remove the self-imposed aspect of it.

Even the article you're commenting on has a hikikomori releasing a game project after several years. He wouldn't be one according to your definition either, even though everyone that knows about him IRL would absolutely call him one.

Nah. I define the hikikomori by necessarily the state of despair. That obviously came through the participation in society.

For the record, a hikikomori makes a video game? Wow. I wish I can do that. It's a matter of effort, of putting a foot in one another. The thing is, developing a video game and releasing it to the public is inherently a social activity, unless you write the code only for yourself.

Things are happening. Playing video games which is what creates despair for me. Nothing happens outside of that video game. Don't get me wrong, playing video is a lot of fun, but it isn't beneficial when there's too much of it.

From reading your other comments in this thread I think you're just equating your experience as a hikikomori to be what it means to be a shut-in.

The currently accepted definition is however merely:

* spending most of the day and nearly every day confined to home,

* marked and persistent avoidance of social situations, and social relationships,

* social withdrawal symptoms causing significant functional impairment,

* duration of exceeding six months,

* no apparent physical or mental etiology to account for the social withdrawal symptoms.

Under these criteria (quoted straight from the linked Wiki article), a person working from home office with no contact can also become a social recluse, even if it's certainly a different experience then what you've experienced

Can't say I overly agree with that, I work full time from home but pretty common for me to not leave my residence for 10 to 15 days at a time, and usually only to purchase groceries or small things to repair or maintain where I live. This is my life for the last 6 or 7 years now.

I have no family to speak of, and I don't have any acquaintances outside of work. And I've never met any of my colleagues face to face. Many of whom have never seen a photograph of me. Most of our interactions are in Mattermost chats, emails, or work items. Most people only know me as ASCII codes rendered on a screen to form words.

If that doesn't qualify me as a shut in, what does?

>To be a shut-in is the inability to access the full spectrum of what life has to offer.

My response to that would be to ask why such things would be appealing in the first place. Why should one that finds no reward in dealing with other people at all, aspire to being promoted or falling in love? Both of which inherently require dealing with other people.

I feel it's what we've evolved to be tbh, regardless of what we've logically concluded.

This is not a valid argument.

The same argument has been used to oppress people since time immemorial, whether they were brown skinned, homosexuals, neurodivergent, Jews, or various other arguments for being “not as we were evolved to be”. (You have targeted one form of neurodivergent people here).

If you ignore the eyeblink of the last 100 years, then we have hundreds of thousands of years of brutal rape, war, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, enslavement, and I’m sure we could think of a few others…

It would be very hard to argue that this is not “what we’re evolved to be”, since we so lustfully pursued these endeavors for literally 100 times as long as we have recorded history.

This argument is basically the same exact sentiment as “because that is Gods will” or “because that is the way it’s always been done” dressed up in a patina of science by including the word “evolved” in it.

A good question. I define that with: nothing happens. Life becomes static. Events don't happen.

That's what I meant by being a shut-in. To be fair, a shut-in to having a life is a range rather than a binary thing.

I don't know. I was OK with not meeting people in real life. Then I started meeting people, and started to find a new dimension in life. I found that I have certain social talent that I didn't know I have.

One thing to take into consideration is that people changes and their preferences changes. They are not static.

Anyway, it's not so much about having photos or being able to see someone's face. It's about something happening. It's kinda hard to define.

Again, no failure, but no success either. No exhilaration, and no happiness. Life is static. Nothing happens. Sadness may happens, but hopefully good things should outweigh that.

>Again, no failure, but no success either. No exhilaration, and no happiness.

It's worth keeping in mind that the only useful judge of success/failure and happiness/despair is you and you alone.

This means your experience and what you consider success and happiness are only valid insofar as you are concerned. They cannot and should not be applied (nor forced, for that matter) upon anyone else.

>there may be so much entertainment, and yet there's nothing on the internet either.

There's plenty on the internet. There may have been more outside, but cultural shifts are decreasing that. So the Internet is becoming surprisingly (and depressively) more competitive.

By any objective measure, there's more books and more video games than you can ever play within your limited lifespan. That is what I meant by there's always something to do but yet nothing.

