[throwaway2016b]

This paints a dark picture, not only for urban life, but for basic income. What wondrous creativity will be unlocked when we no longer need to work to survive? A negative amount, if you judge by the NEETs of today. Give a man food, shelter, and internet, and he'll kill himself for you.

[projektir]

It doesn't paint a picture because a limited and flawed experiment should not be used to make sweeping predictions about society at large.

This is precisely why, earlier, I was against calling the setting in this experiment a utopia. It's anything but. But call it that, convince people it's actually good conditions, and then other people will run to make unfounded claims that good conditions are bad. Not to mention that basic income is not going to magically create good conditions, anyway.

NEETs may be caused by poor life prospects, not the presence of food, shelter, and internet. I imagine you have access to those things, too, so do many other people who are not NEETs. People do not do well when they feel life is pointless, and many people do just as poorly as NEETs do but you don't see them or think about them because they don't make headlines.

[throwaway2016b]

Indeed it is a flawed utopia. Give them a planet to explore, problems to solve, predators to avoid, kin to protect, goals that must be met to survive...

>NEETs may be caused by poor life prospects, not the presence of food, shelter, and internet.

I am intimately familiar with NEETs, having spent years interacting with them. The pattern I have noticed is of above average intelligence, many even brilliant, who would have thrived if the world had only given them a push, but left to their own devices commit slow, masturbatory suicides.

Some people can invent purpose from thin air. This is especially common amongst the kinds of elites and academics that most eloquently advocate basic income. But the vast majority of us cannot any more than a mouse. Most insidious is that even those for whom purpose is closest to grasp lose their drive. The artists lose the joy of painting and the programmers never begin their projects.

The true utopia is the harsh, cruel world of nature that provides purpose to every living thing.

[Dylan16807]

Most jobs don't provide a push toward self-actualization. They're just repeating basic actions for hours. So now the situation is the same, except with less free time.

If you want to get people out of the house and interacting, that will go a long way, and doesn't require 40 hours of drudgery.

[aidenn0]

Jobs provide the illusion of self-actualization.

[TeMPOraL]

> The pattern I have noticed is of above average intelligence, many even brilliant, who would have thrived if the world had only given them a push, but left to their own devices commit slow, masturbatory suicides.

I don't know the same people you do, but for the people I know, I think they could be thriving if the world would stop pulling. They don't need a push. They need to have a way of doing things on their own without ending up in extreme poverty. We were not designed for the increasingly complicated and demanding market economy. Some of us can't handle it.

[projektir]

How do you know that they would have thrived if the world gave them a push? What kind of push? Do we not have plenty of examples of people with such pushes doing not so well already?

I haven't interacted with NEETs specifically, but I have interacted with a few people in a similar bucket. Including people who actually exhibit some similar signs but are not NEETs because they technically are in work or education or something (in fact, I think that part of the definition is not really relevant and is just an easy shorthand - which is why I'm not buying the "need a push" thing - often these people can adapt to a push just fine). The issue I often found is that they lost life purpose, and often they're rather hard to argue with. The more intelligent people can't convince themselves with nice sounding falsehoods. But there's little else offered them. God, of course, is dead. And, after a while, there may not be anyone for them to talk to whether they go out there or not. Let's say that I'm not too surprised at their existence, and no weird explanations about how man moved too far from nature or something have anything to do with it.

A person being brilliant doesn't deal with unpleasant people or environments, it doesn't solve all the nasty hoops that one often has to jump through to do certain things, it's really not something that gives you all that much power. If anything, a more brilliant person may realize how powerless they are while a less brilliant one will keep pushing. If we have groups of intelligent people repeatedly refusing to participate in society that may mean something's wrong with the society. Something's driving them away, making them give up. I can see many such forces.

We should stop trying to create a surrogate purpose, whether it's through the worship of nature's hardships or deities that probably don't exist. We should, you know, maybe actually look at the problem, and figure out what we want to do. I think people want to do plenty of things but are usually not invited.

I'll agree that some people may not find a purpose on basic income, but they already don't have one. Someone in 3 jobs on min-wage drinking themselves to death in a bar is hardly better off than a NEET. Or what of people in gangs or cartels, what of drug addicts. There are many groups like this, NEETs are pointed out because it's a fun target people like to pick at. There was always a sizable percentage of people who had issues. Those people do not magically disappear in the natural world. This is a more advanced issue that basic income neither causes nor will it fix. But it should at least help make their lives a little less miserable, just like many other movements made the lives of certain groups less miserable.

> The artists lose the joy of painting and the programmers never begin their projects.

You appear to be referring to something that happened in the past? What?

