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New Insights into Hikikomori – People Who Withdraw from Society for Years on End

53 points by DanBC 7y ago

therp43 7y ago
Is there really anything to gain from contact with society? Most people run some sort of scam. I ghosted a few years ago after bad divorce, and it was very good decision.
- trevyn 7y ago
  I’ve also noticed the perspective that a majority people seem to “have an angle”, whether that’s an outright financial scam, emotional manipulation, some sort of hustle, wanting to monetize your brain by employing you, or whatever. Interested to hear other people’s observations related to this.
  - raducu 7y ago
    Not to forget they want to fuck you if you're a woman. But there are people who genuinely also want friends, but they are rare as you age.
    - in_hindsight 7y ago
      Also people who just want to genuinely have fun in this life - they are a treasure
  - jddj 7y ago
    Some communities are more transactional than others. Everyone has an angle in that we're generally a social species and being around people we like and who confirm our worldviews and validate our ways of life (and make us laugh) gives us pleasure (to varying extents along the introvert to extrovert continuum), but the result of that is that some interactions are just that, interactions for the sake of interaction with no higher or lower motive than enjoyment. If your social experiences actually end up more like businesspeople networking, which is certainly something that happens in many circles, then the transactional nature of it all can definitely become far too obvious and off-putting.
DanBC 7y ago
Full title is: New Insights Into Hikikomori – People Who Withdraw From Society For Months or Years On End. Don't forget that the BPS can sometimes misrepresent the research so you need to be a bit careful with anything from this source.
isnetea 7y ago
I’ve cut off all family and friends for a long period of time now, and discontinued my career/work after finally reaching a cynical point of no return a few years ago. My only interactions at this point are with food service workers at the store or coffee shop, or other shopping/errands. Perhaps this is a variant of Hikikomori. In fact, the characteristics of one for me are essentially spot on, except that I’m more of a shut-out (in public alone often). I’ve given away my retirement and am preparing for suicide. I’m not in search of advice nor assistance regarding my situation. I smile in public, but inside I’m meditating in preparation for the unknown void of the afterlife. There are almost certainly many others like me. For a long time, I wondered if it were possible for people to treat each other better and whether that would have changed anything for me. The reality is that I was unequipped to build a healthy place in society because I decided a long time ago that I hated being alive and hated people. It’s my own shortcoming, and suicide is a valid way to remove a weak seed from the gene pool, if not controversial or taboo in Western society. My understanding is that it’s not as frowned upon in Japan but not sure if that is still the case.
- zerogvt 7y ago
  I think you should listen a bit of Alan Watts. You can start from this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_HkQ4-x4P4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_HkQ4-x4P4
- bubblewrap 7y ago
  If you hate people, why do you care to remove a weak seed from the gene pool? In any case, that would also be accomplished by simply not procreating. My own recipe against suicidal thoughts is that life is very short anyway. There is little point in shortening it artificially (unless you are in significant pain because of health problems, perhaps).
- neverthesame19 7y ago
  A few weeks ago, I was really depressed. I had exactly the same thoughts. I didn’t want to leave my place or meet with friends. After taking magic mushrooms, I feel FAR better. It’s a bit strange to explain but even if I still have these negative thoughts, it’s harder to obsess about them like before. You should also check ketamine treatments if you’re in the US.
diingke 7y ago
I’m tired of hearing the self-loathing and foreigner living in Japan anecdotes the reason anything is anything is cuz someone created a word for it
paviknada 7y ago
I was a Hikikomori (In North American) for 1 year. These bits from the article really resonate with me “I am anxious about the possibility of meeting people that I know” and “These anxieties may be related to a sense of humiliation, which suggests that they are afraid of being seen in their current situation". Before becoming a Hikikomori I had failed out of University and felt embarrassed to leave my room, also felt embarrassed at my physical appearance. Looking back at it, I wasted a year of my life doing nothing but getting high, and consuming entertainment. Great news though now I work 40 hours a week and waste my time getting high and consuming entertainment only during the evenings.
- bjs250 7y ago
  The joys of capitalism. I jest, though. While it probably feels the same on paper, your mental health is (probably) much better now, I would assume.
bashwizard 7y ago
I felt probably like a Hikikomori when I moved to the other side of the country for my now ex and worked remote for two years. I basically never left the house except for walking the dog and doing grocery shopping. I had no friends and no real social life except when my ex and I visited her friends and family or if I flew back to my hometown. Even as an introvert I felt fucking miserable for the entire time. I enjoy solitude but that shit wasn't it, it was isolation.
- bjs250 7y ago
  This is my fear of working remote. Seems to come up relatively often in threads that discuss remote work -- needing to force oneself to leave the house (which is also the workplace)
  - GGfpc 7y ago
    You can always find a coworking space.
  - in_hindsight 7y ago
    Working from home when remote seems like the most dangerous idea if your work does not require human interaction (live meetings etc)
MistahKoala 7y ago
"But one local demographic variable did stand out as being protective" What does 'protective' mean in this context? I wondered if it was somehow a typo of 'predictive', but that's a bit of a leap for a typo.
- nyolfen 7y ago
  you see it in medical literature; i believe it just means what it sounds like, ie that living in the environment they describe makes one statistically less likely to be a hiki
vfinn 7y ago
