The hermits of the 21st century

Some would argue that contact with parents doesn’t, in fact, constitute human interaction, but rather liaison with the authorities for the sole purpose of rule reinforcement and reminders of regulatory requirements.

Which is a fancy, alliterative way of saying they don’t like being told what to do because they are perfectly capable of making a mess of their life themselves. They can do it without the benefit of a hindsight that knows nothing about the pressures they face, because adults all grew up in remote times when Jane Austen wrote life plans for girls and Bob Marley and the Wailers were close relatives of Jesus Christ and his disciples.

A report recently looked at what it called “Japan’s young recluses”.

These are people (not necessarily living with their family) who prefer online relationships to real ones, although they would probably dispute the term “real”, claiming that a relationship with someone you have never seen in the flesh is just as valid as one where you have met in person.

The report included an interview with a young man “in a tiny flat hunched over laptop”, who said, “I don’t really like communicating with people.” Resisting the temptation to play him at his own game by challenging the meaning of “communicating”, the sentiment he is expressing takes us alarmingly close to the realms of science fiction.

In a week when Star Trek celebrated its 50th anniversary, we’ve been hearing how our mobile phones were inspired by their communicators, which seemed farfetched even 20 years ago.

The 21st century youth living a solitary life with almost no real human contact is like a character from the show, living on a planet which no one but Mr Spock can really identify with.

“Bizarre, Captain? Not at all. It’s a perfectly natural way to live. The earthly equivalents of these people have been wishing for such an existence for centuries. But they had to wait for technology to make it possible.

It’s not that they want no one else in their lives – they just want relationships on their terms.” The real people interviewed in the report said they had no human contact except at special events, where they dressed as characters, thus presumably avoiding giving too much of themselves away.

Why, though, should a modern young person want to do this when their millions of predecessors just got on with their lives, scowling their way through their teens until the hormones abated and their place in society was elevated through the simple process of ageing? There were always hermits, but they were few and far between.

Before the world became as densely populated as it is, there were far more opportunities to grump off into the hills and live in a cave, but apparently the disaffected youths chose not to do that.

And that suggests that what irks the young is the constant presence of other people. To many of us, this would seem to be a positive thing – you have a far better chance of meeting a suitable mate if there are a host of options rather than taking your pick of the three or four possibilities in your remote village.

Human beings want choice, or we think we do. Hence the expression being “spoilt for choice”, unable to make up our minds because there are so many options with something going for them, but seemingly none which cover all the bases. Is it this that so frightens the young that they retreat into themselves? Would a Japanese teenage boy be happier if it was a straight choice between one distant cousin and the daughter of the guy who runs the dinosaur supplies shop three doors down? In this day and age, of course, it is asking for trouble to suggest that a boy should be restricted to choosing a girl as his mate. We have moved on from the simplistic difference between heterosexual and homosexual to a stage where an intellectual giant/cultural icon such as Miley Cyrus has to describe herself as “pan sexual” (i.e. not limited in sexual choice with regard to biological sex, gender, or gender identity) in order to leave all doors open and avoid the stigma of being what her parents might have referred to as “normal”.

Looking on the positive side for the self-isolated, particularly in a place such as Trinidad, where just being in the street is potentially hazardous, at least they are less likely to get killed if they spend their days indoors, making friends and occasionally enemies with people who are never likely to get close enough to reach them with a bullet or a blade.