from Hacker News

The hikikomori in Asia: A life within four walls

by reqo on 5/25/24, 2:10 PM with 331 comments

  • by neonate on 5/25/24, 4:30 PM

  • by ilaksh on 5/25/24, 3:55 PM

    I think this is really a spectrum and they are focusing on some more extreme aspects of it. But it is definitely not just an Asian thing and I believe to some degree this type of social withdrawal has affected perhaps a very significant portion of our society.

    I have definitely been socially isolated my entire life to some degree or another. But much more so in adulthood. Again, I suggest that this is relatively common, not something that happens to only a few million people.

    One aspect that is being glossed over is the amount of socialization or let's call it "pseudo-social" activity that is happening over the internet for these people.

    I'm someone who generally does not have friends, leaves the apartment literally only a handful of times per month to take the garbage out and maybe buy groceries once or twice a month if I am trying to save money versus Instacart.

    For me it comes down to money. I have a health issue that makes me fatigued etc. and don't have money for health insurance. I don't have money to go to restaurants or otherwise waste going out. So I stay home.

    Because I'm always in a poor health and financial state, I feel uncomfortable trying to do any "real" socialization.

    But I have always been trying one way or another to get to a point where I have a "real" online business that allows me to actually thrive. Such as buying a car and a house, getting health insurance and addressing my health issues, or paying taxes.

    But what I have managed so far is usually just enough to scrape by. There have been some minor successes here and there but rarely have I ever felt like I had enough to truly meet my basic needs such as the health concerns or financial stability.

    Anyway, I think it's easy to get in a position with health and financial challenges, maybe just a series of low-paying contracts, where some degree of social isolation is just practical and realistic.

  • by admissionsguy on 5/25/24, 4:27 PM

    I think the main thing is the lack of on-ramps. Once you have fallen out of the social circulation, there is basically no way of going back. Unless you are able to stay within an extremely narrow range of behaviours (in terms of not being weird, basically speaking expected thinks in expected tone of voice and body language), nobody wants to associate with you. And since about the only way to learn these things is to be around people who already behave in the "right" way, a vicious circle arises.

    It has nothing to do with debt, wealth or earnings. Completely independent things. People had it worse at every time in history in almost every place.

    It has nothing to do with social media / internet. It just something people tend to fall into when they withdraw, and have no trouble abandoning as soon as the life outside becomes tenable again.

  • by marcyb5st on 5/25/24, 3:58 PM

    From my personal experience (I also went through a very dark period in my life and just recently climbed out of the hole I dug myself) I guess people are realizing that working hard won't get you anything close to what previous generations had. Once that settles in it's hard to push yourself to do basically anything.

    Additionally, I also believe that feeling is compounded by social media where selection bias only shows you cherry picked moments where it seems other people are living the life you won't get.

    Finally, among the younger generations there is a lot of climate change dread going around.

    For me it was a combination of all these factors and to this day I can't pinpoint exactly what was the trigger, but after COVID lockdowns I simply kept social distancing.

  • by ThalesX on 5/25/24, 4:27 PM

    I've recently finished reading "Civilized to Death"[0] and I can't help feel there's some truth to some of the ideas.

    One idea that stuck with me is that shit zoos have concrete cages for the monkeys, and they're miserable in them, showing similar signs to modern humans (depression, addition, anger), whereas nice zoos try to keep the monkeys in similar environments to those that they evolved for, where the monkeys are pretty much chill. The author argues that we're constructing concrete zoos for ourselves and in the process making ourselves miserable. We're so far detached from what our bodies and minds evolved for, that it's an alien environment for our species.

    If this holds truth, it's really no wonder that the more we pile on and the further we stray from our true species' preferences, the more horrible we will feel, and this hikikomori is a fine illustration of that.

    As some comments pointed out 'what about the great depression', 'what about 'nuclear war', "don't you like your electricity"? These are all human patches for human made problems. I don't think the correlation between progress and wellbeing is as clear cut as some would like to see it.