Hikitomoris often have low status. They aren't respected in the eyes of their peers, because they lack either a job, skills/education, a spouse, or looks. So when they talk with their peers, they feel inferior, and are often reminded about their position. That's why they rather step aside. Some of them are unwilling to integrate with the ill values the society has, and that paralyzes them, since they don't have where to go. Mental issues are related to this matter, at least partly caused by the system, and maybe childhood experiences, traumas, etc. The longer they stay isolated, the more they fall behind, and the harder it gets for them to go out and compete.
daodedickinson 7y ago
>But if these anxieties are keeping people inside their homes, what’s prompting them to retreat there in the first place? The survey also revealed that hikikomori are more likely to have dropped out of high school or university. Perhaps finding ways to keep young people in education may, then, reduce the risk. Holy God no! I had excellent grades and extracurriculars but in high school there were months I would cry every day in class or even cut my wrists in class to relieve social pain by replacing it with the more endurable physical pain. A few angelic classmates tried to help but teachers did not, although I learned after the fact that they talked about me a lot in the faculty lounge where I was called "Boo Radley". One doctor at the high school said I was autistic so my parents gave me to the local university's psychology department and paid a bunch of money so every week I had an hour appointment each week one on one with the dean of the department. It was maybe worse than nothing. I never had any idea what to say and he had no idea what to ask and he would tell my parents that I wouldn't talk (when it was more that I didn't have the ability to skill or something to - he would ask queations that I could totally understand were normal for normal people but as for me answering them - I wouldn't know how to even begin because usually either they didn't prompt a verbal reaction in my consciousness, or it would prompt the beginning of an potentially-endlessly complicated chain reaction that would take hours and hours of me forming and conducting a commission investigation in my jead) and, as far as diagnosing me, one prof gave me an IQ test and called me a genius and they said that once I got to grad school I would fit in. The professors told my parents I wasn't autistic, and that's all my parents heard. The professors diagnosed me with "Pervasive Developmental Disorder", which was later replaced with "Autism Spectrum Disorder". Anyway, I got into my first choice school, and I got accepted by all of them except the ones that have interviews to keep people like me out, but I was afraid of debt so I went to my last choice school because I got a full ride for academics. I was still extremely depressed but felt better overall than high school, although I attempted suicide at least once in high school and once i college. I missed two questions on the GRE and got into the #1 ranked program for my major. I was leaning on not going to grad school because it seemed insane to borrow $60K a year for three years but my parents wanted me to go and said they would pay for the first semester and my godparents talked about how they met in grad school and I thought about how the psychologists said I might not fit in until grad school. So, I went, but I was still the most awkward person by far. I couldn't get any mentorship from my mentor anymore than I could connect with that psychology dean. The final straw was this irrelevant-to-our-major class we were all required to take, one of those ones where they get a not-a-professor maybe as desperate as I am, and one where you have to write papers. This guy was a Marxist homilist, just about literally. He would start each class reading from the original Marx (never Zizek, Bookchin, Foucault, Butler, no not for him). Guy would tweet about how Dungeons and Dragons had a dangerously inaccurate portayal of agriculture. I shit you not. Anyway, there was an essay prompt that really inspired me, and I wrote what I thought was the best writing of my life. I worried if the teacher would like it and prepared to really try to learn from the feedback. The next day, the teacher told us he wasn't going to read any of the papers and as long as he got an email from us with a document attached, we would get an A. I switched to computer science where the professors openly hated their lives and had absolutely no flame of earnest passion to pass on. Students would openly cheat and I was the only one who would complain. Profs would tell us they were being forced to pass incompetent undergraduates to maintain revenue. The #1 student in my year was an audacious sociopath who loudly bragged about hacking university systems and businesses for money, with no shame or hint of ethics or philosophy. I was #2 and #3 was a girl that really wanted to be a math major and was leaning back and forth. Well, I guess one week she decided it was going to be math and blew off studying for an exam. As the professor roams the room during the exam, he looks at her paper and panics, realizing he could lose his job because she's the 1 female out of the 3 in the 80 person class that is holding up the female average and he's already under investigation for gender bias. So he just starts telling her the answers and trying to get her to cheat on a test she doesn't care about. I lost the last of my hope in the utility of universities and made to leave. They offered me a teaching position if I finished, as if that was an enticement. Somehow Google got my phone number and wanted to interview me but I couldn't work there in good conscience. Out of all the cs jobs I applied for, I finally got through an interview, and I was offered $500 to work the entire summer as an internship. The charity I had been doing volunteer computer work for two years offered me a position for maybe 80% of federal minimum wage. I went back to my janitor job because it paid better. But I was completely alone and eventually I had more and more sleepless nights and when I kept having 2+ sleepless nights in a row and I decided I couldn't safely drive to work anymore. Fifteen years earlier, in middle school, I remember when my babysitter heard that my friend was paid $500 by his uncle to work all summer she called him up and cussed him out until a fair wage was paid. I worked on her farm for many years. I still have only worked for people that loved me. Why did I make an exception for schoolwork? I tortured myself for years, submitting to this imposition of school for what? To come up with answers for people that do not care for me, do not pay me, already have the answers to the objective questions, and are not interested in my subjective answers. So, no, keeping kids that are emotionally wrecked and socially destitute coralled in schools will not help because that's not their function. Our society can't turn off the media and go back to each other now because we wouldn't know where to even begin.

