NEET: Not in Education, Employment, or Training

It seems there are record numbers of men not pursuing education or looking for work. The data for this is described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1m812n3/record_numbers_of_young_men_not_working_pursuing/. Do you know anyone like this? Why do you think this group is growing?


32 comments

  1. Because quite frankly, it’s not worth the effort. If you can’t survive even with the majority of jobs available, then why bother with the system at all?

    If I didn’t have a family already, I’d be unemployed. I’d still work for myself, but I wouldn’t even consider working for somebody else.

  2. I see this talked about all the time and I understand the thinking beind it, they pretty much are just “checking out” on society. But I just dont understand how people actually do it and survive.

    Like if I didn’t work id be homeless.

  4. Very hard to find a job as a new grad these days. Companies just want to hire middle managers to leverage AI.

  5. Because the requirements for getting an “entry level” job is fucking ridiculous these days

  6. Average Men deal with reality long before anybody else. Nobody is doing anything to make a low paid mans life easier.

  7. I think a lot of people are just hopeless.

    If working a full time job doesn’t leave you any better off than someone who doesn’t work, why bother?

  8. Echoing other folks who say that it’s a pretty natural response to a broken system where it’s extremely volatile, deeply hard to even get started in and there is a ludicrous amount of exploitation for very little reward from employers who have seething disdain for you and not only hate they have to pay you anything at all, but are trying desperately to eliminate your position entirely. I’m older and I have a dead end job, but I don’t even look at getting a better one, going back to school or whatever because… what’s the point? We’ve known about the rat race for generations but at this point it’s extremely blatant and the cheese is not even remotely worth navigating the maze.

  9. Almost every comment points to the job market and career prospects, but that’s just one of a few important bullet points in this discussion imo. Over the decades, women have been cannibalizing “maleness” in the sense that they’ve been told to pursue careers, provide for themselves, postpone traditionally feminine gender roles, etc. While this may be universally considered a great thing for equal rights, there is a byproduct of this kind of cultural shift that manifests in the form of men no longer being as “valuable” to women. This is just a brief bird’s-eye of the whole conversation, but not only are career prospects increasingly dire and unfulfilling, so too are the relations between men and women in the “mating marketplace.” I’d also argue that social media and general cultural shifts over the decades have also impacted male displacement.

  10. Because there’s no longer a reward for working hard.

    Used to be you worked hard you got a wife, a family, a retirement, and a valued place in your community.

    Now you get a “partner”, a dog, no future, and you’re reviled by your community for having the wrong shape of genitals.

  11. What education or training would you begin today that will put you into debt (possibly massive) and eat up huge amounts of time but not be obsolete in 5 or so years?

    I’m fortunate to be older and have a career but if I was starting out I’d find the outlook bleak.

  12. Me personally think it is a combination of feeling that there is no point to joining the grind. They see that society clearly labels them as expendable and not worthy of compassion, simply due to their gender, and again they then see no point. We live in a society where we can see the horrors of the world at an instant and the injustices of the world and even our own lives. We are bombarded with messages from everywhere do this, do that, and we see people living so lavishly by doing from our point of view, nothing. But we know we cant reach it. So men as women before them are checking out, it is just not worth it.

    A contribution to what we are seeing may also be the parents not teaching the same values they themselves were brought upon. These men might be the kids whom you see parents just let them do whatever.

  13. My take from where I’m standing

    – Job requirements for entry level jobs are nuts:
     
    When i graduated in 2007 I got a job as a graphic designer and the only req was “do you know photoshop”, now those same listings expect you to know the full adobe suite, 3D modeling, a little web design, video editing, and social media

    – Companies want to do more with fewer people: part of the same thing above, a company with 40 employees in 2010 tries to do the same work but now with 25 employees.

    – The young adults coming out of school are genuinely seem to be more of mixed bag. You have a lot of naturally bright individuals succeeding, but I’ve seen several people in my own life graduating from 4 year programs that can’t spell at higher than a 6th grade level, and don’t especially excel at the program they just went through.

    The jobs are still as cut throat as ever, and individuals in those cases aren’t likely to prosper in a high pace environment, so many get spit out and don’t get back up

    – Also the pay isn’t growing, so its not worth the struggle

  15. The corpos have won.

    Say what you want about women in the workplace, but th key thing it achieved for society was making work less valuable.

    You used to be able to support an entire family of 4 on a single income, without a college degree. Now, with a college degree, you can’t afford childcare, healthy food, proper education for your child, or even a fucken house. That’s right, will all be renting till we retire and are forced into homelessness.

    And those fucken corpo banker trust fund kids will simply turn a blind eye while quietly funding more anti human policy.

