Young men who get stuck doing nothing...

[Bunny890]

My younger brother is living at home with my parents and I know several other young men who also get 'stuck' at home - endlessly online, alienate friends, not able to even look for employment or engage with healthcare. I realise that there is a mental health element to this, but I can't help but feel frustrated - Mu

My dd had just left college when the pandemic started. She had poor GCSEs, had done two college courses she disliked and had no idea what she wanted to do. She had a few friends but isn't as good socially as most women are.

She was staying in bed all day, interacting online. She did get into gaming for a while but for her it was a way to make friends, as much as it was about the gaming. She became very close to an older girl and they met up frequently in real life. She supported dd to get a job - dd hated it (with good reason actually, it sounded awful) and it didn't last but it was her first taste of employment.

Due to the pandemic we didn't push her to get another job for a while. She stayed in her room mostly but we knew she was interacting socially online and 18 months ago met a boyfriend that way who she is still with - he doesn't live near us so that got her out travelling to see him.

She has since had several short term jobs and is now in one that looks like it could last a while. The job hunting experience got her over her nerves about being rejected. I no longer worry she will spend her life in her room at our house.

I have nephews though who could turn into men who do nothing. Two have jobs though have mostly had to work at home in the last couple of years and still live with mum and dad in their mid twenties, no girl or boy friends etc. One still at uni who has no friends, always been painfully shy and games a lot. He did go to meet some online friend irl recently though, so maybe there is hope......

@WonderingWanda What I mean is that unlimited screen time, allowing teenagers their phones in their rooms at night, not insisting that their 12 y o still comes for a walk on the weekend, not facilitating clubs and sport, not encouraging their sons to organise social events from a younger age. Not turning off the WiFi, confiscation, remote controls etc when rules are broken. Not making them do chores not making sure homework is done first etc These are just some examples. Teens are just huge toddlers and need just as much parenting but so many parents are burnt out by modern life and just leave them to parent themselves. I have lots of gcse age students whose parents say 'what can I do, he just games all the time', they have no stomach for being the bad guy and stopping the gaming.

This ^ is an excellent summation of the problem

I think that touches on one of the key psychological aspects of this, which is the effect of timescale upon cause-and-effect relationships, and how easy it is to just ignore those the operate over a longer timescale and only react to the immediate ones. Psychologists call this "time discounting" - it's why we can spend all morning earnestly planning how we're going to lose weight and then eat half a chocolate cake and a tub of ice cream with lunch.

If you literally took a hikikomori youngster and locked them out of the house without a key, they probably would do something about finding somewhere safe and warm to sleep, they wouldn't just curl up on the side of the road and die. That's not really the point though. People can carry on for a surprising amoung of time living dysfunctional desperate lives from moment to moment - like some addicts for example. What they need is to learn to exert control and creativity over longer timescale issues. Not can I get lunch now, but do I have a job which means I'm going to be able to support my need to eat into the mid-future without relying on others. To do that they need self confidence and something to value, but it's also true that they probably need to be pushed.

I think what I'd tend to do, rather than suddenly one day just locking them outside, is set some things in motion to facilitate a move towards independent living. If money allows, take out a rental on a flat and pay the rent for the first three months, making it clear it's up to them after that. Support with job applications etc. in that time. Have a deadline, but with a process in place to lead up to it so it can become part of a larger picture way of seeing the world.

I suspect he won't take medication because then there'd be the expectation he will see some improvement and start getting better. He doesn't want to because his life is set up exactly how he wants it right now.

And of course, it will continue for as long as your parents enable him. He's figured out threats of suicide are a very handy way of getting everyone to back off and leave him be/go along with his wishes.

Your parents could do with some proper education in mental health and suicide imo, including learning that threats of suicide are often a means of manipulation and that nobody can 'cause' someone to end their lives via reasonable actions, nor can anyone prevent someone who's determined from ending their life if they've made their mind up.

Ultimately it's not really your problem so I'd back off and let it play out however it's going to. Your mum probably enjoys on some level being useful and needed and still caring for her baby, perhaps gets something from the drama of it all, who knows. If they don't call the police when he becomes violent then they're partly responsible for the next time. It sounds quite embarrassing tbh, like he's an overgrown toddler.

Interesting re gaming. My brother (53) was not and isn’t into gaming. Books have always been his thing. If you look at family trees, you will often find in the past ( pre and post WW2) men who didn’t marry, maybe lived with a married relative and held down a simple job. Maybe some of them would be Hikkikimori today. I think what’s changed is 1) pre welfare state you had to work unless your family could support you, now you can get by on benefits 2) you can now withdraw into a virtual world. I find all this Metaverse stuff and talk of “augmented” human beings deeply sinister.

