I'll guess that the biological roots are the same as for any learned avoidance of painful stimuli. When people make social contact and repeatedly and predictably find that it is negative, they learn to withdraw from it. They try withdrawal once, it relieves some of the pain, and it does so over and over. It's the same as a dog who avoids the kid who kicks it. I'd bet that the dog would make a good animal model to investigate the biology ... but I'm not sure it's worth learning at that price.
You might be able to "cure" the dog of withdrawal by changing its chemistry such that it no longer avoids the abusive child. But if the child is still out there that isn't necessarily a favor to the dog.
Once you hit adulthood, most able-bodied, able-minded people are expected to be "contributing members of society". But that definition is pretty nebulous - it doesn't have to be society's definition - whatever you set to be your own expectations for success. If you repeatedly fail to meet those standards you set for yourself, it can cause you to turn this feeling of pain and frustration from failure inwards, towards yourself.
At some point, you simply withdraw entirely, because you are afraid of feeling the pain of failure that you trained yourself to associate with attempting to meet your goals.
This is often compounded by well-meaning people trying to shame you into doing something: "You can't live like this! You HAVE to get a job!" - sort of "support" from family members or friends.
Or, they might throw blame: "Why don't you work harder? Stop wasting your time doing nothing!"
I think this may be a significant factor on why this symptom appears much more common in Japan, a mono-cultural society with very high expectations to conform. Also perhaps why it's growing overall, as the general prospects for younger people seem to be worse than the previous generation across most developed countries.
However, I don't think you can treat the chemistry to "fix" social withdrawal. I believe it's linked to other mental health issues, like depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. Treating those issues, primarily through therapy, is required first, before working on fixing social withdrawal, which at that point should be straightforward.
>I don't think you can treat the chemistry to "fix" social withdrawal
Oh, I'll bet you a fat R&D contract and a promised economic boom that you can. And you probably "can", for a given value of ""fix"". It'll just be another neoliberal pressure-washer pointed at the weathered rock face of our collective humanity. See, it's still just fine!
I think you hit the nail on the head mentioning monoculture. If there's only one way to be successful and accepted, anyone who doesn't fit the mold simply drops out. In a more varied society there are more alternative "acceptable" paths available to those people who didn't fit the mold for the primary path.
You're not wrong, but some fraction of the hikikomori could also be treated effectively through tough love. Their behavior is being enabled by parents who allow them to live at home, set low expectations, and fail to enforce consequences. If parents kick them out then they'll be forced to sink or swim. This may seem harsh, but those parents will die eventually and the hikikomori will eventually have to fend for themselves no matter what. Better to learn how to live in society sooner than later.
> If parents kick them out then they'll be forced to sink or swim.
If you've ever lived in or near a US city, the "sink" outcome is actually quite common.
> Better to learn how to live in society sooner than later.
Your approach converts a family struggle into a community problem.
I don't see why society would encourage families that can support hikikomori for some number of years to offload all of them onto society immediately, even if some would successfully "swim".
Yes, eventually, and we will need programs for people in their 40s+ who have been cared for by their now deceased families. I suspect you're going to need hot pockets, video games, cots, showers, and they'll do ok. Maybe by then they'll be happy they're in a community together because they've been community deprived their entire lives. Who knows, this is a new problem.
But if you force them to "sink or swim" now, you're going to have a raging generation of 20-somethings with nothing to lose and contempt for the society and families that abandoned them. Also, did you notice the planet is literally burning?
For personal reasons, I'd like to keep society going a little longer. If we could not start a Joker breeding program, that'd be great.
I don't know about the Japanese, but I'm certainly not willing to pay taxes to provide free food, housing, and entertainment to people who are capable of working but choose not to. Their happiness isn't my concern, and they can go get a job no matter how miserable it makes them.
The vast majority of people eventually figure out a way to "swim" when they're left with no alternative.
By paying taxes to provide free housing and entertainment to people not only do you bribe them to not revolt as you are the one to blame for their "laziness" by working more than you demand in labor, it is also better for the economy and the working people as working to feed or house someone is more respectable than working for the sake of some billionaire that caused the hikkikomoriproblem.