I partially solved that by actually just learning the science as opposed to watching more educational science video. There's only so much edutainment that you can tolerate.

> That is, assuming you're introverted enough that zero human interaction doesn't affect your mental health.

This is never true. It might even feel this way for years but one day it will become unbearable.

To be honest if I were to become a hermit, I would go live in middle of a forest. Then one can be alone AND enjoy fresh air & nature with no people around. At this point lots of rural places have adequate internet connection for remote work & any entertainment needs.

Cities are kind of pointless if you don't enjoy participating in live activities with other people. Just worse housing at higher price.

Cities provide all the services that a hermit needs in order to live a comfortable life. The forest does not.

Not with that attitude. We have survived for millenia with most humans never seeing a city.

Most humans have historically lived in some kind of community - be it a city, a town, or a village, the point is the same: a community can provide more services that a single person living in the forest can't.

Survive, yes. But survive in comfort? Perhaps not.

I actually think we survived in communities/cities for longer. We lost our rough traits (ie: lots of hair, thick skin, etc...) compared to the rest of apes. So we must have been inside homes for a very long time.

That only really applies to cold climates at best.

Here's the theatrical trailer of Ten Canoes (2006) by Rolf de Heer with modern actors, many of whom are a generation or less from living traditionally without permanent homes, long houses or anything westerners would consider as "inside", retelling a story from their oral history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH_MY8FJuYo

You can get delivery in some parts of the Balinese forest. Internet is Okay.

This is not a neat thing at all.

Perhaps a pun on NEET which whilst not the same thing as a hikikomori is undoubtedly an adjacent concept.

May I ask what makes you think this way?

In this society someone like me that is solitary for the most part can contribute to others, and be compensated for my contributions without having the issue of having to deal with other people directly.

It's not appealing to everyone, but having the option is helpful to those averse to direct interaction. I don't see much downside in having it open.

>I don't see much downside in having it open.

on the contrary, that feels like the step right before the good ol' dystopian VR reality that many sci-fi literature dive into . I don't see much upside to that happening.

Slippery slope fallacy. Shall we ban TV and radio as well because they replace real-life interactions?

No, there is such thing as social TV and radio. Just check out bars.

The VR future tailoring to your imagination is where things really start to go dystopian. It's not exactly a slippery slope since that's what the GP mentioned.

I can't foresee something like Ready Player One happening on a large scale though.

My preference for not interaction with anyone is the exception, not the norm. For what you fear to come to pass, the the opposite would have to become true. Why would people in general shift their preference towards isolationism?

>Why would people in general shift their preference towards isolationism?

Because it's convinient. It's always because it's convinient. We've had so many issues in society happen because the alternative is more convinient.

And yes, isolation is convinient. No worries about interpersonal insecurities, no worries about troublesome encounters, entertainment can be tailored to your tastes instead of as a compromise of the group, and minimum social pressure to do what you are not comfortable with.

I can ask the contrary, why wouldn't people shift towards isolationism if they otherwise had their own automomy and comfortable living.

I would surmise that the answer would lie in just how comfortable people can make themselves without any other sort of interaction. My first instinct would be to say that there are many that wouldn't, if the migration into large and expensive metropolis's such as New York, London, Paris, or Tokyo are of any indication.

For the ambitious, it's quite unlikely for one to strike greatness without support from others. Anyone is capable of anything, but no one is capable of everything. That ability to connect and network with others so that their skills and resources can be utilized to achieve feats that would otherwise be impossible alone. And I doubt that those without any sort of ambition are the majority.

Plus we saw major advances towards that sort of reality during the Pandemic, and yet those changes haven't had quite the staying power in society as some had predicted. More and more people are congregating again in various ways.

Hence why I say that I doubt that we'd see some dystopian reality where people are going to be plugged into VR all the time.

>I don't see much downside in having it open.

The downside is that unlike in a society where that isn't an option people aren't forced to socialize and then they adapt. Having everything catered to shut-ins normalizes pathologies, something common across a lot of modern internet subcultures.