I guess what I am trying to say is there probably always have been socially
withdrawn, low functioning men but the possibility of living without work, and the advent of the internet has made it more widespread and more acute now.

I think what’s changed is 1) pre welfare state you had to work unless your family could support you, now you can get by on benefits 2) you can now withdraw into a virtual world. I find all this Metaverse stuff and talk of “augmented” human beings deeply sinister.

I don't think (1) really applies because if you look at people's accounts of relatives like this, they're almost always living in their parents' homes and being fed and very basically supported by those parents. It may be that benefits top that up but with stricter criteria now and the fact that people tend to go on for years or decades living like this, they're not going to be the main ongoing factor. They certainly won't be enough for a hikikomori to rent somewhere on their own, not least because of the difficulty of finding a landlord who will accept long term unemployed tenants.

What may be a factor is that home ownership is much more widespread now than it was up until the mid-20th century. When most people rented, they wouldn't have had a spare room in which to accommodate an economically unproductive adult son. Now they buy a family-size home and pay it off with a mortgage while the children are growing up; the rooms are then there to be used so rather than downsizing, they go on letting them be used.

Yes I agree. My late father was one, I think, and he was born in the 1930s. He made a late bid for self-actualisation in his 40s by marrying my mother, who had a mental health diagnosis. That wasn't an enormously functional setup either.

I agree with the parenting teens. I think some people assume that people will just develop good life habits like housework by a socially acceptable age without having to do anything. Many don't, many need to be actively taught things, made to do them with consequences, have the value of them reinforced.

I know parents in my son's class like this.

My son is year 3. The kids are still almost all 7 years old.

Its something else.

I haver a friend whose brother is one of these- he lives with his widowed mother who is lonely and has no real desire for him to leave - it's a weird co-dependancy. He is in his late twenties and has never had a girlfriend and has no friends despite living in the town he grew up in. His life is sleep, eat, online gaming in the early hours. He won't even leave the house to claim benefits and is essentially a financial leech on his mother who seems to see it as a small price to pay for her darling son to stay with her (even though he never seems to leave his bedroom and keeps strange hours so not exactly good company!).

In his case from what I can see it's largely due to sheer laziness and the fact everything is done for him. Why he doesn't have the desire to shape his own life I can't imagine. Both of his sisters are fully independent, partners and careers and live full and interesting lives. Neither are particularly close to their Mother, whereas the son is the apple of her eye- go figure.

I think if manchildren live at home with their parents then the parents have a responsibility not to enable them.

DS1 is 20 anmd came home this summer instead of getting a job, an internship or going abroad. He had plans either end of the summe rand some that fell through mid summer which was one reason. But he fell into this sleeping late, cooking fry ups at 3am and leaving the dishes, skid marks in the loo etc and I had words with him about all of it. We are a very non-confrontational family but I couldn't let him drift. I made him get up, get dressed, come for walks, even do some weight training with me. I handed him the loo brush, the washing up brush, the laundry hamper.

I think even if they are in crisis splitting up from someone or struggling with MH, you give them one week of total self-absorbed childishness and then you raise the expectations of what they are capable of.

If either of my DC come home and begin to mope after uni, I will fill their lives with so many chores they'd rather get a job, and I'll make it clear I'm not a nag, I'm doing it on purpose so they don't become manchildren.

A friend of mine calls this 'launching'. She says there's a window of time in whcih young adults need to launch their lives: get a home of their own, a job, a partner, a social life, and if they fail to do the majority of these by their late twenties they then lose the instinctive drive to do so.

You did a really good thing, making him launch when neither he nor your parents were motivated to do so. I hope he appreciates you.

I agree this is the root of it. X

Agree it's a problem. We can't all get better jobs due to skill level and the simple fact that someone has to do the worst paid jobs.

Not every person in this situation can turn of the games console, go outside and create a better life for themselves

I’ve just seen this on Twitter, both sad and scary. I wonder how the stats will look in another 30 years?

The best thing we ever bought was a remote for the WiFi some 20 odd years ago-it got turned off after a certain time-if my friend did that -which is what I suggested years ago for her to do-I’m pretty sure her lazy and entitled son-would have got a full time job and be living on his own by now-except now he is morbidly obese and gaming -he never leaves his room apart from to do 8 hours work a week.so she is subsiding him totally.I asked her how will she manage her electric bill as he has 3 monitors going and all this high tec stuff on 24/7 as well as telling her to wash his clothes separately to the households and cook him meals separately again.she doesn’t know what to do ir say-otherwise he has a huge aggressive tantrum, he literally rules the roost

I completely agree with this. Some parents are opting out of parenting and allowing their children to do what they like with no consequences. I see on here problems with adult children living in the house and the response is usually "he is 18, he is an adult, there is nothing you can do". I lived at home until I was 26 and by God I lived by my parent's rules or I was out.