53 points by DanBC 7y ago

Is there really anything to gain from contact with society? Most people run some sort of scam. I ghosted a few years ago after bad divorce, and it was very good decision.

trevyn 7y ago
I’ve also noticed the perspective that a majority people seem to “have an angle”, whether that’s an outright financial scam, emotional manipulation, some sort of hustle, wanting to monetize your brain by employing you, or whatever. Interested to hear other people’s observations related to this.
- raducu 7y ago
  Not to forget they want to fuck you if you're a woman. But there are people who genuinely also want friends, but they are rare as you age.
  - in_hindsight 7y ago
    Also people who just want to genuinely have fun in this life - they are a treasure
- jddj 7y ago
  Some communities are more transactional than others. Everyone has an angle in that we're generally a social species and being around people we like and who confirm our worldviews and validate our ways of life (and make us laugh) gives us pleasure (to varying extents along the introvert to extrovert continuum), but the result of that is that some interactions are just that, interactions for the sake of interaction with no higher or lower motive than enjoyment. If your social experiences actually end up more like businesspeople networking, which is certainly something that happens in many circles, then the transactional nature of it all can definitely become far too obvious and off-putting.

DanBC 7y ago

Full title is: New Insights Into Hikikomori – People Who Withdraw From Society For Months or Years On End. Don't forget that the BPS can sometimes misrepresent the research so you need to be a bit careful with anything from this source.

isnetea 7y ago

I’ve cut off all family and friends for a long period of time now, and discontinued my career/work after finally reaching a cynical point of no return a few years ago. My only interactions at this point are with food service workers at the store or coffee shop, or other shopping/errands. Perhaps this is a variant of Hikikomori. In fact, the characteristics of one for me are essentially spot on, except that I’m more of a shut-out (in public alone often). I’ve given away my retirement and am preparing for suicide. I’m not in search of advice nor assistance regarding my situation. I smile in public, but inside I’m meditating in preparation for the unknown void of the afterlife. There are almost certainly many others like me. For a long time, I wondered if it were possible for people to treat each other better and whether that would have changed anything for me. The reality is that I was unequipped to build a healthy place in society because I decided a long time ago that I hated being alive and hated people. It’s my own shortcoming, and suicide is a valid way to remove a weak seed from the gene pool, if not controversial or taboo in Western society. My understanding is that it’s not as frowned upon in Japan but not sure if that is still the case.

