A hikkikomori is a person who shuts themselves in and distances themselves from society. Twitter is a site that allows wide-scale socializing through massive networking. On paper, Twitter and hikkikomori should be opposite concepts, but could Twitter actually make a hikkikomori even worse? When does the line between ‘socialite’ and ‘shut-in’ begin to blur?

The Bones of It

I leave my house almost exactly four times a week, each time to attend college at the TCC Visual Arts Center in Portsmouth, Virginia. I have a handful of close friends, but I don’t go anywhere to see them – two of them live with me, and the rest of my friends invariably come over to my house when we want to hang out. We collectively will go out and do something maybe once a week, and if it’s more than just buying fast food, it’s usually to check out a book or comic store. Living such a shut-in life used to mean that I was an anti-social hikkikomori, but that can’t be called the case anymore.

After all, how can I be called anti-social when I speak directly to as many as one hundred people on a daily basis? Twitter allows me to converse in real-time with people from around the world who are honestly interested in what I have to say. I know they are interested, because they ‘follow’ my updates, meaning that they have made a point to tune in directly to my voice. This is what we call ‘being social.’ Much like the common concept of a ‘popular’ person is one who is connected to a large number of people through a network of friends, I am connected to a community-worth of people via those that ‘follow’ me.

Between my blog that is currently getting between 700 and 1000 hits a day, my 130 Twitter followers, and the people I talk to over AIM, Yahoo messenger, and now Google Wave, I could almost be called hyper-social. But at what cost? It takes all of my free time to maintain such a high profile. My online presence is broad because I spend ALL of my time at my damn computer! Even though I am social, could I also be a hikkikomori because I am always shut-in?

The answer is a resounding ‘no.’ While being a shut-in is a definitive property of being a hikkikomori, the reverse is no longer true. Whereas it used to often be said that an ‘online life’ is not a ‘real life’ (hence the increasingly archaic abbreviation ‘IRL’),  it’s difficult to make that claim now. Twitter is a direct reflection of the immediate thoughts and actions of the user. A blog is a projection of your personal ideas. The internet has quickly become more honest, personal, and real.

A hikkikomori just wouldn’t use Twitter or a blog or another social networking tool. My best friend is a hikkikomori – he READS Twitter, and he READS blogs (probably yours, too!) but he’s a lurker. He doesn’t want people to know and connect to him, because he isn’t social. ‘Shut in’ and ‘hikkikomori’ mean two different things – ‘shut in’ and ‘anti-social‘ mean two different things – in the current form of the digital age.

Drawing Brevity to a Parallel of Happiness

Nozomu Itoshiki-sensei from Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is always in despair. He has a definitively negative outlook on life and society in particular, and thus wishes to kill himself. When Itoshiki feels happiness, it is a fleeting emotion before he plunges back into the hell of sorrow.

One could almost say that Twitter, in it’s extreme brevity of 140 words-per-post, only offers tiny blips of socialization. Could it be that the moment after your Tweet is published and read, you are once again a lifeless hikkikomori at your desk? Does it depend on what you are doing or where you are when you Tweet? If Ghostlightning Tweets from the tennis court and I Tweet from my desk, is he being more social than I am?! Could it be that society is leaving me behind because I still live with my parents?!

ZETSUBOU SHITA!!! TWITTER HAS LEFT ME IN DESPAIR!

Lol Links:

Yes, this post is a real retweet.

I try to avoid doing too many of these ‘what am I up to’ or ‘what will I be up to’ posts because everyone does them and they always say the same thing. It’s always like a summary of what’s going on in your life at the moment, or about how you have fluctuating interest in whatever, bla bla bla. If it means you aren’t blogging anymore, that’s one thing, but if you’re just going to start posting again in a couple of weeks, I don’t really see why you have to make it public. However, if there’s one benefit I’ve always gotten from sharing information about myself on the internet, it’s that I get a lot of solid advice from my fans, who are all older and more experienced than me. Yeah, I usually get the same advice every time, and for the most part I have all the answers, but it’s still nice to know there are people listening and responding and ready to help or confirm your beliefs. And I could use some of that. So I give you a ‘what’s going on’ post.

