Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms?

Tangent: people think life extension will magically materialize with some singularity type event, but in reality it's a slow creeping thing. The single most powerful life extension technology ever developed is the cardiac bypass, for example.

Being a shut-in is nothing new, but most of those are either very old people (who are shut in for partially physical reasons) or people with severe agoraphobia (who can't leave their houses without having panic attacks) or biologically-rooted mental illnesses.

What's happening now in many countries is that people without anything physically wrong with them are becoming shut-ins at very early ages-- 20s instead of 80s.

I feel like corporatism is cultural alcohol (alcohol was more devastating to Native Americans than Europeans, who built up a tolerance over millennia) whose psychological effects are probably somewhat worse in East Asia. Corporatism is everywhere, but when it fails us in the U.S., we don't internalize it. Compared to people in Japan or Korea, we laugh it off, work odd jobs, take a couple night courses, and maybe move to another part of the country. We're used to the industrial-corporate economy melting down every couple of generations (1929, 1973, 2008) and we know that it can be awful, but we don't take it personally. We'd rather pull up stakes and move across the country. In East Asia, there seems to be much more shame to not finding a place in the salaryman system.

Hikikomori is the response, on a large scale, to the decline of a system (world corporatism, which reached peak employment in 2008) in a world where the resulting negative impacts are internalized and personalized to a much larger degree than here.

If you find it depressing that they're having a "fantastic time", then they aren't your friends in any meaningful sense.

This isn't directed at you. Envy is a stigmatized but natural human emotion. (I rarely feel direct envy, but who doesn't second-guess the path they've taken? It's very easy to look for greener grass and say, "Man, I could be a Director now instead of a 3-failed-startup wash-out", never mind that the other person is Director of a failing, bland company.) Everyone gets down when they see other people having easy, seemingly unearned success-- and oversharers tend to be the hypersocial people who make their successes look even more unearned (it being better, in their view, to be well-liked and socially successful than talented or hard-working).

My point, rather, is that if these people's successes get you down, they aren't friends in any meaningful sense. And social network "friendship" is anything but in many cases, since many people are trying to incite envy to validate their own choices and results.

Most of my real friends I never check on Facebook.