Maybe you should start fixing the problem where most people don't work for their own sake or their fellow people but actively compete over fewer and fewer necessary working hours as productivity keeps going up without the economy growing and everyone insists they need a full time 40 hour job.
Pretty much all unemployment can be explained by the laziness of the financial capitalists rather than the people doing the work. Investors being job creators is ridiculous because saving money destroys jobs so the net job creation is zero and it is actually the opposite, saving forces investment and hence nobody gets moral superiority by creating jobs because if they don't they are massive assholes.
In European countries like Spain the elderly voted in heavy labor restrictions against firing seniors and introduced huge severance packages which means companies fire young people first instead of old people who have more than enough money and would have even more after severance pay. What this means is that the old are hoarding all the income opportunities while simultaneously saving for retirement which decreases aggregate demand and effectively makes it pointless for young people to work for their own money and very profitable for them to just stay at home while their parents pretend they are the productive breadwinners. The sink or swim/tough love idea would require parents giving up their job for the sake of the young and that is unlikely to happen. No, the economy isn't growing faster than productivity, you can't grow your way to a job for everyone.
> for the sake of some billionaire that caused the hikkikomoriproblem.
Who exactly caused the hikikomori problem? Hermits and recluses have existed for as long as society has.
> Maybe you should start fixing the problem where most people don't work for their own sake or their fellow people but actively compete over fewer and fewer necessary working hours as productivity keeps going up without the economy growing and everyone insists they need a full time 40 hour job.
> Pretty much all unemployment can be explained by the laziness of the financial capitalists rather than the people doing the work. Investors being job creators is ridiculous because saving money destroys jobs so the net job creation is zero and it is actually the opposite, saving forces investment and hence nobody gets moral superiority by creating jobs because if they don't they are massive assholes. In European countries like Spain the elderly voted in heavy labor restrictions against firing seniors and introduced huge severance packages which means companies fire young people first instead of old people who have more than enough money and would have even more after severance pay.
That's unions for you. It's not a problem of capitalism but rather the eventuality of state-backed labor. Labor is dominated by those most experienced in labor politics. If the state is what gives them power in the first place, why wouldn't they use it to their advantage? Considering that the elderly would have between 40-50 years of experience in expanding their influence, they would already have every single way to extract as much money as possible long before posterity would reach conception. Pension funds and Social Security, are among the top tools in robbing to young Peter to pay elder Paul.
> What this means is that the old are hoarding all the income opportunities while simultaneously saving for retirement which decreases aggregate demand and effectively makes it pointless for young people to work for their own money and very profitable for them to just stay at home while their parents pretend they are the productive breadwinners. The sink or swim/tough love idea would require parents giving up their job for the sake of the young and that is unlikely to happen. No, the economy isn't growing faster than productivity, you can't grow your way to a job for everyone.
There's no way to "hoard" an opportunity. Opportunities come and go based on circumstances and conditions all of which are bound by time, place, necessity, and ability. If they aren't used, they disappear. Opportunities may be created, but they don't work like participation trophies. Just as you mention that there's no way to grow a job for everyone, there's no way to create an opportunity for everyone.
The sink or swim is eventually going to happen. Neetbux will only delay the inevitable. As far as free housing is concerned, in Japan there are plenty of houses at a very low cost in depopulated countryside towns. They can always move out and get a place of their own.
> but I'm certainly not willing to pay taxes to provide free food, housing, and entertainment to people who are capable of working but choose not to.
Above you suggested that they join the military. Where do you think the money for military food, housing, equipment, training, and salaries comes from?
You're not wrong about parental enablers, but those without that kind of support basically just end up as freeters. Cost of living is surprisingly low for a first-world country if you've got low standards, so life can be sustained by not many hours of a robotic low-wage job. The reality of sonkeigo/kenjougo phrasebook shit means that there's not much risk of authentic human interaction even in a public-facing role, so I think you'd be surprised at how many people who are technically employed resemble the classic hikkiNEET pathologies. I'd call it more of a worldview than a specific state strictly defined by employment status.
I rarely use absolutes, but I don't think "tough love" is the solution to anything, if your goal is to truly help the person you are applying "tough love" to.
As long as there's a thread of trust between the caregiver and the shut-in, you have access/influence with them, and they can be rehabilitated, under the right circumstances.
