>But if these anxieties are keeping people inside their homes, what’s prompting them to retreat there in the first place? The survey also revealed that hikikomori are more likely to have dropped out of high school or university. Perhaps finding ways to keep young people in education may, then, reduce the risk.

Holy God no! I had excellent grades and extracurriculars but in high school there were months I would cry every day in class or even cut my wrists in class to relieve social pain by replacing it with the more endurable physical pain. A few angelic classmates tried to help but teachers did not, although I learned after the fact that they talked about me a lot in the faculty lounge where I was called "Boo Radley". One doctor at the high school said I was autistic so my parents gave me to the local university's psychology department and paid a bunch of money so every week I had an hour appointment each week one on one with the dean of the department. It was maybe worse than nothing. I never had any idea what to say and he had no idea what to ask and he would tell my parents that I wouldn't talk (when it was more that I didn't have the ability to skill or something to - he would ask queations that I could totally understand were normal for normal people but as for me answering them - I wouldn't know how to even begin because usually either they didn't prompt a verbal reaction in my consciousness, or it would prompt the beginning of an potentially-endlessly complicated chain reaction that would take hours and hours of me forming and conducting a commission investigation in my jead) and, as far as diagnosing me, one prof gave me an IQ test and called me a genius and they said that once I got to grad school I would fit in. The professors told my parents I wasn't autistic, and that's all my parents heard. The professors diagnosed me with "Pervasive Developmental Disorder", which was later replaced with "Autism Spectrum Disorder".

Anyway, I got into my first choice school, and I got accepted by all of them except the ones that have interviews to keep people like me out, but I was afraid of debt so I went to my last choice school because I got a full ride for academics. I was still extremely depressed but felt better overall than high school, although I attempted suicide at least once in high school and once i college. I missed two questions on the GRE and got into the #1 ranked program for my major. I was leaning on not going to grad school because it seemed insane to borrow $60K a year for three years but my parents wanted me to go and said they would pay for the first semester and my godparents talked about how they met in grad school and I thought about how the psychologists said I might not fit in until grad school.

So, I went, but I was still the most awkward person by far. I couldn't get any mentorship from my mentor anymore than I could connect with that psychology dean. The final straw was this irrelevant-to-our-major class we were all required to take, one of those ones where they get a not-a-professor maybe as desperate as I am, and one where you have to write papers. This guy was a Marxist homilist, just about literally. He would start each class reading from the original Marx (never Zizek, Bookchin, Foucault, Butler, no not for him). Guy would tweet about how Dungeons and Dragons had a dangerously inaccurate portayal of agriculture. I shit you not. Anyway, there was an essay prompt that really inspired me, and I wrote what I thought was the best writing of my life. I worried if the teacher would like it and prepared to really try to learn from the feedback. The next day, the teacher told us he wasn't going to read any of the papers and as long as he got an email from us with a document attached, we would get an A.

I switched to computer science where the professors openly hated their lives and had absolutely no flame of earnest passion to pass on. Students would openly cheat and I was the only one who would complain. Profs would tell us they were being forced to pass incompetent undergraduates to maintain revenue. The #1 student in my year was an audacious sociopath who loudly bragged about hacking university systems and businesses for money, with no shame or hint of ethics or philosophy. I was #2 and #3 was a girl that really wanted to be a math major and was leaning back and forth. Well, I guess one week she decided it was going to be math and blew off studying for an exam. As the professor roams the room during the exam, he looks at her paper and panics, realizing he could lose his job because she's the 1 female out of the 3 in the 80 person class that is holding up the female average and he's already under investigation for gender bias. So he just starts telling her the answers and trying to get her to cheat on a test she doesn't care about. I lost the last of my hope in the utility of universities and made to leave. They offered me a teaching position if I finished, as if that was an enticement. Somehow Google got my phone number and wanted to interview me but I couldn't work there in good conscience. Out of all the cs jobs I applied for, I finally got through an interview, and I was offered $500 to work the entire summer as an internship. The charity I had been doing volunteer computer work for two years offered me a position for maybe 80% of federal minimum wage. I went back to my janitor job because it paid better. But I was completely alone and eventually I had more and more sleepless nights and when I kept having 2+ sleepless nights in a row and I decided I couldn't safely drive to work anymore.

Fifteen years earlier, in middle school, I remember when my babysitter heard that my friend was paid $500 by his uncle to work all summer she called him up and cussed him out until a fair wage was paid. I worked on her farm for many years. I still have only worked for people that loved me. Why did I make an exception for schoolwork?

I tortured myself for years, submitting to this imposition of school for what? To come up with answers for people that do not care for me, do not pay me, already have the answers to the objective questions, and are not interested in my subjective answers.

So, no, keeping kids that are emotionally wrecked and socially destitute coralled in schools will not help because that's not their function.

Our society can't turn off the media and go back to each other now because we wouldn't know where to even begin.