There was another post a couple of days ago about a 14/15 year old girl who only wanted to eat cereal, sweets, pasta and pizza, lots of the responses were that she was practically an adult and what could the mother do!

I find that attitude so ridiculous, my DD is almost 15 and she is still a child that needs my direction. She has good habits ingrained in her from my parenting but still needs direction in certain areas. It drives me mad when people talk about their children's bad habits around food, screen time, chores, etc and throw their hands up and say their is nothing they can do. You are doing your child no favours by not intervening.

My brother was in real danger of becoming a basement dweller. We are from a small town, he was good at school but had no drive, no passion, or ambition. He was sporty, handsome, popular, had (and still has) a great friendship group but they were all the same.
Slowly one by one his friends got jobs, girlfriends, rented a place and he was left behind. My dad practically dragged him to a careers advisor, it was so outside of my dad's culture he couldn't understand, in his culture the men worked and provided.
My brother found his passion and turned his life around, has a great job that he loves, met and married a wonderful woman, has two gorgeous children and is happy and healthy.

I worked at an FE college and I saw it time and time again, young men who were usually but not always from a chaotic background just floundering through life. Often single parent households, mum either working all the hours she could (so not at home) or didn't work and has no ambition or pride for her children. The kids almost always had a terrible diet of sluggish carby food and microwave burgers, washed down with Monster energy drinks and would game all night.
I remember when Fortnite was popular, huge groups of boys suddenly disappeared from classes because they were so busy playing it all night.

I agree that so many young men has fallen into the trap of believing they are above low paid work and thinking their unwashed ass deserves a 10/10 Instagram model girlfriend that they end up doing nothing, no skills, no job, nothing.
Its sad and scary.

Lazyitus for the most part. Probably waited on hand and foot by a martyr mother and not expected to do anything for themselves. No way my sons will get away with this

While I know that people get here by various routes I wonder what the early symptoms are.

It's very much in my mind not just because of the example of my Dsis earlier (yes I know this thread is about men but I think women get like this too - I can think of some examples - but in smaller numbers) but because I see the same traits in one of my DDs. In each case it went something like this 1. lack of friends 2. lack of variety of interest (ie, one overwhelming interest or simply none at all) 3. lack of interest in the world around them.

I'd say lack of interest in their future too, and what they will do with their lives, but I think the average kid goes through a stage of wanting to be a firefighter, footballer or an explorer or whatever and as they move through their teens their plans become more realistic and concrete. Whereas with my two examples there simply wasn't any of that. When it came to the future it was as if it simply didn't exist for them and hadn't done so for a very long time. Because they had no ability to think about it they didn't develop much of an ability to plan for it. In my Dsis's case it meant that her world just got smaller and smaller and ended up being no bigger than the four walls of my parents' house. DM was completely flummoxed and didn't know what to do. DDad was working long hours, also had no ideas (and frankly was annoyed by the whole thing) so he couldn't help either.

In DD's case I am applying a lot of friendly pressure and I'm pretty sure it'll work. Just consistently and calmly turning her head to face her prospects.

I'm sure lazyitis has a role to play - but we all make decisions through laziness but they don't matter if we're not fundamentally scared of the world and averting ourselves from it.

Yes that's right, and it's what I had in mind when I gave that example. It's all very well saying that an ultimatum will sort out the problem - and perhaps in some cases it will - but it assumes that the hikikomori is acting rationally. There's a huge amount of irrationality involved here.

I think if you simly kick someone out of the house then if they had any friends they'd couch surf. If they didn't have any then I do honestly imagine there would be some sort of scene and the reality is that it would either be the park bench or back in the house. And I can remember back in my early 20s of plenty of examples of people sleeping in the park.

It's positive pressure over time, helping with applications etc, probably a very judicious and limited lawnmower parenting is involved (dangerous, but probably necessary). Then the ultimatum becomes a goal instead. Leastways that's how I see it working.

Part of the blame lies with the parents, in that they are allowing it to happen. My friend's son was like this. She got fed up of it and told him he had three months to find a job and find somewhere else to live. She felt awful as she felt she was being hard on him, but also admitted she was part of the problem for making life too easy at home.

Any possibility your brother is Autistic? I know that isn't always the explanation and there may be other reasons. But, I have realised the stereotypes are so wrong and many go through their entire life not knowing or families around them not realising because they don't seem Autistic or do the stereotypical Autistic things. Severe stress and burn out can look like this through no fault of the person at all. It's being completely overwhelmed with acting typical for so long - and many don't even realise they're doing it if they are undiagnosed or unaware.

I've noticed autism being mentioned a few times. As someone with some auts in the family I can see how that could very much be a contributing factor, I would hazard a guess that it's not in most cases.