A safer option might be to completely change their environment, but stay supportive, in order to break any entrained behavior connected to being a shut-in. Might be difficult to achieve this in Japan, though.
If you delete that remaining thread of trust by applying "tough love," they will be forced to face the trauma that they could not before, but without any support.
Perhaps some small fraction might "survive" that ordeal, but it's not exactly setting them up for long-term success.
I do think many parents have no idea how to handle a dependent in that situation. The worst case scenario is when parents have also "given up" on their child ever recovering/improving - those situations need intervention from an outside party.
EDIT: I'd define "tough love" as actions done with the intent of "helping" someone, but with wanton disregard to that someone's health.
It may just be my own misperception, but the "tough love" approach comes too close to the "pull oneself up by their own bootstraps" for personal comfort. It can work, but it doesn't often enough that I would strongly hesitate to propose it as a solution.
Ultimately, I don't think that any set of short-term actions alone can truly solve this. Macro-scale societal changes need to be in place or at minimum in progress before micro-scale efforts with individuals to make sense. Cure the disease, not the symptom.
> But if the child is still out there that isn't necessarily a favor to the dog.
I think this is the major problem of a lot of modern/contemporary mental healthcare. The "tough love"/rewiring/reframing + medication approach probably does often get the desired result from a 10,000ft view (the patient is "functional" within society and isn't actively trying to harm themselves or others), but it frequently gets administered in the most disgustingly dogmatic, abusive way, which leads to the person in question becoming either emotionally dead, or an anxious, neurotic mess. But hey, at least they show up on time for their cashier job!
There are too many people receiving therapy licenses (only referring to the US here as I'm not familiar with the rest of the world) who have zero real understanding of what they're doing to/with their patients beyond reciting the scripts they learned in a three-day CBT or DBT seminar.
And on one hand, it's hard to blame the practitioners, because what are they supposed to tell someone who hasn't been able to make rent for three months despite working full-time and is about to get evicted again? Or who is neurodivergent in some way that literally prevents them from engaging in menial labor without wanting to kill themselves? What can they concretely do to help these people other than teach them to convince themselves that everything is fine and they are the problem?
The whole system is fucked up and there's not really a clear, simple, realistic solution.
I believe in Japan's case there were significant economic issues (the removal of the "lifetime salaryman career path where the company spent significant amount of time in investing/promising it's employees a social contract based on financial security) towards the end of the 80s, resulting in severe penalties to the nations youth at the time that initiated a so called "lost generation" who frequently ended up as Hikkimori.
e.g. when the rug/promise was pulled out and the only prospects were low paid temp work often with no or little social safety nets, whole swathes of people realized that the social contract they signed up for was gone and it drove a lot of people into seclusion.
I was under the impression that the lifelong salaryman career was still both available and common - just that many youths see their parents trapped in it and find such a lifestyle extremely undesirable.
As is always the case, aren't they a stark minority though?
The average middle aged Japanese family salaryman seems to be firm and stable middle class in return for a lifetime of slogging through long, bureaucratic, workdays where he seldom sees his family (and his family, him).
I specifically use the term "him" because this seems to be overwhelmingly a male phenomenon. On the other side of the equation, the wife and kids rarely see the husband/father.
A literally lifelong solid career that some in the West might envy - at least for the stability, but probably not the long hours.
Barring exceptional circumstances, you probably will never become wealthy, but you will probably never dip below middle class either.
Your wife and kids (again, the salaryman concept is probably overwhelmingly a male phenomenon) will enjoy a stable, solid, financial foundation, in return for rarely seeing their husband/father - relatively speaking, at least from the perspective of what the West sees as acceptable work-life balance.
The same thing happened in several European countries and, to an extent, in the States. People still talk about being hired for life and never having to struggle to find a job.
I'm purely speculating but I think it's also a side effect of the high degree of development in places like Japan and elsewhere in the first world. If you're the child a middle class family it's just so easy to live a subsistence lifestyle without working hard or engaging in your community. This kind of isolation would kill someone in a more primitive society but if you can lock yourself in an apartment with running water and food delivery you can be relatively comfortable forever.