    [0] https://www.amazon.com/Civilized-Death-What-Lost-Modernity/d...

  • by tombert on 5/25/24, 7:44 PM

    I have a job and I don't live alone, so I don't think I fall into the hikikomri definition in any real sense of the word, but I will say that remote work kind of made me adjacent to it. I sort of have a strong distaste to leave my house a lot of the time since 2020.

    I still do leave my house, I have a job that requires me to be in the office for two days a week, but it's something I dread every single week for a variety of reasons. There's something bizarrely comforting about just staying in your bedroom all day and pretending the rest of the world doesn't exist, and it's kind of addictive.

    Going outside and having a social life is usually worth it, but it's also kind of intimidating; I have to take a shower, get on the train with a bunch of strangers and not do anything too weird because of course I care a tiny bit what these strangers think about me for whatever reason, go into an office with people who are not-quite-strangers and work extra hard to not be too weird or say anything that might upset someone and keep my desk clean and have meetings with managers who could fire you immediately for any reason they want...it's all exhausting.

    I still try and make an effort to leave my house sometimes, but I kind of get why hikikomori do it.

  • by ItCouldBeWorse on 5/25/24, 4:59 PM

    In my experience, life-experience increases the self-isolation. To the point that the old-folkshome are often halls of quiet, as everyone knows what horrible behavior perfectly normal people are capable and do not wish to interact. The guy who conspires against everyone at work, that manager that harvests others laurels, the longer you life, the more you understand how many will flip on you in this prisoner dilemma of a society. So they all barricade themselves in suburbia, sniper one another through HOA letters and claim to do it for the family, till its time to inherit and even the core family falls apart.

    Maybe some hiki is just more aware of what a lonely hellish life it is to be part of western society. And chooses to opt out. Lay flat. Assumes the party escort position. If he would at least consume drugs in there, but its just ramen and colored light.

  • by random9749832 on 5/25/24, 5:11 PM

    When you are a teenager it is so easy to treat your time as if it is unlimited and start sinking 1000s of hours into some MMO or other games that before you know it you are in your 20s with no girlfriend, job, skill or self-confidence.

    Then you got Japanese entertainment like Hatsune Miku, idols and visual novels/anime that take advantage of lonely people with make-believe girlfriends.

  • by RoboTeddy on 5/25/24, 3:34 PM

    In all the cases in the article it looks like shame plays a big role. I wonder if hikikomori is caused by a loop of [adverse circumstances that cause the person to feel shame] -> withdrawal to avoid shame -> being ashamed of having withdrawn [loop]

  • by HPsquared on 5/25/24, 3:31 PM

    It's definitely happening in the West too. The juice isn't worth the squeeze for a lot of people.

  • by Ozzie_osman on 5/25/24, 4:18 PM

    I know everyone is different, and saying things like "just get a job" or "just go outside" are easy to say and very hard to do when you're stuck in that type of loop. But, I will say, things that I've found will help are having some purpose (work, taking care of someone or a pet, anything), exercise (even walking outdoors), and even just getting your biological clock where you wake up and get exposed to sunlight (vs sleeping all day and staying up all night).

    Getting enough activation energy to do any of those things is difficult, but I've found that if you can muster it, it can help break the cycle.

  • by hypeatei on 5/25/24, 7:02 PM

    I think what's missed in a lot of these discussions is your upbringing. Our society changed very quickly in the last 30 years and parents may not be providing the proper "foundation" for their children since they didn't grow up with all this stuff. Even if you had shitty parents before, you'd probably do alright since all of society in past times was based on in-person interactions and there wasn't endless media consumption at your fingertips.

    Personally, my parents were very immature, divorced, and generally didn't set me up for a healthy/balanced social life. I haven't completely given up; I work, maintain loose contact with a few friends, and basically just "doing my time" until I die.

