Every generation would always talk about the destructive increase in entertainment in their time. My grandfather said his parents told him he listened to the radio too much when he was a kid.

Your great-grandparents were right, it's just hard to imagine listening to radio with family being "destructive", when today people have less friends than ever and are literally choosing Netflix, video games, and pornography over having a social life.

I think entertainment is a lesser issue to the real problem which is car centric urban design. We all live so far apart that it is very time consuming, expensive and tedious to meet other people. Rather than just stepping outside and walking/cycling to someone you have to own a car, spend 30 minutes driving and then 30 minutes back. Or you could just play a video game with them over the internet in the few minutes it takes to set up.

There are certainly a number of factors, but the prevalence and addictiveness of entertainment technology is without a doubt a major factor.

Plenty of hikikomori in the safe, walkable Tokyo. What's keeping them inside?

>What's keeping them inside?

I would guess they've shut themselves in and away from the shame and rejection by society and have found the tiny inkling of happiness possible in that hole. And as society continues to rejects them further for being in a hole, the hole only gets deeper.

Understandable, since the minute they go outside, everything is stacked against them and even with help, they probably won't be able to compete on the same level as the normal people who didn't fall into the hole. I can't win outside, but I can be happy in my hole. Hole good, outside bad.

I'll admit I know very little of the culture in Japan so there are quite likely other factors. I am just talking from personal experience as a 2x year old in Australia. I would happily meet up with friends regularly but it never happens because they live too far away, most of us do not have cars and because most of us live with parents, meetups tend to be in the city where the only activity is drinking. Video games perhaps allow us to have fun when we might have otherwise forced ourselves to go out but I think the primary factor for me is how difficult it is.

You make it sound like a bad thing. Have you met people? Do you really want to spend more of your time with them? :)

Yes. And yes. I'll do anything to hang out with people, especially the ones I like.

You sound like you're making an excuse for a lack of friends by implying there is no one worth being friends with? Perhaps I've inferred too much, I sure hope so...

To be fair to the poster, virtually anyone you meet in real life will be far less interesting than chatting with someone in a specialized forum like hacker news.

That's such a narrow view on what value people can offer you, it saddens me.

I think some of this is when you're first exposed to a new genre of art/entertainment, you don't really know how to explore it and everything kind of looks or sounds the same.

You see what's unique about the overall style over and over, and you don't yet see what's unique about each work, so the art form seems simplistic and repetitive even if it is no more so than others you already enjoy.

For a philosophical reflexion along these lines please check out Byung-Chul Han « in the swarm ». Written a while ago, translated to English only recently.