It enables a sort of Peter Pan like existence in which people stay perpetual kids without ever having to take on the obligations of adulthood. And it's becoming so common that in countries like SK who are at the front of this people have replaced starting families and having sex with adopting dogs and cats. In an entire society like this who takes care of them and delivers their packages when they're all 60 years old is a frightening question. (and a very real one in the near future)

If it was an odd-ball thing it wouldn't matter, but social isolation and delaying or ignoring responsibilities of adult social life are now mainstream issues.

> are forced to socialize and then they adapt.

Do they? Or are they just suffering silently?

That does assume thought that adaptation is the only outcome though. But requires at least two conditions to be met; that the individual in question can adapt, and that society would accept them. What happens when one or both conditions are unfulfilled?

On the obligation of adulthood, do you mean to say that starting a family is an obligation? If so then I wonder if perhaps people choosing not to do so may not be a bad thing. My parents married because that's what you're supposed to do as an adult, and it was something I know my mother regretted later in life. Some people start families and rise to the challenge but it's tragically common that they utterly fail as well.

600,000. That's the number of unique cases the various Child Protective Agencies in the US contends with each year. The US CDC estimates that 1 in 3 women will experience violence committed to them by an intimate partner, and 1 in 7 men will experience the same. Unhappy partnerships aren't exactly rare.

I suppose that does beg the question if it's better to have fewer families with a higher portion that are stable, or more families in general even if it means a higher proportion of them will be broken or unstable.

Agreed. I've seen enough miserable and dysfunctional families (which by far are the majority of families) for me to just clock out from the notion of marriage.

Life is short and I've got shit to do and places to be, I ain't got no time for that concentrated bullshit.

Because eventually, the machine stops.

To the last 3 words, you should probably add a link, or at least author and year ;)

Thanks ;)

>"Having the option is helpful to those averse to direct interaction"

Perhaps it's more worth your while to examine why you're so opposed to interacting with other people. It is undeniably unhealthy to isolate one to such a degree as you're describing perpetually. (And this is coming from a deeply introverted person—I scored in the 5th percentile for extraversion when I took the Big 5/OCEAN assessment. But even I feel the effects of isolation before too long.)

For me?

Part of it is just finding interaction with other's to be exhausting. My parents forced to go out and about rather often in my youth, usually under threat of violence. Even after they stopped have any real power over my I was dragging myself to outings that I utterly loathed doing. To this day I cannot look at a golf course without my stomach becoming unsettled.

Some of it is irrational fear but all emotion is irrational. Some of it is lingering anger from the agency I lacked for so long.

Whether it's unhealthy or not, ultimately I think matters little. At the end of the day I'm the only that it affects. And I think the tradeoff of having my silence is worth that cost, and I find no real impetus to change that.

industrial society and its consequences

Urge to move to Montana log cabin rising! But without the crazy stuff that follows.

That seems anything but “neat”

> A neat thing about today's society is that you can be a participant and contributor entirely without ever stepping outside your room

You can be solely because others don't even have the option.

I think it’s horrifying, instead of neat. We are social animals that need contact with each other. No amount of textual, voice, or video communication can replace real human interaction in person.

> That is, assuming you're introverted enough that zero human interaction doesn't affect your mental health.

There are zero people who fit this description, sorry. Anyone who claims not to be affected by loneliness is lying.

I hate dealing with people and find solitude to be absolute bliss.

The less I have to interact with another human the better, buying drinks from a vending machine is far better than dealing with a cashier at the convenience store.

>"A neat thing"

That's not the word I would use lol

"neat"

Except shut-ins rarely procreate, and just that will be a huge hit on their average contribution to society. It's cool if an individual finds their niche, but as a generational trend it seems highly problematic to me.

> Except shut-ins rarely procreate,

Do they mentor others and pass skills on though?

I've travelled in Japan and met childless swordmakers and glass blowers who have apprentices and former students who have their own aprentices.

You're aware not all things are due to nepotism I assume?

Ah yes, the ongoing conundrum of trying to maintain a clearly very unsustainable quality of life while also increasing the population numbers to ensure the productivity needed to sustain the large and quickly aging parts of the population.

Fun times ahead.

You're welcome to procreate and compensate the head count yourself if the idea of someone not siring children disturbs you so.