    And now there’s AI. We are screwed, utterly screwed. In 10 years there will be a revolution, I swear to god the tent city in my hometown is only getting bigger.

  16. Education is usually expensive. Employment is usually exploitative. Training is usually extraneous.

    …and that’s the only world these young men have ever known.

    Why go into debt for an education, or go through training employers don’t respect, that will land you a job that won’t pay you enough to be anymore comfortable than you already are doing nothing with your life?

    It’s not an unreasonable position to conclude the game is rigged and it’s not worth playing. I say this as a career professional with over 20 years of highly skilled technical work, to the point I now instruct classes, and still struggle to stay above water in this economy.

  18. I can only speak for myself and not general trends.

    I find modern life in the US to be vapid and largely unfulfilling. I don’t like car culture, or new tech or video games. I don’t like restaurants or the bar scene. Much of the things I do like are being monetized more and more. Music and camping are being put behind paywalls and are rampant with consumerism. It seems like the only reason to work is to not starve to death and I feel incentivized to get the highest paying job possible instead of doing something I’m passionate about, because of course passion doesn’t pay.

    I’m currently planning on retiring at 45 and spending my time making bad music and sketching bad cartoons while living off of dividends.

  20. maybe putting the whole country on UBI is relevant

    maybe women refusing to have kids and removing the main reason for men to work is relevant

  21. Because rampant currency devaluation makes it harder than ever to get ahead. The deal doesn’t work.

  22. Did you like miss the last decade of open misandry or something? Kids who are constantly told that they’re inherently worthless are likely to believe it

  24. I think the bar for being considered “successful” in any facet of life is rising so high, it might be overwhelming for some guys so it deflates any desire to even participate.

  25. Education is expensive, employment is increasingly scarce and unrewarding, and training is either inaccessible or feels pointless. 🤷‍♂️ That and people are generally not creative.

  26. JPow just posted that all of the economic growth in the US economy is essentially fake, or is a result of AI driven ‘efficiencies’. (This is the first time EVER that growth was not accompanied by new jobs.) People are getting sick of getting squeeeeezed harder and harder for ever-diminishing returns.

  27. I know a couple. I think the reason is because there seems to be less and less point of “Trying” the economy sucks, dating is worse, friendships are worse, and I think there is no longer a wall over a lot of peoples eyes.

  28. You could argue it’s hard to convince young men to take a stake in society when they literally look at what they are being offered:

    30-40 years of servitude in the workforce building someone else’s dream

    A 90%+ failure rate if they decide to start their own business and not work for someone else

    If they succeed they will be told it’s because they exploited someone else to do it…

    A 60%+ divorce rate, and an increasing number of women who don’t want a family/children

    Giving up 25%+ income if they are successful, for a society that did nothing but undermine that success and criticize them as the problem…

    What exactly is the incentive…

    The approval of a society that doesn’t care about you and will either decide you’re a threat if you have power… and tell you to either never use it for your own benefit or to give up to people who never helped you…

    Or if you have no power, will tell you that it’s just as well that you don’t so you can’t “weaponize it” or that you have enough based on nothing more than your gender or race?

    Society asks everything of men and offers nothing…

    And I say that as someone who is in the top 10% of earners, a small business owner and homeowner.

    The reason to NOT be a NEET is to pursue your own goals and desires if you have any personal ambition or a PURPOSE.

    But young men are not encouraged to pursue purpose and are not validated in pursuing and going after what they want… for their own sake.

    It always seems that it only has any value if it benefits someone other than the man in the arena…

    And so it’s going to be very difficult to curb that trend and convince young men they have anything worth sacrificing and striving for.

    Unless a young man is natural ambitious on his own, without being in a stable relationship and desiring marriage and family… and believing that’s on the table…

    You’d have to mostly lie and gaslight young men to get them to give a damn about a society that clearly doesn’t value them beyond how it can use them… and it’s not a mutually beneficial relationship… it’s purely exploitative.

    Again, on an individual level, if you offer a young man the option and you present it as the ability to fulfill his own desires and purpose… you can mentor a man out of being a NEET…

    But you can’t trick him into doing it for the sake of society or acceptance or to serve someone else if he doesn’t have that inclination.

    But if you go that route, you’re going to get a successful man who has power and agency that doesn’t feel the need to contribute beyond what they have to in order be left alone and keep what they have.