Kind of like how in older societies there have been examples of reclusive people from aristocracy. You don't hear about that in the lower classes, of course, because it's so unsustainable for someone in that position.
I think grandparent is talking about wealthy aristocrats who decide they don't want to interact with society/anyone. Pre-pizza-delivery, one would have had to be incredibly wealthy to manage to pull this off -- or be a penniless hermit, yeah.
The reason I replied, however, was the use of the phrase "hermits were aristocratic?", because it brought to mind the fad of the ornamental hermit, kept as a positional good on estates of the rich. [0]
To be fair we don't hear about the lower classes in general.
People who wrote the (history) books didn't bother and therefore historians and archeologist have not a lot to go by. Much of their everyday lives has to be pieced together from scarce evidence.
Sociology is only arriving on the scene much later.
While the idea is interesting, I think that lifestyle changes associated with the social withdrawal behavior are likely to make any blood-based biomarkers reflective of being more sedentary rather than having any causal association. The article does not mention if their "healthy" control subjects also had similar lifestyle patterns but without the social withdrawal.
That we still think there are biological rather than sociopsychological roots shows we’ve got a long way for science to catch up. Misunderstanding of trauma and the effects on physiology of it abound. The amount of pressure put on children in society is extremely high.
I once heard that a lot of mental illness originates because no one would come along and say, 'what happened in your childhood was evil', because adjusting to an irrational environment is maddening and leaves deep scars. It's not the only cause but it is a question that isn't given enough attention.
If we don't even properly understand the causes, then how can we hope to find a solution?
The amount of firmware that ships on the human brain is staggering, and we have only just begun to uncover it. We ignore our evolutionary origins at our most extreme peril.
Dreams are when it breaks through. Some of the imagery I've dreamt is rich in metaphor, even gave me life messages and this has subsequently raised my respect for the bits of the brain not under immediate control.
When your firmware is crashing all the time, sometimes cranking up the cpu voltage can make it work. Even though you have no idea about how or why it works.
The only in-depth video I have seen of a so-called Hikikomori was actually a man with quite a significant social life as well as multiple businesses. He just did everything online.
I'm American and I think I fall into a general "Hikikomori" category although this term seems to be ambiguous and poorly understood.
The short version is that working online and not going out much at all may just make sense if you are relatively poor and have a health condition and/or just don't want to deal with office politics anymore.
And especially if you don't have much savings, going out, making and keeping in-person friends can be quite a struggle. For me, my startups or the easily acquired contracts with "international" rates keep my savings relatively close to zero.
And the reality is that society is quite judgemental towards men or individuals who do not have a high income or even seem unwell.
But part of this is just an ignorance of technology. No, I don't go out usually except when I have to go to the ATM because my landlord is a bit behind the times, but I do work quite hard and socialize in my own way. My online business right now is again kind of keeping me poor but the other hand I am getting hundreds and often thousands of microtransactions per day at this point. And fairly optimistic about it.
I did have a little working vacation scheduled to visit my brother and his family in a week or two but had to cancel it because I am just going to be scraping by this month and if there was another fight with his wife then I would have no recourse because could not afford to get a hotel. Anyway it's just not practical right now.
Anyway, a retreat to living online can be easily explained by just having financial and/or health problems.
But I also do have a social life to a degree. I play Eleven Table Tennis in VR almost every day. I get to have my day on any topic on HN, reddit or sometimes Discord.
But I would say even in VR I am somewhat withdrawn in that I find places like VR Chat awkward and mainly avoid them. Part of that I think is just my nature of not having a ton of interest in socialization or a lot of energy left over for it. But another aspect is again the financial situation. Even I would say the cheap apartment may contribute because all of my business is broadcast to my neighbors which does suppress voice chat interaction somewhat.
I did go to a ping pong club for some months a few years back. It's not very practical these days due to financial constraints.
Anyway, to people in the thread downvoting me already within 20 seconds, way to go. Anyone who knows me in person would describe me as a Hikikomori. And I am giving a detailed explanation. But you just bury it within thirty seconds.
Honestly I think this is part of the explanation of why I don't have a lot of friends. I tell the truth plainly, and people don't like it because it goes against their often incorrect worldview.
