「It’s The Only NEET Thing To Do.」：出自杉井光「神様のメモ帳」，为 NEET 侦探事务所门上的标语。读音与「It’s The Only NEAT Thing To Do.」相同——后者是美国俚语，意为「这是唯一值得一试的做法」，一语双关。NEET 即 Not in Education, Employment or Training。
家里蹲：日本厚生劳动省定义为超过半年不接触社会、不上学、不上班、不与外人交往、生活自我封闭。
2024 year-end review
review
machine-translated from the original
「It’s The Only NEET Thing To Do.」[1]
if i had to put this year into words, my first instinct is to open the photo album. unfortunately, screenshots included, this year produced only 65 photos, and for a moment i don’t know where to start.
still, i’m going to look back, because, luckily, there were at least a hundred-some days when i was alive, and it’s those days that let me feel time was still passing.
this year is another odd milestone in my life — like going from primary school to middle school, from middle school to high school — i went from high school up to: hikikomori[2]. not only temporarily out of the education system, but never having entered the social one at all. in chinese the phrase is 「被社会淘汰」, weeded out by society; put gently, someone a notch worse off than the unemployed.
that said, i have no plan at all to leave this state. becoming like this was my own choice, something i actively brought about.
「It’s The Only NEET Thing To Do.」 — it’s the only smart thing to do.
is it? of course. i only get one life, after all.
january–march
the start of the year carried over the suffocating feeling from the end of the last one. less and less socialising, more and more days of talking to myself.
at the same time some things with no connection to my actual state kept running — i paid application fees for universities overseas, and at the end of the month got an offer from a university in the us. none of it mattered, though; for various reasons the going-abroad route was never going to work out from the start.
in march i began clearing my digital traces in bulk. deleted my accounts on zhihu, douban, xiaohongshu, reddit, clubhouse; backed up my qq zone and then emptied it; archived my tweets and deleted every one. around the same time i finished my third visual novel, 「narcissu」, and, with nothing to do, spent an evening memorising the kana — how much of it i still remember is another matter.
at the end of the month i started going to school only one day a week. call it the moment i had a little agency, and the first step toward becoming a hikikomori.
april–june
in april i found out a middle-school classmate had deleted me — probably the long run of half-hearted replies. not surprising, but i still froze for a second.
may: classes ended, graduation photos. the road to further study ran into a dead end amid all the scrambling — i won’t go into it; in short, it went round and round for months, and in the end i went nowhere. this was also the busiest stretch of my year — fact-checking one plan after another every day, knowing full well it was most likely pointless.
the same month i deleted my bilibili account for good. in the last quiet days before everything settled, i went to the cinema alone to see 「Inside Out 2」, the only time this year.
at the end of the month i closed the online social space that had kept me company the longest.
july–august
through july and august i kept the habit of walking ten thousand steps every morning, mostly because i couldn’t stand being at home.
august brought something not small, for me — my blahaj was thrown out. it was the last of the plush toys to be cleared away. it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it saved my life in my worst period. i have always felt more for objects than for living people — not just a quirk; it’s that they’re simple, uncomplicated, and don’t betray you. a sense of safety, i suppose, is roughly that.
at the end of the month i met a few high-school classmates for one last meal. they were about to set off on their respective journeys, and so was i… probably.
september–october
september, and officially a hikikomori.
a few days after mid-autumn, my mother had an acute attack and was hospitalised — acute pancreatitis. i stayed at the hospital for several days, sleeping maybe eight hours out of forty-eight. after she was discharged i took over the cooking and looking after her.
october was, because of that, a rarely calm month. apart from going downstairs to take out the rubbish, i didn’t leave the house once all month. it was also my most productive stretch — several weeks spent learning things in earnest. a genuinely reassuring state to be in.
november–december
in november i got through seven visual novels — 「ever17」「サクラノ詩」「サクラノ刻」「remember11」「素晴らしき日々」 and the 「Muv-Luv」 series. still didn’t go out.
december, likewise, not once. after finishing the light novel series 「神様のメモ帳」 i remembered i hadn’t logged my mood in a long time. proof, i suppose, that things were getting calmer.
at the end of the month the argument in my head started again: is it time to rebuild some social life? would having those connections make me better? without them i really do have more time to do more things, isn’t that good — thoughts like that, surfacing over and over.
afterword
i wasn’t going to write this. but last night i read a friend’s year-end review and thought, compared with the last two years, this one deserves a proper look back. this was a year i was alive.
quite a few 「achievements」 this year: the most shut-in year, with the time spent indoors countable in months; the least social year, deleting and cutting off a great many platform accounts; the year i learned the most, catching up on everything i’d let slide and then learning new things on top — i have to say, no social pressure plus being home alone does wonders for efficiency; a single-day reading record of 698 minutes; and the most hours of music ever, with youtube music ending up as the main player, plus a small self-hosted music library for the songs that are hard to import.
about the 「active choice」 from the beginning — what i actively did was nothing. knowing a path would fail, i never proposed a plan b, and so i missed the moment. my passivity is my activity. it’s a bit of a paradox.
to close, borrowing a passage: when you’re young you think people are everywhere and everyone’s business is yours; by middle age you find that apart from family you have nothing left. but what if you can’t get along with family either? then remember to love yourself — for every day you’re alive, be as good to yourself as you can.
addendum
this year i logged my mood 738 times (once in the morning and once at night). roughly: 1% very pleasant (5 times), 5% very unpleasant (39 times, half of them in january), 27% mildly pleasant (mostly 「calm」), 67% mildly unpleasant (mostly 「tired (mentally)」, then physical fatigue, lost, unmotivated, depressed, sad, bored).
notes
「It’s The Only NEET Thing To Do.」: from 杉井光’s 「神様のメモ帳」, the slogan on the door of the NEET detective agency. it’s pronounced the same as 「It’s The Only NEAT Thing To Do.」 — an american idiom meaning 「the only thing worth a try」 — a pun. NEET stands for Not in Education, Employment or Training.
hikikomori: defined by japan’s ministry of health, labour and welfare as more than six months without contact with society — not at school, not at work, not seeing anyone outside, living shut away.