zerogvt 7y ago
I think you should listen a bit of Alan Watts. You can start from this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_HkQ4-x4P4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_HkQ4-x4P4
bubblewrap 7y ago
If you hate people, why do you care to remove a weak seed from the gene pool? In any case, that would also be accomplished by simply not procreating. My own recipe against suicidal thoughts is that life is very short anyway. There is little point in shortening it artificially (unless you are in significant pain because of health problems, perhaps).
neverthesame19 7y ago
A few weeks ago, I was really depressed. I had exactly the same thoughts. I didn’t want to leave my place or meet with friends. After taking magic mushrooms, I feel FAR better. It’s a bit strange to explain but even if I still have these negative thoughts, it’s harder to obsess about them like before. You should also check ketamine treatments if you’re in the US.

diingke 7y ago

I’m tired of hearing the self-loathing and foreigner living in Japan anecdotes the reason anything is anything is cuz someone created a word for it

paviknada 7y ago

I was a Hikikomori (In North American) for 1 year. These bits from the article really resonate with me “I am anxious about the possibility of meeting people that I know” and “These anxieties may be related to a sense of humiliation, which suggests that they are afraid of being seen in their current situation". Before becoming a Hikikomori I had failed out of University and felt embarrassed to leave my room, also felt embarrassed at my physical appearance. Looking back at it, I wasted a year of my life doing nothing but getting high, and consuming entertainment. Great news though now I work 40 hours a week and waste my time getting high and consuming entertainment only during the evenings.

bjs250 7y ago
The joys of capitalism. I jest, though. While it probably feels the same on paper, your mental health is (probably) much better now, I would assume.

bashwizard 7y ago

I felt probably like a Hikikomori when I moved to the other side of the country for my now ex and worked remote for two years. I basically never left the house except for walking the dog and doing grocery shopping. I had no friends and no real social life except when my ex and I visited her friends and family or if I flew back to my hometown. Even as an introvert I felt fucking miserable for the entire time. I enjoy solitude but that shit wasn't it, it was isolation.

bjs250 7y ago
This is my fear of working remote. Seems to come up relatively often in threads that discuss remote work -- needing to force oneself to leave the house (which is also the workplace)
- GGfpc 7y ago
  You can always find a coworking space.
- in_hindsight 7y ago
  Working from home when remote seems like the most dangerous idea if your work does not require human interaction (live meetings etc)

MistahKoala 7y ago

"But one local demographic variable did stand out as being protective" What does 'protective' mean in this context? I wondered if it was somehow a typo of 'predictive', but that's a bit of a leap for a typo.

nyolfen 7y ago
you see it in medical literature; i believe it just means what it sounds like, ie that living in the environment they describe makes one statistically less likely to be a hiki

vfinn 7y ago

Hikitomoris often have low status. They aren't respected in the eyes of their peers, because they lack either a job, skills/education, a spouse, or looks. So when they talk with their peers, they feel inferior, and are often reminded about their position. That's why they rather step aside. Some of them are unwilling to integrate with the ill values the society has, and that paralyzes them, since they don't have where to go. Mental issues are related to this matter, at least partly caused by the system, and maybe childhood experiences, traumas, etc. The longer they stay isolated, the more they fall behind, and the harder it gets for them to go out and compete.

