February 02, 2006
Hikikomori
A chunk of Japanese youth are shutting themselves in. Not leaving their rooms for one, two, five, ten years. It's a fascinating article.
American youth seem to choose different ways of "dropping out". Our culture is more permissive and has always had a soft spot for the young rebel. Japanese culture has no such outlet.
Part of me wants to say "Get your lazy carcass out of your room and get a damned job." Most people can't afford to be clinically depressed and laze around the house all day.
But there's something else going on here which the above sentiment doesn't quite cover, and I don't mean clinical depression, a condition of which I have never been particularly credulous and of which I am less and less inclined to believe is actually a medical problem.
I'm talking about the sentiment expressed in the last paragraph of the article in which a 23-year old Japanese guy says it may be too late for him to start a career. One might be tempted to say that this is ridiculous. He's got the vast majority of his life ahead of him. But it's increasingly true that the things in his life which will be determinative for the rest of his life are already passed. If you aren't on a fixed career path by the time you're 25, it's increasingly difficult to be on one. It's as if in today's new, global, economy, you've got to have all your ducks in a row by the time you're 20 or so. If you're in, you'll have the opportunity to be enormously successful. By the time you pass 20, the heights to which you can rise start falling off dramatically.
This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that we're seeing an increasing trend towards extended adolescence. People are going to college and then spending the next five years "preparing" for careers that, if we're really honest with ourselves, are simply things we tell ourselves to keep our "day job" from becoming our "real job". If you want to reach the top of your field, or at least the part which will let you do the things you want for a salary on which you can hope to support yourself and a family, something most young people someday dream of doing, you've basically got one shot, and it's gone by the time you're 21.
Japanese people stay in their rooms and don't come out. American youths bounce from gig to gig, not settling down for a decade or more after they're reached adulthood. Disparate symptoms of the same underlying problem?
What about bipolar disorder? Do you doubt the existence of that too?
Posted by: Evan Donovan at February 4, 2006 06:35 PMI'm not disputing the existence of anyone's symptoms. But just because a group of symptoms is bundled together and called a disorder/disease/syndrome etc. doesn't mean that there's anything medically wrong with you. There may indeed be something wrong with you, but that something does not need to be physical.
The reason I'm skeptical is that we have absolutely no idea what causes depression or bipolarity, and even though we have found certain chemicals that seem to alleviate symptoms, we don't have any idea how they work. Melatonin, seratonin, SSRI's, they're all basically flailing about in the dark. We're not sure exactly what they're doing, and we're not sure exactly why what they may or may not be doing affects a person's mood.
This, to me, doesn't sound like a description of a "disease" the way the word has traditionally been defined. Cancer? Yeah, I get that. Infection? Check. But melancoly? Meh. Just reading the definitions of these disorders gives such nebulous criteria that attributing them to discrete physical causes seems a bit unlikely.
Again, just because there isn't anything physically wrong doesn't mean that there isn't anything wrong.
Posted by: ryan at February 4, 2006 07:53 PM