If you read my blog at all, you know I haven’t been posting much for the past couple months, and if you follow me on Twitter you mostly know why. A lot of shit is going on for me right now. I graduated in mid-June and for a bit over a month before that I did hardly anything at all – all that I could think about was how I needed to finish school and graduate. Because of that, my posting slowed down a lot along with my anime consumption all together, and I really haven’t been able to concentrate on much in that time. What posts I made were simply because I’ve always had so much time, and the posts I’ve made were all either really, really huge because I was dumping all of my accumulated desire to post in at once, or really minor because I just wanted to post so badly, though a lot more of that came through in the blog renovations I’ve done.

After graduating, I really wanted to make a comeback, but there has been no FUCKING end to the things piling up for me to do. Almost right out of graduation, I had to go sign up for (community) college and take my assessment test, and I’ll be apparently going back to school on August 20th. I also had to start learning how to drive because my dad decided to sign me up for driving school on the 6th-14th in spite of my never having been on the road and requiring some 40 hours of practice before taking the course (and I only got 5 hours in – thank GOD I’m a fast learner.)

But on top of that, we moved on the 3rd – an easy move, since it was only 3 miles away and we have moved 18 times, but nonetheless moving is time consuming and stressful. Plus it was cutting into my driving practice time as well as causing situations like taking an assessment test then packing my room then trying to practice driving all in one day, which is way the fuck more than I want to have to do in one day.

what I found when I typed in 'anime status'

Even though the moving is out of the way, and the college stuff is done till I go back, I still am in the middle of my 7 days driving class and have to practice driving at home as well. Let me tell you – I HATE driving. I fucking HATE it. It’s frightening, mentally exhausting, and not something I ever want to do of my own volition. I’d rather take my damn time to ride my bike somewhere than drive there, but if I want to get back and forth from c0llege, I’ll have to be able to drive. Which means that, yes, I am stressing myself over learning to do something that I don’t want to do in order to help me with something that I don’t want to do.

Because I don’t really want to go to college. The only reason I am going is because I honestly have no idea what I’m doing. But that means going to college is probably only worse. I have no career plan. I’m not thinking ‘oh I should get a degree in X so I can go work in X’, I’m just biding time until I figure out what I do want to do. And honestly, I’m not sure when or if that will happen. If it were up to me, I’d just stay in my room forever, though I obviously have an obligation to my parents not to do that. They won’t let me just live off of them forever. If I go to school, or if I get a job, those are my options.

But honestly, I think I’d rather be a vagabond. I’d rather try to ride my bike across the country or be a freeter and hop between small jobs just for the hell of it. Yes, I always claim to have big goals. I claim that I am going to be a big name and come into a vast wealth. But going to college has nothing to do with that. I know what I have to do to become wealthy and rich, and going to college won’t help me. What’s holding me back is my own indecisiveness and insecurity, not a milestone of education.

But what do I do about it? If I just don’t go to school, it won’t make me any less indecisive. But at the very least, I want to stop running so fast into all this. I want to take a fucking break. It’s supposed to be summer, but I haven’t been able to enjoy it at all with all this bullshit going on. After driving class, I will immediately go to Otakon which can hopefully blow a lot of this stress away, but then I’ll be starting college in only a month. It’s just uncomfortable and rushed. And I don’t even know what classes I want to take. It’s no fun.

And so, I haven’t been able to live for my passions lately. The stress and overactivity has made it difficult to watch and blog anime. I actually have, no kidding SIX posts sitting unfinished in my dashboard. Every time I tried to post, and they are all great posts, I would get too frustrated and not finish it. Even that Maze post sat around for a few days before I finished it. And now the new season has started and I’ve seen the first eps of Canaan and Bakemonogatari which were both amazing. I want to post. I just hope I can bring myself to do it.

Related Posts:

1. My last status report was more optimistic, lol.

2. I’m still not sure if I missed the generation gap or not

3. Today’s post title is brought to you by the Dredg song ‘Whoa is Me’, slightly modified for my purposes