I do not agree that breeding should be equated with contributing to society.

As cynical as this will sound, breeding is contributing to society in the sense that you provide productivity to it. Ensuring your retirement, in essence.

In many (western inspired) parts of the world, the retirement scheme depends on productivity being increased for every generation. This because every generation that retires is larger than the previous generation that retired. The population growth drives the need for an increase in productivity.

You can increase the productivity by either increase the size of the working population, or make the working population more productive per individual. Up until recently we actually did both. That's why our elderly now can enjoy VERY comfortable retirements compared to two generations ago.

For us, those who are now working, it doesn't look great. We're not having children and it's getting hard to squeeze more productivity out of us.

Here according to the latest projections, I'm not supposed to retire until I'm 69. And this is with today's data. I fully expect it to increase further. Those that were born in 2015 or later are expected to work until they are 71, according to today's data.

The problem is that I don't think that on average we can work until we hit 70. My father's generation was quite broken right about around 65 when they retired.

Short-sightedly, increasing the (young) population is increasing productivity as you said, but when thinking a tiny bit deeper about it, we're already consuming each year twice the resources Earth can provide us, so continuing on this "econo-societal runaway" is completely bonkers.

The population should imperatively shrink, it should already be at most half of the current size.

With this completely different viewpoint, the real contributors to society wellness are those who have less (or no) children.

I absolutely agree with you. 100%.

The problem is how we can make this transition from a large population to a smaller one with as little suffering as possible.

As I said, here we are expected to work into our 70s on average already, which just will not be possible. At some point there won't be enough resources to care for those who can't produce. We need a substantial increase in productivity per individual for society to keep working while the population numbers are decreasing, and that doesn't seem to be happening.

Yeah... the consensus is that the more we wait before reducing willingly the population, the more it will happen suddenly and violently (wars, famines) at the snap point (or at snap points, plural).

Not pretty thoughts, but just mechanistically unavoidable...

I'd say, let's reduce our comfort, let's do it now, yeah we'll be poorer and all. Still better than the alternative.

The point is to go out of our way to remain (and become more) altruistic and united at a global scale... in order to spread evenly the diminishing resources.

If everybody gets poor in a similar way, it will reduce anger and unrest. Or avoid wars, if that's a country that would have felt wronged otherwise.

We are not consuming more resources than the Earth can provide. The idea that our population is too big is subjective and arbitrary.

The Earth can easily support 2-10x as many humans as presently live on it.

Our way of life, however, is quite wasteful and inefficient.

(First, "We are not consuming more resources than the Earth can provide", is a false statement, as right now every year we (the whole Humanity) consume more than what the Earth can regenerate. It's an established fact. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day)

Nah, it's both, not either, of these elements of the solution.

Only lowering our way or life (in your scenario, lowering it at an unimaginable level), while being twice as many, is unacceptable, as we'll deal with absence or regression of medicine (too costly in energy or resources), drastic reduction or extinction of research and exploration, and end of the "global village" concept because of too expensive communication and transport. Education is at stake too.

And only reducing how many we are is as unacceptable, as it implies too much lives lost too suddenly, of course.

It must be a combination of both.

So, the point I raised stays true, we need (also) to reduce the population. But not only.

Right now I'm thinking I found the right way to explain the problem: even if you (and me, and a handful of other groups of humans) would agree to live like ancestral tribes, it would still not be the case of a lot, the vast majority, of people. And they would be much, much angrier of this plan, than of some alternative plan, e.g. to reduce the population and get altogether to a moderately poor level of life (not as drastically poor as if we keep on procreating. Say, way poorer than US citizens, but still wealthier than the average inhabitant of a Third World country).

And how to deal with social unrest is crucial, in how we'll solve the equation.

It should be fairly obvious that any system that depends on endless growth is an unsustainable pyramid scheme. Not the kind of thing we should be basing society on.

I'm not blind to this very, almost blindingly, obvious problem. I've posted comments on the subject before, where I've strongly supported the idea of a decreased population.

I just don't see a way to decrease the population levels in a way that doesn't lead to a collapse of our way of life.

> As cynical as this will sound, breeding is contributing to society in the > sense that you provide productivity to it. Ensuring your retirement, in > essence.

