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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The downside is that in a society where that isn't an option people are forced to socialize and then they adapt. Having everything catered to shut-ins normalize 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 adult social life are now mainstream issues.
Do they? Or are they just suffering silently?
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.
Life is short and I've got shit to do and places to be, I ain't got no time for that concentrated bullshit.
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.)
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.
You can be solely because others don't even have the option.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe death does this. Breeding does not.
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.
More change to get healthy, smart kids when might achieve great things.
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.
why is it problematic? Procreation is not the be all and end all of one's purpose in life.
it's already decreasing in first world countries, so this isn't a problem limited to shut-ins.
Fun times ahead.
That's an argument people bring up when they never thought about what's after breeding eh?
Besides the philosophical question, in a time were we have enough people anyway this simple worldview holds even less value
Feel free to add more to your comment if you feel differently
(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)
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.
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.
So I feel it's less about how the society is structured, and more about how each country positions itself.
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.
The phenomenon OP is talking about is excellently captured in the "Thing, Japan" meme as well [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism
This is never true. It might even feel this way for years but one day it will become unbearable.
That's not the word I would use lol
Cities are kind of pointless if you don't enjoy participating in live activities with other people. Just worse housing at higher price.
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.
> 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.
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 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.