Embedded on this page are two videos I stumbled across on Hikikimori as a phenomenon. The first video is on the development inside Japan, and the other examines if Hikikimori can exist outside Japan. It’s a fascinating exploration of the cultural process that pushes people to withdraw from society. It may have inadvertently pointed out that Japan was roughly twenty years ahead of the rest of the world after the bubble economy. Specifically, the rise of part-time work, fewer career options, and a generational opportunity gap expressed as a cultural rift. Specifically, people stuck with part-time employment must be lazy and looking for handouts, and that the narrow path to lasting career jobs comes with high stress and no room for any mistakes.

You see this clearly in the US and UK in the debates around minimum wage pay, student debt, and any other issue about people’s economic situation that came of age around the last big recession. (The one caused by depraved indifference to reckless finance games, not the one caused by depraved indifference to economic precarity in the face of a global pandemic.)

The arguments usually come in two forms. The first, easily dismissed, work and debt are teachers of valuable moral lessons. This lethargic thought dragged forward from puritanical roots and has always been used to argue against improving the average worker’s conditions. The second is a bit more insidious and starts to point at why the rest of the world is beginning to see the same social withdrawal phenomena Japan has over the last three decades.

The Boomers like to cite that they could walk through life and pay their way with part-time jobs through college and get a house all before thirty. There’s plenty of data on how much the economic situation has changed, specifically how actual financial security is moving out of reach for people. That doesn’t matter; like most things that are common sense, it’s mostly a bunch of confirmation bias and cherry-picked data. Of course, the experience for boomers who lost their jobs in recessions during the late ’70s or the early ’90s is very different from most of their peers. Their upcoming retirements without money and decimated factory towns are supposedly the economic precarity fueling the rise of populism.

But the two sides of the same economic adversity story aren’t applied to their kids. Their lack of opportunity doesn’t represent some sweeping change in the nature of work; it’s that they stop at Starbucks on the way into their first part-time job and a second time before running around town driving Uber or delivering Door Dash orders. Both jobs that most investors only see as stopgaps until autonomous vehicles replace them. These companies are debt machines carrying a bet that their primary workforce can be replaced entirely; without that payoff, the business models break down. They admit themselves, as do most of their investors.

These companies are held up as paragons of the transforming workforce, and their number one goal is to eliminate most of their nontechnical employees. On the technical side, you’re looking at an army of consultants backing up a relatively small actual number of employees. These have in common that they do not have any guarantee that the job will be there in ten years and more than likely poor or nonexistent benefits. Yet, you’re looking at two ends of the supposed skilled vs. unskilled labor divide, but both lack the foundation to buy a house, save for retirement or do more than keep up the rent and student loan treadmills a few years longer.

These are not all jobs. Plenty of companies that do direct hire and give benefits, there’s government jobs, and there are the trades. Before pointing out that there are a few more chairs in the game, we should point out that we still see fewer chairs each round. Despite the angry rhetoric around Socialism, the aging Nativists all seem to get that the game is rigged against them. They just think that it’s some global cabal pulling strings to import immigrants to take jobs, and not that agribusiness and meatpacking plants put up billboards to attract people they can pay slave wages and cut out all those OSHA protections.