I don't feel that I am I inconsiderate online. Just literally have contrary viewpoints that don't sit well with people.
Actually sometimes my comments are more blunt these days. But that is an adaptation from receiving disdain for years when expressing contrarian viewpoints, mostly regardless of the tone I use.
With an n=83 they did clustering, random forests and a regression model to develop a new genetic test? At least they used the standard questionnaire which should resist the chance of them overfitting the data.
But, the problem could be generally solved by treating people with the disease just using the questionnaire. Taking people's blood to see if treatment is progressing is an interesting way to assess people for treatment. Would be great if this test was expanded to a larger amount of people.
I think that a large portion of society has gone insane and I see the need for social withdrawal as a mark of sanity. It reminds me of this Aldous Huxley quote:
"The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted."
I find that a lot of highly socialized/extroverted people seem mentally ill - They tend to resort to common catch phrases to express themselves. They don't seem to have their own opinions about anything. They never seem to be able to justify the thought processes which led to their decisions or beliefs - Their line of thought about anything tends to be short and tends to link back to mainstream media rhetoric or religious dogma imposed on them by authority figures. They seem incapable of even basic self-analysis or introspection; they are only able to judge themselves and figure out what they want through the opinions and feedback of others. Also, they seem to lack creativity.
For me, this is pretty obvious because I know enough sane people that I can see the difference. Spending time with sane people feels great and is fulfilling. Spending time with normal 'highly socialized' people feels terrible. It's just very difficult to find sane people these days... Especially within certain social groups, many people are just incredibly fake and incapable of forming a genuine relationship.
Modern psychiatry doesn't have a very good definition of normal. A behavior is considered a mental illness when chronic fixation and/or financial distress is involved. That's broad enough to account for plenty of "normal" behaviors.
I find these takes pretty silly, if you look at them in a historic perspective.
Is it more human to live in a village where the local feudal lord has right of life and death on everyone? Where people are bought and sold as cattle with the land they are forced to live on?
Is it more human to live in a kingdom that will go to war with another because someone stole someone else's woman, or because they are arguing about whom is the son of whom? You are minding your own business, until one day some authority drafts you and suddenly you're in a field with a heavy pole, shouting that you'll butcher or be butchered in the name of something that makes no difference to your life.
Is it more human to live as a slave and drag massive rocks day in and day out, in order to build funeral monuments to some "living god"?
An ever-increasing percentage of the world population lives in the best of times - something undeniably demonstrated by the enormous demographic rise. There are more humans that ever, how can you seriously argue we are "less human" than before...?
Although these times seem less fair, I feel that these societies made more logical sense when you consider people's beliefs at the time. For example, people thought that kings were divine beings chosen by god(s) so that justified why they had all this power, status and wealth. Nowadays it's difficult to make sense of why things are they way they are... Once you factor out the religious framework and you factor out the false narratives about success and power being attained as the result of hard or intelligent work... The modern social structure doesn't seem to make any sense.
It all seems to be about luck these days. Why should randomness determine everything and why should we pretend that our social structures are based on anything but meaningless randomness? Part of the mental illness of modern society is that we're constantly pretending that random events mean something.
> Is it more human to live in a village where the local feudal lord has right of life and death on everyone?
Certainly, marginalized communities probably feel this was about their local police force. How do you think people feel about the police during the Uvalde shootings?
> Where people are bought and sold as cattle with the land they are forced to live on?
People live in expensive cities because that is where the jobs are and where they live are controlled by landlords who were eager to evict them during the pandemic until some cities enacted eviction bans for a time. Private equity are buying entire neighborhoods to rent them out. Sure, in theory no one is forced to live anywhere, but in practice they are.
> Is it more human to live in a kingdom that will go to war…
You mean the War on Terror? The proxy wars against communism (e.g. Vietnam)? The World Wars? The numerous conflicts the US fought to overthrow democratic elected leaders in South America and the world to install dictators more aligned with US business interests (for their oil, their resources, to “liberalize” their economy so US multinationals can take over the local economy)?
> Is it more human to live as a slave…
Is it more human that productivity has increased 10x in the past decade but wages have been stagnant? Is it more human that we are increasingly forcing people to have bullshit jobs when automation could do it better and faster and we could instead re-distribute the wealth robots make into a UBI so that everyone could enjoy a life pursing their real passions?