I believe death does this. Breeding does not.

Good work HN, your inability to read and think strikes again!

I don't think that lack of productivity as a society is what drives our suffering. There is enough stuff.

The work you are talking about, that we are supposed to do well in our 70s, is just a means to determine how we distribute our stuff, not a means to create more stuff.

Then you won't have a society pretty soon.

That scenario is realistically impossible with the current size of the world population and the fact the majority will always try to procreate.

I think if you and your significant other have good genes, it can be beneficial for society, humankind, if you procreate.

More change to get healthy, smart kids when might achieve great things.

It's been a long time that Humans don't solve problems through natural Evolution anymore...

Thanks to medicine, the burden of ailments on individuals has become negligible, and moreover the speed at which our culture and technology evolves is incomparable to the speed of genetic selection.

Education has arguably way more impact on the success of an individual than their genes.

> a generational trend it seems highly problematic to me.

why is it problematic? Procreation is not the be all and end all of one's purpose in life.

>Except shut-ins rarely procreate, and just that will be a huge hit on their average contribution to society.

it's already decreasing in first world countries, so this isn't a problem limited to shut-ins.

TIL shut-ins could remain true to the lifestyle, procreating without ever physically meeting, as long as they live within ~24h shipping distance of each other. (compare "A Boy and His Dog", 1975)

(for those not into the whole recombination thing, I haven't heard anything about human cloning yet, but there was a high-level equine competition recently in which six of the competitors shared their genotype)

Tbh, I never understood why the phenomenon of Hikkikomori, which is the Japanese version of NEET (people who don't work or study) has captured such a large amount of the public's imagination, with multiple fictional works made about them.

Just take a look at the World Bank's stats on what percentage of people are NEET:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.NEET.ZS

Here we can see, Japan stands at 3.1%, one of the absolute lowest, while the US is at 11%, Italy at 15%ish. It would stand to reason this would be a much more prominent I'm not sure the difference between these stats and public perception is due to different measurement criteria, or due to cultural differences about societal expectations.

definitely culture expectations. Japan is a very conformist society that expects every member to contribute. So someone more or less dropping out is a big deal, for them and their family

China is similarly an Asian country, with demanding social roles and other struggles as well. They have significantly more people and landmass, and so, opportunity for the diversity of phenomenons like this, and yet, they are much less visible than Japan's. The difference, I think, is in PR. Whatever Japan has, they turn it into pop culture, and they use that pop culture to strengthen the idea that Japan is somehow interesting. The feeling I have about China is that they rather want to project one specific image.

So I feel it's less about how the society is structured, and more about how each country positions itself.

> and yet, they are much less visible than Japan's.

I feel that's by design. China's been more hostile to the West than Japan over the past decades than Japan/South korea. In some ways, the red scare never truly ended.

It is indeed PR, as you said. I'm sure it's even worse in China, but China wants to look like having a pristine image (due to the above situation). Japan is definitely closer to the western mentality where they would turn such a story into an episode of Hoarders or something of that vein if they could. There are indeed a dozen decently known anime based around the Hikkimori lifestyle.

I think it’s because a NEET in other places, like Italy or the US, is not a shut in 99% of the times

I'm not sure that's true. There's a lot of young people (particularly boys) who sit home at their parents and do nothing but play video games and never go out:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...

I'm not going to go deeper in the topic as it has been discussed to death in many places, but I do believe that there's a metric ton of young people who are disengaged from society.

For sure they are correlated but it's not 1:1

There's a huge difference between NEET (which basically everyone goes through periods of) and complete shut-in.

The way I see it, Japan is an Asian country, and fascination with Asian countries has a long history[0]. The other thing is that Japan has a vivid pop culture since WW2 and really ramped up its soft power effort, of which a significant aspect is the export of the Japanese culture in general [1].

The phenomenon OP is talking about is excellently captured in the "Thing, Japan" meme as well [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan

[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thing-japan

That's not what hikikomori are. Hikikomori shut themselves in and interact with the outside (real) world as little as possible. You don't even have to be a NEET to be a hikikomori, and there's no implication of social withdrawal with NEETs.

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