  • by motohagiography on 5/25/24, 5:10 PM

    our baseline entertainments are better than the long tail of negative interactions one persists through to get to the great ones. in doomscrolling vs. disappointment, more people are picking doomscrolling.

    older than the examples, but I have done this. live alone on a large rural property, walden style, tech comp no family, have online interactions for remote work, old irc channels, take some sport, fitness, and music training as kind of weekly rhythm, family lives in other time zones. it was an ideal I thought I could achieve and then have it to share with others. relationships and friendships with any personal connection or intimacy still manage to fail, lots of reasons but I'm the constant. only way to sustain anything is to keep it at a polite distance with no expectations.

    issue i suspect is that meaning comes from the cohering and persistence of relationships, and without that persistent mutual understanding, meaning just seeps away and leaves a flat state of inertia. no advice other than to avoid this example. I sympathize with these young people, it's as though they don't see a present or future in which there is meaning for them, or in which they are a participant, and so they are just withdrawing and waiting for the next life instead of engaging this one. it's a unique and recently invented trap, avoid it as best you can.

  • by MathMonkeyMan on 5/25/24, 4:33 PM

    > He dare not come in company, for fear he should be misused, disgraced, overshoot himself in gesture or speeches, or be sick; he thinks every man observes him, aims at him derides him, owes hint malice.

    - Hippocrates?[1]

    [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskLiteraryStudies/comments/68zg38/...

  • by getpost on 5/25/24, 6:37 PM

    Several adults in my friendship circle (retired or semi-retired) have evolved to spending nearly their entire waking lives online. They're able socialize normally, but they don't make the time to do that as often as in the past. This is tantamount to hikkormoridom.

    One friend went to visit two other friends who live together in New Mexico. He imagined they'd be out and about doing stuff during his visit, but the hosts remained preoccupied by their online activities. The visitor could have stayed home and texted.

  • by BaculumMeumEst on 5/25/24, 4:27 PM

    It’s fun to watch mass media inflict so much harm on people with irresponsible reporting designed to terrify, outrage, and misinform you for profit, and then turn around and report on the fallout.

    Maybe fun isn’t the right word.

  • by karaterobot on 5/26/24, 1:17 AM

    A lot of discussion in this thread assumes that hikikomori are a very new phenomenon. I see that they appear in the psychiatric literature as early as 1978. I also see that the number of hikikomori in Japan varies by survey, and is hard to measure, but still seems to be roughly the same as it was in 2010, if not a little lower.

    What to make of that? Because the most obvious and most common explanations for them seems to be the internet, smartphones, and anxiety about the future (global warming, the economy, etc.). But if those were the reasons for hikikomori, I'd assume that the number of hikokomori would have increased significantly in the last 15 years, not stayed roughly the same, as it has. The gravity of the internet in our culture feels like it has increased exponentially. Climate fear doesn't feel exponentially higher, but subjectively it still feels a lot more widespread to me. Why not commensurately more people living as hikikomori, if the phenomenon supposedly tracks these factors?

  • by GlibMonkeyDeath on 5/25/24, 6:33 PM

    Hmm, no one is talking about the enabler for this - modern wealth. In the not so distant past, refusing to get up and face the world would result in starvation. Survival required people to be more social.

    As a parent of two adult children who are both working, I can't imagine enabling this (even though I could.) Sure, if my kids were truly disabled that would be another story, but it seems the hikikomori are just unhappy with the world. Enabling them to spend their lives doomscrolling or playing games is actively harmful.

  • by forinti on 5/25/24, 5:28 PM

    In South America it's become common to hear about adolescents and young people (mostly men) who spend all their time on video games and neither work nor study.

    I imagine this to be a very different phenomenon from Japan, because the culture is so different. In South America I think it is just general disengagement and disillusion with society and work environments in general. For most people life is having a bad job that pays very little and you have to spend hours on a crowded bus to get to a pretty horrible part of town. Living in the virtual world is much more comfortable and pleasant.

