Comment by ThrowawayR2
1 month ago
The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.
There is effectively zero evidence suggesting a population on UBI will result in some sort of outpouring of creativity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori and it's not a phenomenon limited to Japan.
Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about. There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study.
I personally know that some crucial open source work is maintained by people with schizoid-avoidant spectrum issues. I know a lot of them but I won't out them here. hikikomori are driven to be invisible because their extreme pathological avoidance of attention. You don't know them and their contributions because they don't want you to know that they still live at home, out of their car door dashing because no company ever hires them, are shut-in because of serious unhealed trauma, are still deeply in poverty in such a wealthy industry etc.
A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.
Many prominent pseudonymous devs have had hikikomori traits. _why practically inspired a generation of Ruby devs. visualidiot (RIP) was a crucial driver behind a lot of web dev culture in the 2010s. Heck, I made significant contributions to Joomla and WP themes back in the day -- you have probably used sites with themes or plugins I made. Also I ran a blog a decade ago that used to rank prominently in google and receive dozens of emails a month from people struggling with mental illness -- many people crediting me with saving their lives. Surely that is something of value to society.
Don't go around spreading bullshit like it is facts about a group of people we know little about.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/creative-exploration...
Love a headline that conforms to Betteridge’s law
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You assume much about what I know about the hikikomori demographic. My power level is well over nine thousand.
>> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.
> Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about.
Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?
> A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.
"likely", "might" - this is all speculation on your part too. There is no reason to believe that a lot of humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would, in fact, contribute more to society, nor that the contributions from those that do would, in fact, offset those that don't.
It's speculation on both sides of this particular argument I see no compelling evidence at all.
> Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?
If we can't tell, the "they aren't" bit is of course made up. Are you not arguing in good faith, or are you just not paying attention to what you're quoting?
"they aren't, plain and simple" is the made up bit I was calling out. There is literally not much more to the original comment to be calling made up.
"A lot of these humans" was me referring the humans I personally know mentioned in the prior paragraph. And I was speculating on the effect UBI would have on them.
Because anecdotally my experience is that hikikomori are a hotbed of creativity and that financial assistance with no strings attached has helped us increase contributions. However, it is very possible I have a skewed sample point because of course I would only know the hikikomori that are hotbeds of creativity -- I wouldn't ever encounter those silently scrolling and never building community online. That said, it feels intuitively correct to me that people with no irl connections would be pretty motivated to build connections some other way. I certainly was. But perhaps that is simply outlier behavior maybe it is more typical for hikikomori to spend their lives watching anime. We don't know.
The thesis of my comment is that we don't know enough about the demographic of hikikomori to state absolutes about them -- to do so is to spread bullshit. I said "There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study." Which seems to also be the thesis of your comment. I suspect from your comment history that you are just being deliberately argumentative so you can pass reading off as new insight.
People who are specifically not employed because they aren't motivated to do anything at all don't seem to be the best sample for what average people could do if they had more free time during their waking hours.
It seems unlikely that the most motivated people will take up UBI; the most likely UBI recipients are those who are marginally employed, and likely marginally motivated.
Guess what the U stands for
did you mean to write the opposite of what you wrote?
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What do you think UBI is and how do you think it works? Honestly.
a) I'm not sure it logically follows that the hikikomori would be a particularly artistic group, thus don't understand the assertion; b) how do we know they aren't? By definition, they wouldn't be out promoting their works or gaining recognition.
Also, there is at least one example of UBI contributing to an increase in activity:
"According to the research, 31% of BIA recipients reported an increased ability to sustain themselves through arts work alone, and the number of people who reported low pay as a career barrier went down from one third to 17%. These changes were identified after the first six months of the scheme and remained stable as the scheme continued." [1]
[1] https://musiciansunion.org.uk/news/ireland-s-basic-income-fo...
> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true.
This seems a non-sequitur. People whose motivation is isolation are unlikely to try to generate anything for other people.