A harsh and cruel world, is, by definition, not a utopia. At most you can argue that a utopia is not possible. But let's not call a bad thing good. Most beings do not enjoy suffering by its very definition. We've moved away from the natural state of things for a reason. Nature is not the way it is to make anyone happy, quite the opposite, really, so do not expect it to be the one to accomplish that task. That one is on you. There are far worse situations than being a NEET and nature offers so many of those. If that's all the world can offer, I'll keep looking for more.

A simulation of strife, if such is so required, is already far superior to true strife. Strangely enough, simulated strife hasn't really been all that popular so far - people seem to ultimately prefer their games to be a bit more forgiving and fair.

And let's be suspicious of claims and theories that just say: "Let's go back to how it used to be". This is an expected rollback. You venture into the unknown, you don't know what to do, so you want to run back to how it was, because it's familiar. But consider how big the unknown is, how much possibility there is there. Why settle, why not make sure there is nothing higher? When we fail to fly, do we stop trying? When we can't find a solution to a problem, do we stop looking? Why do you expect the design of a world in which all humans are happy some easy task you so flippantly dismiss the moment there's a roadblock? It's only logical that there will be many, many errors and setbacks and failures along the way. This IS, perhaps, the true purpose of humanity.

Can you really not imagine a world better than this?

[drzaiusapelord]

Only because we don't take social currency as seriously as monetary currency. In a world where financial incentives don't matter, you'll have other incentives. We can see this in video games where people half-kill themselves to get some status or armor or whatever. Or how wealthy people take up charity work or compete on social status points like who holds the better parties or decorates the home better.

>if you judge by the NEETs of today.

I think its pretty obvious that NEETs are very much in denial, or have no access to, the mental healthcare they need. We also need to accept that a lot of people on the autism spectrum will end up as NEET-like and there's probably nothing to be done about it.

[TeMPOraL]

I would probably be a NEET (or barely E-human) if it wasn't for SSRIs, despite being a (I think) competent programmer who wrote code since being 13 years old. Medication lets me manage my disdain for what a typical human like me has to do to earn their bread - mostly pointless, mostly useless (or even socially harmful, hello ad world) stuff. I'm in tech, but I know some people who are close to being NEET and are on the more "artsy" side. I suspect some of that comes from lack of mental strength to handle the reality that you need to suck it up and waste 1/2 of your day, every day, doing stuff of dubious value, in order to stay a respectable (and fed) human being.

(In case you think this is just laziness, it's not - look at the hobby craft world. People can do a lot of hard, difficult work, as long as they have any say in what they do. It seems that a lot of people crave more autonomy now.)

That's why I'm hopeful about basic income idea - it seems like a way to give more autonomy to people who do not have the grit to fight for it on the job market. A way to channel this untapped productivity.

[projektir]

Indeed, but I think also the mental strength tends to get sapped when the thing you're doing is pointless and/or socially harmful. Some people may delude themselves into thinking that their work is worthwhile even when it isn't. It's generally easier to live life when you think you're doing the right thing and everything makes sense.

[M_Grey]

Truly, "NEET" is a mental health issue in almost every case; when you look at it carefully it seems like a terrible way to live. Being utterly disconnected from your peers and potential social contacts is just not good for the human animal.

[spicytunacone]

I came from a comment on a more recent story[0] so I realize I am a bit late, but what about being a NEET implies social disconnection? I believe you're thinking of shut-ins or hikkikomori[1] if you want to keep in line with the parlance. NEET can simply mean someone is unemployed or "between jobs" as you will, which my undergraduate microeconomics courses told me is a normal occurence (cyclic economies, employer/employee mismatches over time). Whether they get money from the government or live off their family, plenty of my peers during bouts of unemployment would still go out.

I realize it's colloquial to continue the bastardization of NEET to mean someone who has withdrawn from society, though I feel the nuance requires particular attention especially if we're attempting to diagnose problems and propose solutions. Indeed there may be overlap, but what can be said for one set may not be true of another even if one is a subset of the other.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12521277

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

[M_Grey]

"...The blind forces of urbanization, flowing along the lines of least resistance, show no aptitude for creating an urban and industrial pattern that will be stable, self-sustaining, and self-renewing. On the contrary, as congestion thickens and expansion widens, both the urban and the rural landscape undergo defacement and degradation, while the unprofitable investments in the remedies…serve only to promote more of the blight and disorder they seek to palliate." (Mumford)

[johnfjacobi]

This article reminded me a lot of stuff written by Mumford, Jacques Ellul, and even Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber). Their stuff is worth reading.

Industrial Society and Its Future http://wildism.org/rca/items/show/13

Also Ellul's The Technological Society

[dredmorbius]

Mumford and Ellul are among the references in Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History, which I'm just completing. It came out in 1994, too early for Kaczynski's Manifesto (1995), but it wouldn't surprise me if he references it in later works (I've not yet checked).

Bill Joy cites Kaczynski in his own Wired 2000 essay, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us".

[M_Grey]

Thanks for the link, I haven't read that in full, just parts.