In TOKYO, from a popular message board r/japan on Reddit‘dot‘com:
“Our son doesn‘t want to work like a normal person he says, wants to sit at home and do nothing.”
“Cut back on his allowance! Or throw him out!”
“We can’t do that. He is 30 next year and would be homeless and maybe kill himself.”
“Sit him down and discuss his options. Therapie?”
“We tried that. He says he has mental illness and cannot work. He is not gay though.”
A terrible malady has befallen Japan. Young men are committing life-long slo-mo suicides. They are vegging out in their box rooms or at their parent‘s houses, wasting their pointless existence in front of computer screens. They are turning into living trash.
They are called the Hikikomori [pronounced: Hee-Kee Komoree] or “shut-in-hermits.” Millions of males are quitting society and squatting on their tatami mats for years and decades until they die from mental exhaustion.
The government is partly complicit. It wants to reduce the subpar population and prevent those losers from making copies of themselves.
Big Corporations are preying on the time of the Hikikomori, for they are good at clicking, swiping and scrolling on whatever you give them—computer games, websites, porn and advertisement. The average Hikikomori spends 16 hours on brainless online activities. They are mining virtual coins for Clash Royale and Candy Crush, or watching 1 billion hours of TikTok videos.
[Maybe we could teach them how to code?]
In the past, during old capitalism, the ruling elites would exploit the labor force of the underclasses, labor slaves really, but in this new world of data harvesting, all they want is to lock them up in their tiny apatos and see their online clicks, likes and views.
