Also, not his apartment, his aunt's apartment.

"Japanese Game Developer rarely leaves his aunt's apartment."

This is super weird. How has he not developed any skin condition, especially if he is working outside and sweating?

I can understand not going to the doctor though. There are lots of people who go to the doctor only if absolutely needed. It is even more understandable if he lives in the U.S and doesn’t want to deal with insurance companies

You mean a guy comes into your apartment, puts groceries in the fridge or puts them on the table and then proceeds with collecting your trash for you?

As for home haircuts - it's not a thing there as you would rarely invite even friends into your home. It's a space for you and your family.

If meticulous sorting is not required and labor cheap, it is easy to offer this kind of trash take out service.

Again, it's a peculiar mode of thinking if you aren't conditioned to it. If you've been the popular kid, smart, social, you've been handed most things to you, or people were always quick to help you, in whichever way. Some never had that.

And well, some just really like their alone time. And aren't we happy for the time that we live in, that such behavior is empowered for those people? If we disregard an active interest in the contribution of others to something, if X is happy, let's be happy for X.

I've worked at a Japanese company and seen people who were ostensibly good at English gloss over the right result in a Google search because they didn't quite have the fluency to pick up on it immediately. People who aren't comfortable with English at all often get lost in native language articles that are just outright wrong or misleading, because when there's a vacuum of information to begin with it's very easy to write a bad article and still end up the top result for that topic in that language.

That's not to say most non-English content is bad - most content overall is bad or mediocre (or just obsolete), in any language, English included. Thus, the lower the density of content in any given language, the more likely that good content for any given search doesn't exist, and you're left with the poor stuff.

The exception is when you're looking for information on an insular tool or community that is primarily developed and used by speakers of a given language. There's a whole world of "Galapagos tech" in Japan that nobody uses elsewhere, and you won't find any English resources on it, and it might even be pretty good. But in today's globalized society, cooperation across borders ends up producing higher quality results (especially in open source) most of the time, so these kinds of insular projects are rarely the best option, unless it's a very niche thing or support and documentation in a non-English language is a primary concern.

Quick example of this kind of bizarre situation: I recently took a peek at reverse engineering a certain Japanese product that uses Android tablets and involves keeping a database on them and synchronizing it from a base station. Database updates are hilariously slow, taking hours to catch up on just a few thousand mutations. Turns out they were using an extremely niche database engine by Hitachi (if I remember correctly), in an embedded version; the only reference to this engine I could find was in the context of a full blown enterprise offering by them (think Oracle competitor). I bet it was configured to flush to disk after every mutation, for data durability in an enterprise setting. Had they used SQLite - which comes with Android, is free, and would've saved them a license fee - everything would be much simpler and DB updates would be orders of magnitude faster, since you can trivially configure it not to flush or just put the whole update in a transaction. They also could've just had the base station maintain the SQlite DB file and bulk transfer that, since it's not that large and it'd probably end up being faster and more reliable than the delta update mechanism with CSV mutation logs they were using.

(I'm a native Spanish speaker and my Japanese is good enough to understand technical content with occasional use of a dictionary, so I have a bit of experience with two non-English ecosystems)

One morning I decided to blow-dry my hair. The dryer had a hard time starting. Then a chunk, chunk noise occurred. Finally, a stream of brown paste shot out from the dryer. I threw it away and never used one again.

My coarse, gray hair was always wet morning, noon, and night. It was awful. That is the reason I get haircuts even if I'm not trying to impress anyone.

Why not even shorter? This time of year cold is a factor, otherwise mainly habit. And fully short (almost or entirely not there) involves blades, I'm not trusting myself not to cut the back of my head to shreds (again, I'm often not physically well coordinated!).

It gives you a lot of time to think about your life, that's for sure. I finally had time to think that while I believed myself to be a good husband, I realized I'd actually been a pretty shitty one. It gave me a chance to finally understand and self-diagnose my mental health issues.

I lost 90lbs in the first six months of jail. I went from an overweight 260lbs to a sane 170lbs. That was from being able to strictly control my diet and do a bit of exercise in my cell each day.

If you love reading, like I do, then you can do a lot of that. The biggest problem was access to books. In some jails, e.g. Cook County Jail, you might have almost no access to books unless someone sends them to you from the outside. And if you read a book in three days like I do, then your friends and family might get exasperated at constantly sending you $20 books for eight years. Also, the guards are going to take all your books off you as fast as they can and throw them away. I read over 800 books in jail.

I went to the Hole three times for 10 days a piece, once for telling my wife in a letter that I'd traded a packet of coffee for a stamped envelope, second time for taking too long trading my rice with someone for a chicken nugget, and third time because the jail had a secret intelligence operation running against me (I got all the documents under FOIA eventually) and so the guards threw contraband into my room, right in front of me, and then arrested me for it.

For 10 days at a time, the Hole isn't so bad. I don't know if I would hate it more if it was longer. My first trip there I wasn't prepared and didn't know how anything worked. They had a great selection of books in the Hole if you could get to them. The next two times I went I distracted the guards and managed to grab books before I got locked into the cell, so my time went a lot better. The first time I went they had a policy of putting you in there naked for the first day, but I sued over it, so the next two times I didn't have to suffer that indignity.

You can usually get some peace in the Hole. Jail isn't good for people like me who don't mind isolationism because 99% of the time you will have a cellmate to start with. If your cellmate cannot or does not want to read, then they will try to talk to you for the 16 hours a day you are in the cell awake together. And when you are out of the cell you are likely in a room the size of a standard living room, but with 50 other guys, so you will get no peace there either. Going to the Hole might be your only chance to get a few minutes of quiet.