> An ever-increasing percentage of world population lives in the best of times…
An ever-increasing amount of the world are living under a dystopian nightmare where people are being dehumanized and the planet being made unlivable all so arbitrary numbers on a spreadsheet gets bigger and bigger.
———
The problem is not that we feel less human than we did before, but that we don’t feel more human now. With all of our progress and advancements, with our increasing understanding of ourselves and our world, why isn’t the world more human (more humanistic)?
Japan is one of those countries where rumors and social pressure can be worse than law enforcement. The UK is a similar country in many regards (especially in terms of social culture) but has managed to build a better social support network and awareness of the negatives of mental health and "bullying" is more apparent. I also think that "witch hunt" morality is more tolerated in Japan whereas in the UK it's considered harmful. Japan does have a lot of strict laws against such things, but it may also reflect the severity of the issue in that the problem still exists (for British people a good comparison might be classism and associated cultural traits in the UK). The issue can be associated with mental health issues (especially the aftereffects) but it needs to get to the core of the issue that is the bullying and exclusionary social pressure in Japan.
These people have almost universally been bullied or subject to severe stress from social pressure. I currently live in Japan but I find it hard to speak out because the internet can be too Americanized to explain my culture comparison.
There are many societies you could suggest as a model to improve what Japanese culture lacks. The UK is not one of those.
Urban UK is a crumbling non-society, plagued by social disgregation, ghettos, wanton violence, relentless vandalism, shocking rates of theft, and significant amounts of abuse on women and minors. Compared to urban Japan, it's a Middle-Age hellhole.
When I was a wee lad it occurred to me that there was a choice before me : to imitate or not to imitate.
Society is largely composed of people imitating each other. Imitation is membership. Imitation is moral. Imitate effectively and your future is bright.
I faced the same choice when at a very young age I realized I was not neurotypical. Just like the hikkomoris, I have made an active choice to not be like the others and while that costs me dearly in some aspects of my life, it has definitely helped me in other ways.
Japan would do better against "Hikikomori syndrome" by changing the studding environment culture of their school: bulling against the non-normative people (with closed eyes from the school), super competitive studies, almost mandatory second school, all to become boring salarymen bullied by the corporate higher ups. The society pressure for this life model is the problem, not some sort of genetics.
Also, most Hikikomori are men, because women may be able to escape all this crap by getting married. This is also a failure, because they are not expected to get a "real work" and to quit asap if married.
There is also the "herbirore" phenomenon, the cousins of the Hikikomoris, mainly people who want to avoid the family culture of Japan. (And let not forget about the suicides, but japan is not ranked first on this contrary to common beliefs)
Fortunately all this seems to change little by little, but searching for "biological roots" is just searching for excuses. Next research will be an American university searching for "biological root" in young people doing killing spree in schools ?
The herbivore (I assume that's what you meant), 草食系男子 has little to do with "not wanting family" and more to do with men that are not keen to approach / take initiative towards women. Usually not just because of shyness but because relationships are very very low in their priority list.
絶食系(roughly translated to "fastivore", fasting) are probably the one you're referring to.
The statistics that says 40-60% of 30s year old males have never been in a relationship is probably more from this attitude.
Even more so because Japan does not encourage immigration. But I think in the long run this will be better for Japan. It will probably be the first modern economy that will learn to deal with a shrinking workforce.
Answering the question of why does coping with these pressures take this form does indeed have a biological component. It’s not excuse making to ask why humans respond to certain negative pressures in a recognizable pattern.
Point being, all we have is correlation, and to go down the road of chemical imbalance can lead to wasting time, more people socially withdrawing, and possibly more people being harmed by some cockamamie medical treatment for something that may very well be socially instigated.
And what better way to dismiss people's problems than to assume they're defective.
i wonder if your interpretation of the myth of sisyphus that sisyphus just doesn’t cope with negative pressure well enough. maybe we should look for a biological component to explain sisyphus‘s attitude.
You might be able to "cure" the dog of withdrawal by changing its chemistry such that it no longer avoids the abusive child. But if the child is still out there that isn't necessarily a favor to the dog.