  • by jmyeet on 5/25/24, 3:53 PM

    People aren't stupid. What we have in the world in general (not just Asia) is a crisis in hopelessness.

    People are facing crippling student debt (depending on your country), one bad medical incident away from being homeless, crippling housing costs and wages that barely cover costs such that you need 1-2 "side hustles" just to make ends meet.

    It's really no wonder people are checking out. It's also no wonder that people aren't having children either. They simply can't afford to.

    One common counterargument to this is that consumer spending is up but that really makes my point: people are spending now instead of saving because they have no future.

  • by matrix87 on 5/26/24, 5:57 AM

    Not a hikikomori, I work and kind of look forward to the office and do fun stuff rarely... but I wish there was an easier way to find a "way in" in the bay area

    Also another weird thing I realized after moving: cultural distance and ethnicity matter. The schools spend a bunch of time forcing people to sing songs about it not mattering, but psychologically it matters a lot to people. I'm a secular jew but am considering becoming a religious one just for that

  • by im3w1l on 5/25/24, 5:06 PM

    I think it may be due to some sort of "outcome compression". The life of working a bottom tier-job isn't materially better than a life of not working at all.

    One solution I've been thinking of is that maybe there needs to be some kind of state-provided minimum life. Almost like opt in communism.

    If you opt in then you get an 8h/day job automatically. Doesn't matter if you don't have any skills at all. The job will be guaranteed safe and non-humiliating (no sex work and if you are a vegetarian you don't have to work as a butcher etc). In exchange you get enough food, clothes and shelter to provide for yourself and children (assuming two incomes), entertainment (exchangable for cash equivalent), pension, health insurance, upskill opportunities, and some money on top. If you have negative net worth when enterring the program, your loans will gradually decrease (this could be done as some combination of the state paying them off for you and the loan giver being stiffed).

    You can opt out at any time you want.

  • by amonith on 5/25/24, 8:39 PM

    As a man with a full time job (remote), a wife and a kid under way I cannot really fathom having energy for more social activities (except meeting some friends or family at most once a month, reluctantly). Am I a hikikomori? I kind of relate to them. My wife also doesn't meet anyone else ever. Now that I think of it - neither do our parents or most people living in their village. It's all work + church at most.

    Maybe as humans we don't really need social interaction THAT much? I mean how do you explain people who seem to thrive living off-grid? We do need jobs and some basic communication skills for sure at least to maintain the current standard of living but maybe not for socializing. Some comments here kind of sound like "extrovert propaganda" - same people who cry for the return to office because they cannot imagine that people can live differently.

  • by itronitron on 5/25/24, 4:22 PM

    The social home is a great idea and I am glad to hear that it works. It would be interesting to compare social communication styles between people in the social home with social communication among extroverts (in another situation). I expect they are quite different but it would be good to know how they differ.

  • by blopker on 5/25/24, 4:42 PM

    > He said he didn’t respond to friends’ messages or confide in anyone, feeling like nobody would understand anyway.

    I feel this. I think people would call me an introvert, but I'm probably just an over-thinker. It's casual conversation that seems to be exhausting (or uninteresting?) to me. Once I'm in a space where I can talk openly about more abstract topics I start to enjoy it. Getting there just often seems like too much work though.

    I tried therapy, meditation, 'wellness' apps. It all either felt too 'me' focused, or too detached. I like this site because people here seem to share what they are actually thinking, and are eloquent enough to capture interesting nuance. I don't always agree with it, but there's a level of authenticity to where I always learn something about the human condition. I wanted more of that.

    [This is kind of a plug, but whatever]

    I've spent the last few years in a deep-dive around why we seem to be collectively getting lonelier over time. I started a non-profit[0] to house this research. It's evolved into a platform where we host these support groups. Anyone can join, it's free, and as long as you stick to the community guidelines [1] anyone is welcome to join.