But your general idea is correct - is there group where motivated people don't need to worry about money?
Well yes - we see this in artist colonies and indeed in entrepreneurial retreats like https://www.recurse.com/
Counterpoint to your counterpoint: the flourishing of the arts in Bohemian districts[1] in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Maybe there’s a feedback loop with societal expectations regarding the hikikomori / NEETs? The more they are demonized as unproductive, the less productive they become.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism
Hikikomori seems to be largely a symptom of mental illness. NEETs almost by definition are not productive.
The fact that these groups are not producing mass amounts of creative works in no way implies that currently-productive people would not produce significantly more creative works if they had the time and resources to do so.
No that wouldn’t. If the zeitgeist, culture, society at large are antagonizing toward you, if you are meant to feel like a useless negative part of society, why would we expect amazing output from them?
This reinforces others talking about the flaws of hustle and grind culture. The status quo create the conditions for the negatives and then point to that and say “see”.
NEETs are, by definition, people who are either unwilling or unable to do anything productive, so I don't think they are a good example. I expect you'd get better results if you include the people who are employed today.
> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.
It's funny how you chose to frame groups as "NEET", but you somehow failed to refer to "aspiring artist" or "aspiring musician" or "aspiring novelist". I mean "aspiring artist" already implies engaging in an activity albeit not professionally or reaching success.
You also somehow failed to refer to "amateur artist". As if not enjoying enough success to live comfortably with your art to the point of requiring to hold a job to pay rent is something that would validate your argument.
I'm not sure you are even aware of the fact that most of the mainstream artists you see around are not even professional, in the sense that in spite of their success and touring they still need to hold a job to make ends meet. Check out any summer festival, pick any random non-headliner band, and see how many members hold jobs, and had to take time off to go touring. Even some music legends have a history of holding humble jobs at least up to the time they made it. See Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, who famously lost a couple of fingers in an industrial accident while working at a sheet metal factory.
It's not just music, either. Luminaries like Fernando Pessoa could very well be classified as the ultimate NEET as he spent years of his early life not in education, employment, or training.
The UK music culture of the 1960s was in large part due to the "dole" or cash payments to poor people.
I don't think that's the only reason since the dole exists today too and there's not as much good music coming out.
Jazz and other music genres in the US came without government welfare, they came from struggle and oppression. Motivated artists will still work part time to fund their dream, they don't necessarily wait for welfare to start making art.
IF you were to give a lot of people free money today, will you get more and higher quality art in return, or will most people just drink and smoke that money while playing videogames at home?
Society, people and the world today are vastly different than back in the 1960s, so we need new polices targeting the society of today, not 1960s policies.
What do you mean there isn't much good music coming out? Maybe the genres people are creating more of don't match your personal preference, or you aren't looking for it and are just relying on major media companies to show it to you, but ive never had more high quality music of more variety than ever before.
Much of it is farther in the electronica genres that many people somehow still ignore the existence of but I haven't had to listen to the same song twice unless I wanted to in a number of years. Just on my youtube discovery feed right now I got multiple 1+ hour synthwave mixes, EBM/EDM, industrial bass, multiple forms of metal, filk, jungle and DnB, punk rock, old and new jazz styles, and more, 95% of which was made in the last 2 years.
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What do you think those policies might look like? It's true that we have more screen based entertainment options today. We also have a very different music distribution system that is likely influencing things substantially. In the 1960s, I imagine getting on the radio was what it took to launch a career, now it's matching the algorithm on spotify.
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Um, hikikomori are a hotbed of creative works, though. Your entire premise is false. I don't know that you could get reliable statistics proving this claim, but Japan likely has the highest number of creatives per capita of any country in the world, and a ton of them are NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels. The vast majority of this creative work isn't commercially successful, of course, which is part of why they're NEETs.
