The NEET. The acronym stands for Not in Education, Employment, or Training. As far as identities are concerned, it’s not one most people have heard of, but it’s a type of person that everyone knows. 

They are often male (if there are any female NEETs out there reading this, sorry). Without education, their job opportunities are limited. Without employment, they don’t have anything to do or anywhere to be during the day. Most of them are at home in the proverbial basement. Without any type of training or trade, they have no traditional pathway towards earning money. And it’s not that NEETS are intellectually incapable of studying or performing a job—they could become Software Engineers or blue-collar workers if they wanted—it's that they shun the notion of work entirely.

While I can already hear the comparisons between the NEET and the Japanese Hikikomori being made, the two are different for a few reasons: the NEET doesn’t need to be in their house 24/7. They meet up with friends, and some pursue passions outside their home, both unimaginable situations for the Hikikomori. The Hikikomori, too, may be working a job from their bedroom. The NEET most certainly is not. 

Things start to get tricky when you look at NEETs in the context of incel culture. While opinion differs, the general consensus seems to be that NEETs are not necessarily incels but there is some overlap between them: mainly that it’s going to be tough as hell to convince someone to fuck you in your parents’ house after you explain that you’ve been living with them for years. But that doesn’t necessarily mean NEETs don’t have affairs or love lives. Some, the good-looking, can still pull it off.

The way I see it, everyone, or mostly everyone, gets dropped into a period of NEEThood at some point in their lives—those who don’t are lucky—and that doesn’t need to be a bad thing. Human beings have been turned into ugly creatures by modern work.

The NEET knows this. But life isn’t so bad when it’s lived away from the world’s monetary concerns. It can be beautiful. I forget which artist or writer was asked how he was able to find any way to believe in humanity and his response was essentially, “I don’t see them up close.” I’m probably butchering the story—I’m almost certainly butchering the story—but there's a parable in there that can’t be missed. I would reckon that it's this, a short sentence found in the first few chapters of Saul Bellow’s Herzog: “Man’s life is not a business.”

The NEET has a nemesis: the wagecuck. The guy working 9-5 for an hourly rate or salary if he’s lucky. The NEET doesn’t hate this man, but the system itself which has fooled him into thinking that his path offers freedom. Although this type of life is deemed “progress”, it has the effect of potentially making the person more miserable, not less. As far as the NEET is concerned, the wagecuck is caught on a hamster wheel he can’t escape. In the eyes of the NEET, the wagecuck has made the cardinal mistake of thinking that their work is giving them freedom, rather than modern-day serform. But rather than work, most NEETs—at least the hopeful ones and not those permanently indisposed to depression—use their time to improve their lives, whether that be through art, athletics, entertainment or simple idleness. 

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The NEET is complicated. No two are truly the same. But most of them are privileged to the point that they have a place to stay that isn’t going to kick them out, and being kicked out is the NEET’s worst fear. They are hanging on by a thread. Without a lifeline of cash to support themselves, the NEET’s lifestyle cannot be sustained. As much as I dislike the term privileged, here it actually applies as the NEET can only endure his or her NEEThood by having someone else—usually their parents—finance their lifestyle. For some, the guilt of living off their parent’s dollars is the only factor strong enough to convince them to change their ways. For others, the payment is seen as a penance that must be paid for bringing them into the world without their permission.

The way I see it, life is going to be difficult whether you want it to be or not. We're all people. None of us are immune from the common pains of human existence whether we’re on the bottom or the top of the economic ladder. But I’m conflicted with the notion of someone being comfortable while their parents or significant other toil through a job—the exact function the NEET recognizes as dehumanizing—for the sake of providing for them a space to feel comfortable. I’m not sure what the solution would be, though. 

Still, when I engage with literature and art, I’m reminded just how many of the world’s greatest once fit the description. Kerouac was known for having to come back to Lowell regularly to stay with his mother. He was broke, dreaming of a life outside the norms of society. Fitzgerald wrote his first novel at his parents house after Zelda dumped him. NEETdom is usually a temporary phase, a transitory time in a person’s life, and the NEET shouldn’t treat their condition as fatal or permanent.

Think of NEETs throughout history. They were poor, uneducated, untrained, with little motivation to join a world that existed in the cruel and harsh way it did. They languished—because who wouldn’t in this situation—but they didn’t let their poverty as reason to suppress their soul. Money wasn’t seen as their reason to live. Instead, they were inspired by ideas and concepts greater than themselves. Community. Family. Art. Leisure. When faced with the certainty of not having any chance at a career or conventional life, they made their own, and didn’t concern themselves with the fashionable ideas of their age. In short, they were Sigmas, dancing to the beat of their own drum.

This is the secret power of the NEET. They have time to think while the wage slave is too burnt to consider anything other than dinner and low-grade entertainment on the telescreen. I’d bet my money that NEETs—the ones who emerge from the cocoon—probably become entrepreneurs. The wage slave, meanwhile, is probably doomed to never escape from the comfy world he’s ensconced within. 

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For now, no one is really concentrating on NEETs—although the documentary TFW NO GF touches on the topic—mostly because they don’t really exist in the minds of mainstream America as a group of people worth thinking about (potentially due to their gender). After all, they don’t produce money, they don’t  contribute to the economy. They are, in the world’s eye, equivalent to a leak in the system. But that’s going to change, especially as technology advances and people are forced to reckon on a mass scale with the fact that employment and work in the modern age cannot provide, and may even be in inherent conflict with, a meaningful life, and NEETs are seen not as scourges to society but a reflection of it.

When I see the NEET, I see the struggle of the common man. The common man who knows the truth—that the modern world is ugly and reproachable. A world that only views man’s purpose as maintaining the technological systems we have in place. A world intent on ridding the common man of his natural good by bifurcating him in two selves: the worker and the man. At some point, man will be replaced by the technology he is forced to maintain and the NEET—temporarily immobilized by his mythic struggle against Moloch—represents an underclass of individuals searching for a way around it. They may be misunderstood, even by themselves, but their disagreeableness isn’t a flaw. It’s an asset. Whether or not they recognize this, though, is up to them.

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