    For me, it's a place to get out of my head. To hear from real people who don't generally feel like their voice matters. I know from years in tech management that these are in fact the most interesting people to talk to.

    I've never really talked about Totem here because I think it might be too 'woo-woo' for this crowd, but if any of that landed for you, come check us out. If you don't like it, I'd love to know why. My personal email is in my profile.

    We are a non-profit, grant-funded, and open-source[2] organization. Feedback of any kind is welcome. My hope is to become something like a public utility for these spaces. We're also looking for engineers to help make an app out of this.

    [0]: https://www.totem.org [1]: https://www.totem.org/guidelines/ [2]: https://github.com/totem-technologies/totem-server

  • by grugagag on 5/25/24, 4:31 PM

    Im curios if population desnsity may have any corelation to this or not. Im also thinking that the culture is shunning a certain personality type or people with some mental struggles that their only way to adapt is to withdraw.

  • by hiAndrewQuinn on 5/25/24, 5:50 PM

    I think I came pretty close to ending up like this kind of person a few times. Each time I got out it was by basically taking a hammer to my superego and doing some shit I used to consider "unforgivable", like being long term unemployed, or engaging in long term substance abuse, or moving countries basically on a whim.

    And, if that's what it takes, then I stand by it. If your life choices are "hikikomori" or "scumbag", you'd be an idiot to not choose scumbag. Ideally you can get out of it through less destructive means, but let's not pretend like closing yourself off entirely from the world is better than having a problematic but loving relationship with it in all its colors.

  • by conwy on 5/25/24, 5:28 PM

    Why to complain? Seems like heaven to me.

  • by 39896880 on 5/25/24, 5:38 PM

    If this topic interests you, you might enjoy the book “Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation” by Michael Zielenziger: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24765707M/Shutting_out_the_s...

  • by Xeyz0r on 5/28/24, 12:37 PM

    Sometimes it is just too much to handle for me too. And I just shut down. For a week or two. And then trying to come back. And that period is a painful one

  • by anovikov on 5/25/24, 3:55 PM

    If their parents are not doing anything about it when it's their direct responsibility, how can anyone expect anyone else to fix it? If the culture allows for this, the problem is with the culture.

  • by Borrible on 5/25/24, 5:11 PM

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

    "Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk - that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh - a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs."

    ...

    "Vashanti's next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? - say this day month."

  • by uwagar on 5/25/24, 7:35 PM

    bartleby the scrivener felt like a hikikomori too. anybody felt so?

  • by AtlasBarfed on 5/26/24, 12:22 AM

    The solution is probably early exercise.

    Japanese and south Koreans are canaries in the coal mine for end stage urbanization.

    There really isn't free roaming and a lot of greatly reduced activity compared to rural areas.

    Exercise counteracts depression, imposes a routine of physical mental social interaction with the real world under controlled circumstances.

    But end stage capitalism doesn't value replacement level population growth, so associated programs for child development in urban settings are even less valued.

    Being an environmentalist I always dislike capitalism economics and it's inability to value preservation even if the future of the human race, but it seems that the end state of consumerism and urbanization is demographic collapse.

  • by reverendjames on 5/26/24, 2:53 AM

    He should give the bottom bunk to his grandma.

  • by asdf6969 on 5/26/24, 8:02 PM

    This is how I want to live after I FIRE

  • by Joel_Mckay on 5/25/24, 3:49 PM

    Dr. John B. Calhoun's work with "The Beautiful Ones" may unfortunately generalize to human civilizations:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOFveSUmh9U

  • by SoftTalker on 5/25/24, 3:54 PM

    It's an interesting article I don't know why it had to be presented in such a cumbersome graphical style. I tried the trick of changing "www" to "lite" in the URL but it didn't work for this one. I stopped reading about halfway through.

  • by fuzztester on 5/25/24, 8:36 PM

    Article has such a weird UI.

  • by Hikikomori on 5/25/24, 5:00 PM

    I hope they have a roof as well.