I've been a "hikikomori" for most of my life. I rarely go outside, I have no job, and no friends (I don't say this to garner sympathy or to feel sad for myself), and I’ve lived like this for the majority of my life. I’ve spoken with other people who live this way, and the causes of their isolation vary, from mental illness (most common), poverty, disability, or parental neglect. Sometimes their parents support them or sometimes they’re on the verge of homelessness by families who have lost their patience with them. It’s a vulnerable existence unless you’re rich, or willing to find a few months of employment every so often to stash monies, or you have the holy grail of NEETbux.
The hikikomori lives in stasis. It becomes hard to speak with others because you have no life experiences to talk about, your social skills start to atrophy, maybe you begin to only wear sweatpants, microwaved food looks palatable to you… your brain begins to ferment in its own juices. Even your dreams cease to involve the outside, and are instead replaced by the endless halls of your house. Nothing exists outside the walls of my room. When I speak to “normies” (I have nothing against them), I’m perplexed by their lives. I prefer to live this way.
Being a hikikomori means living in a separate reality. I don’t use social media (Agora Road being the sole exception), I don’t know what TV shows or movies are popular, I avoid reading or watching the news, I don’t recognize any celebrities except for those I’ve seen during my pre-Internet childhood – I discover everything organically. I am completely uninterested in dating and the labors involved.
How did I get this here? Unrestricted Internet access from a young age and autism (not the TikTok or Tumblr kind). I’ve always liked living in my own world, and trying to trying to make friends invariably means letting someone into that controlled environment with the danger of making a mess of it, or embarrassing myself. I like my walled garden. I think that some big life decisions are rarely “made”, meaning there’s not really a single point where you go “I choose X over Z”, sometimes you choose something without realizing you’ve made a choice at all or knowing how you got there.
I’ve been thinking about hikikomori and their role in greater society. I think that as our technology “progresses”, the hikikomori phenomenon will only grow, because the need to go outside and interact with others will be greatly diminished. You can do pretty much everything through a computer or a phone now. As people become further isolated and secluded in their own bubbles, the bonds that hold society together will continue to weaken (this was exacerbated by Covid). You might have entire generations of shut-ins who can’t even work menial McDonalds jobs, but the need for such cheap labor will probably be replaced A.I soon anyway, so what happens to the shut-ins? They get turned into biofuel, probably.
I think that “convenience” is one of the greatest predicaments of recent times. Yes, it’s convenient to order all of your groceries online, it’s convenient to only speak with your friends through the Internet, it’s convenient to have everything be a click or phone tap away, and as our lives are increasingly streamlined and trimmed down for the sake of “convenience”, what are we sacrificing in exchange for it? Going to the grocery store in person is a pain because everything is locked behind anti-theft glass, the parks are filled with used needles and wandering lunatics, even the cheapest of fast food establishments require the purchase of their corn syrup slop just for the privilege of sitting there, to filter out the homeless from congregating. This cancer will only metastasize. It will be easier to be a shut-in than a normal person unless you actively work against it.
How does greater society prevent this from happening? By telling people to go outside and speak to other people? Why would anyone do that?