> "NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels"
And you expect the voting public to be persuaded to support UBI because of the immense societal value of an tsunami of gooner fanart (yes, I do have some passing familiarity with the sort of output Japanese NEETs generate) and "trashy webnovels"? I'm pretty sure that when the person I'm replying to talked about "the incredible artworks [and] literature ... that would spring into existence", that's probably not what they were hoping for.
I'm not commenting in any way on UBI, as I try to avoid having strong opinions about topics I don't have expertise on. My only stake in this matter is addressing the patently false claim that NEETs are not creative, when the exact opposite is true which perhaps is incidentally harmful to the argument you were building against UBI given that you staked it on an inversion of the truth.
That you boil it down to "gooner fanart" reflects entirely on yourself and what you view. I believe this is known as "telling on yourself". The overwhelming majority of the artistic output is actually not lewd; somewhere in the region of 85-90% of what gets published is SFW. Not only that, a pretty considerable amount of output is in fact professional-quality; if anything keeps them from being professionals, it's merely the fact that they spend their time creating what they want to see in the world. Being an actually professional artist generally entails creating what other people want to see in the world; specifically what a critical mass of people willing to pay want, which renders commercially viable art to a limited subset of possibilities, mostly only possibilities that appeal to the lowest common denominator if you want to ensure the safety of your income.
You could indeed say that literature is a weak point relative to the very high quality art, music, games, etc, in the NEET cultural sphere, but it's because people aren't trying to be literary. There is simply a subcultural preference, among both creators and consumers, for easier-to-digest writing. The forms of creativity people take an interest in don't have to match the exact ones you value in order for them to have merit. People read and write trashy webnovels because they like trashy webnovels, and that's fine too. It is still an expression of creativity all the same. And some small percentage of those trashy webnovels do go on to be extremely commercially successful, so even if that's your cynical metric for creative value to society it would still be incorrect to say they don't have value.
Can it really be a 'hotbed' if there is no demand (or even maybe awareness) of the works? That just seems like a hobby done for selfish reasons.
Quoting GGGP:
>There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
As it happens, the Japanese internet is absolutely rich with content created by individuals, most of it done for the sake of love for creative work rather than financial motivation. I spend much of my free time either consuming it or contributing to the pool of such work myself. The entire point of this discussion thread was about the potential for creativity if you were to unshackle it from the demands of financial self-sustenance.
As an aside, I believe this phenomenon manifested as strongly as it has in Japan because of the extremely low cost of living relative to the level of economic development; a studio apartment can be had for less than the equivalent of $200 USD per month, and many parents can afford to and are willing to pay this price to get the NEETs out of their house. In essence enabling them, not that they want to enable their adult children to depend on them but the burden is small enough that they can tolerate it.
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All hobbies are selfish, that's kinda the point?
Hikkis will barely have their (speaking from Maslow) physiological needs met, and seldom their safety and security needs. This leaves them with very few mental-emotional resources to put into even having any creative thoughts. UBI would absolutely uplift these people into a position where they can start producing output.
and yet their hypothesis is true, there are already many people, with or without UBI, that volunteer, create things and in general help people surrounding them without any reward and they are the backbone of every society, not the career-chasers
I think phenomena like hikkikomori have more to do with (at least perceived) social rejection than lack of motivation. If the only acceptable message you receive from society is that you must chase the brass ring constantly and any setback means you are an abject failure, then withdrawing from the pain of that rejection makes sense for anyone who has experienced enough setbacks or strongly feels alien to that culture. A broader societal shift would occur if it was truly universally understood that everyone has value as a human being separate from their labor market leverage or capital accumulation.
There will always be strivers who measure their self worth against superficial standards (Russ Hanneman “doors go up” hand gesture here), I just don’t see why everyone should be forced to play that game or starve I suppose. Giving everyone the option to settle for a life of basic dignity while caring for those around them, or going all in on some academic / creative pursuit seems equally valid investments for society.
Yes. The only real conclusion from people like NEETs is that society failed them. Outside of a fraction of total people (or when addictions are at play), it is very rare that someone never wants to be productive.