How did you find the Covid-19 lockdowns?

Tokyo really isn't that, though. Of big cities it's probably one of the most comfortable to live in. I live walking distance to Shinjuku station, which is the most transited train station in the world, and rarely does a car pass by my apartment. Other than the occasional ambulance there's basically no audible noise from indoors. Sure, you can walk towards the center and end up in the middle of a big crowd - or you can just not do that and spend most of your time in smaller neighborhoods. Convenience stores provide all basic necessities a minute or two's walk away, you have supermarkets within walking distance without having to delve into any dense crowds. You can take main streets to travel around the city and pass by a bunch of people, or you can step 20 meters into a side street and rarely cross paths with anyone. There's parks to relax in all over the city. And if you don't mind taking a few detours and avoiding rush hour, you can get anywhere in Tokyo via the train network (or even buses!) while getting to sit down the whole way, never ending up in an uncomfortably full car.

That said - yes, people don't talk to each other in Tokyo by default, and that takes a toll. I've had more random people talk to me on the street in my visits to Osaka than in 7 years living in Tokyo. To socialize here, you need to find groups with similar interests. It took me a while to figure out how this all worked, but for three or so years now I've been going to anime music and jazz jam sessions and related events, and I even play in a couple amateur bands (modulo COVID). If you don't put in the effort to find these kinds of groups, you can certainly end up quite lonely in Tokyo.

Is there a word for the opposite? A desire to escape the pressure of being a child/younh adult? The pressure to be a child and do childlike things always annoyed me so...

I've been this way my whole life. I like it, I definitely don't like doing stuff with people more than once a week, too draining on me. Amazingly I even have a girlfriend. She lives two hours away and we switch off who drives to stay the weekend each month.

The concept of a hermit is very, very old. Some percentage of humans have always opted out of communal culture for a more isolated experience. Whether that percentage is rising, by how much, and why, is tough to analyze.

Also, the "why" of that question is ripe culture war fodder, which makes any discussion difficult.

Why should one stay in the society, though? Was it ever intrinsically good? I mean slavery/serfdom, wars, racism, social inequality builtin in the culture multiplied by general narrow-mindedness. People love to ignore these inconveniences. The leader considered "the great" conquers the city and kills/rapes/enslaves everybody? Oh, that was normal. But now it's not, and it will never again repeat itself even on the smaller scale. Now society works perfectly. Yet fundamental physical constants and human biology remained the same. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Why not?

You grow being told that you go to school, you get the high grades, you get the good job, make friends, marry the girl, pop a few kids, and you're happy.

But it's never enough. There's always something you did wrong, always more you need to do right. You force yourself to do the things you're expected or you're forced to do the things you're expected to be happy about even when inside you're inside you scream and weep and want it all to just go away. Always more you must be doing it.

Hold on, they will tell you. Things will get better if you keep going, they will tell you.

You look at all the fighting at home. There's never any laughing or fun talk; you dread coming home because one wrong word or a wrong look and it's more shouting. This is what being with the girl you love is like? Turning home from a refuge into a place of fear and terror?

Hold on, they will tell you. Things will get better if you keep going, they will tell you.

Ultimately that turns out to be fine for you. You can't really get bring yourself to really befriend anyone anyways. You have nothing in common with anyone else. You have nothing you can say and nothing you can do that would make their lives just that little bit better. So you say nothing. And you do nothing. You just keep going on and on to the next thing and the next thing after that.

Hold on, they will tell you. Things will get better if you keep going, they will tell you.

But five years later on, and it didn't get better. Ten years on and it didn't get better. Twenty five years later and it never got better. On that day you realize what a sham it all was. It never got better, and it never will get better. They were lying to you all along. There is no better tomorrow.

And then you realize something else. Maybe that's fine to. The sun rises, other people laugh and play, and the world moves on whether you're there or not. So you just keep doing it. No hopes. No dreams. No future. Just never ending Now where you just survive the day, only to wake up and do it all over again until you don't.

So... after all that. Why not?

I realize that it might not help answer why more and more might choose to do so. I can't really offer answers to that. I can only answer why one person might choose to.

When an economy reaches stagnation/saturation people still want to play the capital accumulation game. So they start accumulating money and land that they never intend to use. Money is needed as a medium of exchange for the division of labor. Shelter is a basic need so people absolutely need land.

Because this is an accumulation game, owning more just means you demand more. If the interest rate (or gains from land or whatever financial asset) were 3% then some people end up unemployed because they cannot clear this artificial profitability gate. Employers want to hire whole individuals for as long as possible (ideally a 60 hour week). This means some people go without a job because 2 people working 60 hours can do the job of 3 people (on paper). People (especially the youth) are scared of ending up long term unemployed, so they skill up. They now have to compete with their peers for an artificially limited number of jobs. If they win the competition then they win big. If they lose, they lose big. The government must (they have no choice) intervene. Predictably, there must be an expansion of welfare. Remember how 2 people are doing the jobs of 3? Well, that means a small portion of that extra 1/3 will go to the person that ended up unemployed. It's extremely counterproductive but that is just how things are.

So now you have two options. Play the game, suffer, win and pay welfare for others or never play and get paid welfare (it's not like they want you as their competition anyway).

I have to put emphasis on the fact that the welfare is just a symptom to avoid a rise in extremism. If you get rid of it without treating the symptom then expect to see lots of angry people on the street who have nothing better to do than hate you.