I watched this when it was first broadcast a few years back. Riveting, and just tragic. All the more relevant to me as I’m currently living in Japan, on a 6 month sabbatical from work, in a tiny 1R apartment (basically a hotel room) in an old block in Fukuoka. I hardly see my neighbours but I guess that’s not unusual in a big city.
I do know that when I looked down from my balcony (I’m on the 6th floor) - I could see that the balcony below was completely filled with trash. That was about 2 months ago, and I noticed last week that it had been cleared. I can only hope that this was a good sign for whoever was living there.
Given the social and work pressures that are well reported, and the subcultures such as gaming, anime etc, I can well imagine how these lead to people becoming hikikomori. I wouldn’t use the word “choosing” - similar to addictions I think it’s just something that some people can be predisposed to.
True indeed. The programme focuses on what happens when they are eventually left alone - the full synopsis:
It’s estimated over a million Japanese live as “hikikomori,” recluses totally withdrawn from society. Some hikikomori may even go for decades without leaving their house. While in the past the phenomenon was most commonly associated with young men, recent data has revealed a much wider demographic of people whose confidence in themselves, and in society, has been shattered. As the parents or relatives hikikomori so often depend on entirely become too old to care for them, many now face a dire situation, left alone and unable to cope.
The opening line of the documentary:
“On this visit, the property’s occupant was still alive. A recluse, he’s isolated himself for over three decades”
I don’t know where else to put this, so I’m going to put it here. One of my favorite YouTubers for years has been Rob Scallon. If you’re into music at all, his videos are great. And he does a variety of stuff. Original music, weird instruments, goofy experiments, music education, all kinds of stuff. I had noticed he wasn’t posting as much over the past year. And he just posted why. Hopefully this helps remove some more stigma from mental health issues.
I keep trying to wrap my head around this. Like, I thought Graham’s Number was a really, really big number, but I could kind of understand how the number of Knuth’s up arrows were increasing explosively from g(1) to g(64), but this just seems like pure sorcery to me.
For comparison, here is the relatively tiny Graham’s Number, which is already too large to write out all of the digits in the entire observable universe no matter how small you write each digit…
Trigger warnings: plenty of them. Domestic violence etc. Heads up, please.
I found this article enlightening, terrifying, inspiring, and all too familiar in some ways. And now I’ve read it twice through. It’s powerful. In the end, it’s more positive than negative.
@DukeTrout
If this means what I think it means, I am x1023 more opposed to stripmining the ocean floor of nodules containing rare earth elements than I was before. Because such mining would de-oxygenate vast areas of ocean. It would crash everything. And us.
Deep-ocean polymetallic nodules as a resource for critical materials
Abstract
Deep-ocean polymetallic nodules form on or just below the vast, sediment-covered, abyssal plains of the global ocean. Polymetallic nodules primarily consist of precipitated iron oxyhydroxides and manganese oxides, onto which metals such as nickel, cobalt, copper, titanium and rare earth elements sorb. The enormous tonnage of nodules on the seabed, and the immense quantities of critical metals that they contain, have made them a target for future mining operations. Mining of polymetallic nodules has been spurred by the need for critical metals to support growing populations, urbanization, high-technology applications and the development of a green-energy economy. Nevertheless, an improved understanding of the affected ecosystems and their connectivity, as well as the environmental impacts of deep-ocean mining, is required before operations begin.
[emphasis added]
We humans know so little. Will hubris and greed be the end of not just us, but our planet? (ok ok that is not a question I am posing to you, sir, but as a general plaintive query to the cosmos, which I am pretty sure does not give a hoot about us humans at all)
Well, and the other aspect is how ridiculously resource-intensive it is even to exist in the deep ocean. We might as well be strip-mining the surface of the moon for the effort and resources required to operate in the deep ocean.
