“Lazy Kids”?? The Dark Secret of the NEET Crisis & Youth Disengagement
- Kevin Lankes
- Jul 14
- 9 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YXTPMp-FdwA
God, kids these days! They’re just so lazy with their hoola hoops and pokey man video games! What’s wrong with these young’uns?? Laying around, mainlining avocado toast all day and binge-watching YouTube videos of dudes yelling inside toilet bowls. Where’s my cane? I need it so I can wave it around in the air.
To all of this, I say, quite insistently: old people, calm yourselves. You can’t ruin every sector of the economy and be upset when no one wants to participate anymore. It’s like inviting everyone to play basketball with you, but you bring the basketballs, and they’re edible basketballs, and you eat all the basketballs. And everyone else is just standing around like, what the f*ck? You can’t blame them when they leave the court confused and extremely disgusted.
And that’s exactly what’s happening. A lot of younger people around the world are just dropping out. They’re NEET. And I’m not saying that because they’re cool, even though I’m sure lots of them are, but they’re NEET, as in, N-E-E-T. It’s an acronym that stands for Not in Employment, Education, or Training. It’s a term that has a cloudy origin, but one use can be traced back to 2010, when the European Commission on Employment Committee began using it as one of their trend indicators.
And yeah, it’s a huge movement. One-fifth of the global population of young people are NEET as of 2023. 14% of youth in America. 11% in Canada. 4.5% in the Netherlands. Brazil comes in at 20%. Chile 23%. South Africa 42%. The numbers here should also give you an idea of the reasons for the NEET population increase, seeing that countries with proper support systems in place have less. Though Russia is an outlier at just 14%. But if you don’t work there you probably work in the gulag, so I don’t know if that counts.
The global cultural rise of NEETs is massive. There are terms for it all over the world, mostly meaning about the same thing, and some describing different stages of NEET-hood, and the difference between short-term and long-term NEETs. Hikikomori and the satori generation in Japan, the sampo generation in South Korea, tang ping in Chinese-speaking regions, waithood or “failure to launch” in English-speaking cultures.
There’s a subcategory called unintentional NEETs. Those are young people who’d really like to be productive members of the worker bee class but they just can’t find a job or get accepted to school.
But lots of people are doing this intentionally. They’re looking around and realizing a lot of factual realities about the world they live in. The society we’ve built, collectively, has been taken over by the very few. Monopolies and bazillionaires control everything, costs are out of control, salaries are garbage, and quality of life is way down from those idyllic days of laisez faire Americana that conservatives are always verbally jizzing about. Not to mention, that lasted about a decade and only for certain people, so it’s not even real.
It’s getting rougher and rougher out there. Workers with college degrees earn 68% more than those with just a high school diploma. And those with master’s degrees earn even more. But the average cost of college tuition and room and board was $2,870 in 1981. I don’t just mean one semester, I mean the whole four years. You really could work a full-time summer job at the minimum wage then of $3.35 an hour and pay for college all on your own. Or combine a part-time job with small, affordable loans or Pell Grants. And then go take your degree and be set for life. Apply for jobs by just walking into an office somewhere and having a firm handshake and good eye contact, along with some gumption. And have like one or two skills like being able to read and knowing how to type. And then work twenty-five years and get a nice gold watch and a full retirement account that allows you to travel the world and spoil your grandkids. Except, sorry, you don’t have any grandkids because this is not the same world anymore, and your own kids grew up in a post-capitalist hellscape, and they can’t afford to have kids themselves.
The average cost of college tuition in America today is $38,270 per year. That’s over $153,000 dollars to get the same exact degree that a lot of crypt keeper assholes got who also then got to go on to have a life and afford things. Without access to the higher-paying jobs that open up by having a degree, of course you’re not going to get the higher-paying jobs. And even if you have the degree, the sheer number of skills someone needs to possess these days completely dwarfs what older generations had to know in order to qualify for job prerequisites.
Let’s take a look at a content and media role since that’s where my professional background is. Like, social media manager. You have to know how to use, just use, all major social media networks. Is there even an equivalent for that level of skill set in an old people job? I don’t know, you tell me, but I don’t think so. And then you have to know how to use each of those optimally, with topics and tags and best practices for timing and engagement, and then you have to know how to build an audience with every single one of those platforms. God forbid you’re in content management and you have to add website operations and maintenance, media partnerships and programming, ad ops and programmatic ad revenue generation, affiliate marketing and relationship management. At one time, a lot of these things may have fallen under several jobs across a number of employees. But in my last job, I was responsible for all of these things. That’s the other thing about the job market, near constant layoffs have created an environment where people are forced to take on the job duties of those who were just fired, or else risk being fired themselves. That never changes because the executive teams convince themselves that they don’t need to replace anyone because they’re making more money with less people now and operations are going just fine. They’re not stressed. And so the rest of your employees just slowly self-select out of your organization, and the problem gets worse internally, but also globally. We live and work in an environment where 64% of young people worldwide are afraid of losing their jobs. These are people aged 15-29. This is according to a World Values Survey. This is where NEETs come in. Some people just choose not to deal with all of that. And honestly, if they can make it work, then why not?