    Our society doesn’t want independent, powerful high agency men…

    It only is concerned about NEETs because it can’t extract value from them…

  29. I was one of them for a good few years and I’m on the cusp of 30. My direct experience has been:

    1. poor health. You literally can’t look after yourself if you are sick and tired. You might not have an actual disability, but you can still be overweight/malnourished/sleep deprived. These all affect your physical and mental wellbeing, which in turn affects your decision making, which just reinforces the bad choices that lead you to that bad place in the first place. How to break the cycle? Get healthy with the bare minimum of activities that you can consistently do. 1. improve sleep (fastest one to fix, make it your priority). 2. become fit/get on the pathway to becoming fit. if you’re overweight, The fastest solution is to… fast – do OMAD/low carb. Hard to start due to carb cravings and feeling like you’re starving to death but easy to stick with after 2-3 weeks consistency carb cravings go away. This is literally how Ozempic etc. work. They kill the feeling of fake hunger/carb cravings so you can focus. Even at 12% bodyfat with abs you’ve still got 100k calories of energy in your fat cells. You’re not going to die from skipping a few meals (if pre-existing health condition obv get medical advice and ignore me).

    2. very poor guidance in life / lack of insight into other options I might take for a career. Very pigeonholed into doing xyz and not experimenting more. Having the courage to not care about taking roles you would otherwise look down on e.g. retail/labouring/courier etc. Just experiment and if you don’t like it, live enough below your means that you can jump ship without risk. As you experiment more you’ll figure out whether you like x type of work more than y type of work. Helping you make better long term decisions and back up those decisions with a more mature and thought-out motivation (e.g. at least I enjoy this type of work, might as well put a solid shift in and get ahead). If you don’t earn enough to live, make a budget and see how low you can get your outgoings. Reducing outgoings is essentially the same as a pay rise if you just slightly shift your mindset. You are controlling how much money it takes for you to live. How much further can you reduce the outgoings? Learn to cook some very basic meals. Eat the same stuff. Save a little and buy in bulk so you have more cash next month. Save that cash, now you’ve got more of a financial cushion and less stress. Buying a ton of subscription services? Cancel them, put an e-reader app on your phone and download free e-books from online. Now you’ve got entertainment for limitless hours. This is literally what I did when I was on govt support to make my paltry income stretch a tiny bit further.

    3. comfortable modern living making us apathetic / poor motivation to break the pattern by not really engaging with wider society / not seeing value in participating in society. Gaming/social media/pornography. We literally call these things brainrot content. We know they’re bad for us. We know they’re addictions. If they were easy to break out of we wouldn’t call them addictions.

    I ended up getting a simpler manual labouring job and enjoyed it more than my previous more technical profession. I broke out of my bad habits and addictions and apathy by being more proactive about pursuing stuff I enjoyed more than those vices. But don’t get me wrong I’d still love to lounge around getting stoned and playing games, but I’ve done so much of it that I don’t even like doing it any more. The return on investment of being a more productive citizen is more valuable than the return on investment in selfishly maintaining my previous status-quo existence.

    There’s a really strange paradox I’ve noticed. When I didn’t do anything I had low agency and didn’t want to do anything and felt like I couldn’t do anything. It was self-reinforcing. Now I’m in full-time work, do martial arts, attend local social groups, have more friends, go on nights out, attend to my hobbies such as writing and learning stuff, have my fun time watching movies and other stuff – and I get better sleep than ever before in my life… It’s just easier for me to do stuff now and have agency and momentum that just lets me steamroll anything I need or want to do? I feel more empowered and less inconvenienced by things. It’s like dominoes. Just knock the first one over and you build momentum. Before you know it you’ve transformed your life and there’s an ease/assuredness to the mentality you tackle obstacles and goals with. There’s a saying – “If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.” I understand that now. Getting stuff done is a learned skill that becomes a habit, you want to depend on someone who has developed that skill.

  30. If there were NEET women, other men would help or society would change. When there are NEET men, women will not help and society will not change.

    Men helping women is a socially accepted behavior. Women helping men is not a socially accepted behavior. Women who help men will be judged for marrying lower, settling, or mothering, while when men do the same, it is completely acceptable.

    To your question there are so many NEET men because society doesn’t care. Women don’t care. No one is on the hook for helping men, but men.

    Where feminism is particularly cruel to men is saying that women don’t owe men anything (even as fellow human beings) and men’s happiness is not a woman’s responsibility, but it is totally fine for men to bear more financial burden when it is convenient for women. They say they don’t want to mother a man, when men have also needed to father women by dealing with her emotional baggage and/or trauma. So in effect, men are expected to bring women up but not get any credit, while women who bring men up want credit and to toot their own horn every chance they get.

  32. In some parts of Pennsylvania, you either work for the government, work at the hospital or prison or are on disability. And there’s a LOT of people on disability…

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