daodedickinson 7y ago

>But if these anxieties are keeping people inside their homes, what’s prompting them to retreat there in the first place? The survey also revealed that hikikomori are more likely to have dropped out of high school or university. Perhaps finding ways to keep young people in education may, then, reduce the risk. Holy God no! I had excellent grades and extracurriculars but in high school there were months I would cry every day in class or even cut my wrists in class to relieve social pain by replacing it with the more endurable physical pain. A few angelic classmates tried to help but teachers did not, although I learned after the fact that they talked about me a lot in the faculty lounge where I was called "Boo Radley". One doctor at the high school said I was autistic so my parents gave me to the local university's psychology department and paid a bunch of money so every week I had an hour appointment each week one on one with the dean of the department. It was maybe worse than nothing. I never had any idea what to say and he had no idea what to ask and he would tell my parents that I wouldn't talk (when it was more that I didn't have the ability to skill or something to - he would ask queations that I could totally understand were normal for normal people but as for me answering them - I wouldn't know how to even begin because usually either they didn't prompt a verbal reaction in my consciousness, or it would prompt the beginning of an potentially-endlessly complicated chain reaction that would take hours and hours of me forming and conducting a commission investigation in my jead) and, as far as diagnosing me, one prof gave me an IQ test and called me a genius and they said that once I got to grad school I would fit in. The professors told my parents I wasn't autistic, and that's all my parents heard. The professors diagnosed me with "Pervasive Developmental Disorder", which was later replaced with "Autism Spectrum Disorder". Anyway, I got into my first choice school, and I got accepted by all of them except the ones that have interviews to keep people like me out, but I was afraid of debt so I went to my last choice school because I got a full ride for academics. I was still extremely depressed but felt better overall than high school, although I attempted suicide at least once in high school and once i college. I missed two questions on the GRE and got into the #1 ranked program for my major. I was leaning on not going to grad school because it seemed insane to borrow $60K a year for three years but my parents wanted me to go and said they would pay for the first semester and my godparents talked about how they met in grad school and I thought about how the psychologists said I might not fit in until grad school. So, I went, but I was still the most awkward person by far. I couldn't get any mentorship from my mentor anymore than I could connect with that psychology dean. The final straw was this irrelevant-to-our-major class we were all required to take, one of those ones where they get a not-a-professor maybe as desperate as I am, and one where you have to write papers. This guy was a Marxist homilist, just about literally. He would start each class reading from the original Marx (never Zizek, Bookchin, Foucault, Butler, no not for him). Guy would tweet about how Dungeons and Dragons had a dangerously inaccurate portayal of agriculture. I shit you not. Anyway, there was an essay prompt that really inspired me, and I wrote what I thought was the best writing of my life. I worried if the teacher would like it and prepared to really try to learn from the feedback. The next day, the teacher told us he wasn't going to read any of the papers and as long as he got an email from us with a document attached, we would get an A. I switched to computer science where the professors openly hated their lives and had absolutely no flame of earnest passion to pass on. Students would openly cheat and I was the only one who would complain. Profs would tell us they were being forced to pass incompetent undergraduates to maintain revenue. The #1 student in my year was an audacious sociopath who loudly bragged about hacking university systems and businesses for money, with no shame or hint of ethics or philosophy. I was #2 and #3 was a girl that really wanted to be a math major and was leaning back and forth. Well, I guess one week she decided it was going to be math and blew off studying for an exam. As the professor roams the room during the exam, he looks at her paper and panics, realizing he could lose his job because she's the 1 female out of the 3 in the 80 person class that is holding up the female average and he's already under investigation for gender bias. So he just starts telling her the answers and trying to get her to cheat on a test she doesn't care about. I lost the last of my hope in the utility of universities and made to leave. They offered me a teaching position if I finished, as if that was an enticement. Somehow Google got my phone number and wanted to interview me but I couldn't work there in good conscience. Out of all the cs jobs I applied for, I finally got through an interview, and I was offered $500 to work the entire summer as an internship. The charity I had been doing volunteer computer work for two years offered me a position for maybe 80% of federal minimum wage. I went back to my janitor job because it paid better. But I was completely alone and eventually I had more and more sleepless nights and when I kept having 2+ sleepless nights in a row and I decided I couldn't safely drive to work anymore. Fifteen years earlier, in middle school, I remember when my babysitter heard that my friend was paid $500 by his uncle to work all summer she called him up and cussed him out until a fair wage was paid. I worked on her farm for many years. I still have only worked for people that loved me. Why did I make an exception for schoolwork? I tortured myself for years, submitting to this imposition of school for what? To come up with answers for people that do not care for me, do not pay me, already have the answers to the objective questions, and are not interested in my subjective answers. So, no, keeping kids that are emotionally wrecked and socially destitute coralled in schools will not help because that's not their function. Our society can't turn off the media and go back to each other now because we wouldn't know where to even begin.