Vice did a really great piece last year about what NEETs actually do with their time, and how they afford to do it. I linked that down in the didgeridoo if you want to check out the full story. Some people survive on inheritance, others have odd jobs, and sure, some of them have to get by on government benefits. But that’s not the “waste” you hear about, because that doesn’t actually exist outside a political narrative to justify tax cuts for billionaires. Because the biggest welfare queens are corporations and the wealthy and they always have been. Some NEETs are independently wealthy or have private support systems to help. Honestly, it’s probably time we analyzed our social attitudes toward a lot of these things, one because it’s the only way to fully address something, when we fully understand it, and two, pretty much every nepo baby alive is a NEET at some point and nobody ever gives them a hard time about it. So it’s okay to renounce the world if your parents are rich, I guess.
Speaking of world-renouncers, the historical Buddha, definitely a NEET. And, funny enough, also a nepo baby. But yeah, ultimately, he was just like, f*ck all this, man.
But let’s add some context to this, because it’s not all skibidi. I’ve been looking at things through riz-colored glasses. There are real problems with NEETs, I just feel like the way our society is set up is the least of those. A big issue with the growing movement is that NEETs suffer from mental health challenges at a higher rate than the general population. A 2021 meta-analysis from researchers in Canada found that NEET youth have a higher incidence of mental health diagnoses, alcohol and substance abuse, and a higher tendency to unalive themselves.
So that’s not good. And we can’t say for sure which way the causal link occurs. Is it because people who have a tendency to drop out of the world are stricken with more mental health obstacles? Or is it that people who’ve chosen to live this way in isolation and without a strong sense of purpose and fulfilment are more prone to developing mental health issues? Though a lot of NEETs would say their lives are perfectly fulfilling and that they actually get to do things they enjoy and work on projects they want to pursue. But we can’t definitively pin down the percentage of the population that feels that way. Again, some NEETs are involuntary. They don’t want to be jobless or out of school.
There are additional circumstances that create larger populations of NEET youth. Economically disadvantaged areas and a lack of access to education are big contributing factors. Most NEETs in South Africa, for example, only have a 12th-grade education or lower. And conversely, the Netherlands uses a system to identify and personalize education and training, filtering people into an ideal role in the workforce, which benefits everyone. That’s likely a reason why the population of NEETs in South Africa is a whopping 42%, and in the Netherlands, it’s the lowest around the world at 4.5%. In the U.S. half of all NEETs come from families with household incomes of $50,000 or less per year. Though a fairly large amount, 20%, have household incomes of $100,000 or more. Which means that kids from high-income households might be ignoring education and professional opportunities, and that’s not really so great either. We’re just going to have another stupid, entitled, generation of rich affluenza assholes with no education or moral code running around. Doesn’t sound so great to me.
Another big factor is something called labor market scarring. This happens after a big event that seriously impacts the global economy in a majorly negative way. Think about what happened during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. There are lots of reports about a huge impact to a whole generation of kids and their education. We just couldn’t properly maintain the system and standards fell off. Unemployment skyrocketed and tons of younger people were kicked out of the job market because they lacked seniority. Another fun example is the subprime mortgage lending crisis that led to the housing market collapse. That screwed a whole lot of us who graduated college right into that mess in 2008. Labor market scarring isn’t one and done, it’s known to have a lifelong impact on individuals who experience these circumstances. Starting with the Millennial generation, we’ve been facing these gigantic, global, economy-shattering scenarios at a pretty rapid pace now.
There are financial costs to having a large population of NEETs. According to one study, the economic cost of NEETs in Ontario is $6,069 per NEET. That adds up to $1.92 billion each year. It America it’s estimated to cost under 1% of the GDP. Now, the implications to the economy aren’t really the problem for me, though I know others would be very interested in tackling those. I personally believe that if we shored up our social supports, then we’d have a better handle on the safety and security of our people and we wouldn’t be facing this massive growing problem. And studies about social safety nets support that idea. Investing money in social safety nets increases labor force participation. It’s funny that treating people morally and with respect for their value as fellow human beings is a very strong foundation for building a stable and flourishing society. Maybe we should, you know, go with that, instead of making cuts to Medicaid and social supports like trump and the republican death cultists just did and keep bragging about.
I don’t know man, maybe just continuing to do all the exact things the data shows are going to screw us even more isn’t the best way to govern human society in the 21st century. Maybe we should give a more human-centered approach a shot. Bolstering our society, lifting all our boats, or avocado toast rafts, that’s what’s going to create a stronger economy, which ultimately doesn’t even matter because money isn’t real, but lots of people have to deal with the effects of not having it while others get to go poop in sixteen different bathrooms on their mega yachts. So let’s talk more about the global rise of NEETs and really understand the issue and push for real solutions that we know will fix it. Not fake moral outrage from billionaires who pretend they care about the productivity levels of your 23-year-old nephew who likes video games. Let’s figure this out, because we all deserve to be as happy as we can and experience life as fully as we can while we’re here. Let’s do some f*cking good in our own little corners of the world.
I’ll see you next time.
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