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The story
A thread titled “I think material desire is what drives people out of NEET life” took off on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” (Anything-Goes Live) board. Some posters said they started working because they wanted games or other things, while others pointed to the need for approval, the drive to reach FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) for peace of mind, or simply the desire to become somebody — the takeaway being that everyone’s motivation to work is different.
There were also some tough takes: a sense of crisis alone won’t change a person — without desire welling up from inside, there’s no escaping NEET life.
What people said
You look for ways to make your own wishes come true.
A company with no interviews is scary, if anything. Without any screening you just end up surrounded by weirdos and nothing gets done — nothing but stress.
If you can't even get through an interview, you're not cut out to be an employee.
I think the trick is to make it impossible to stay a NEET
like not feeding them.
I don't think that really works.
It's a completely different kind of drive from desire that comes from within.
Plenty of people end up kicked out of the house that way and then arrested for dine-and-dash instead.
Those people aren't even on the same level as NEETs.
you realize it costs way more than you'd think, and you understand you have to work just to keep it up.
Whether you actually went out and had fun as a student makes a big difference.
Wanting to do this and that tends to require a lot of money.
That's a form of desire too.
The idea that a life-threatening crisis automatically makes the power to work spring up inside you is pure fantasy.
Exactly.
At the end of the day, a NEET is someone who's already fallen once — without something coming from inside themselves, nothing's going to change.
Sounds to me like the parents just spoiled them too much.
You can't do a job without ever having experienced one —
you push through the hard parts and it gradually gets easier.
It's the environment's fault for spoiling them so much that quitting became an easy way out.
There's no paradise waiting at the end of running away forever.
These days even the official versions are often free to try.
I think that's real.
More and more idiots these days are satisfied just killing time without spending any money.
That's a form of desire too.
Working now so you can take it easy sooner — isn't that admirable?
I don't have a need for approval either, but I love gadgets, so I want to work, earn money, and buy all kinds of stuff.
That's why I go out, work, and buy things with the money I earn.
You end up realizing you just like this or that feature of a gadget — you don't actually need the gadget itself.
Take it further and you start abstracting into questions like "what is functional beauty" or "what is consciousness," and the gadget itself stops mattering at all.
I wanted stimulation so badly that I craved new things —
that's part of why I'm working.
There are just people like that, that's all.
That's the difference between me and NEETs who justify not working by constantly comparing themselves to others.
Just because someone else earns more with less effort than me doesn't mean I get to skip working.
Higher-paying jobs come with heavier responsibility to match, so I think it matters more whether you've found an environment that suits you.
You're working for the things you want — what does it have to do with anyone else?
What are you even saying?
No, like — you've seen cases where someone with lower academic ability tries hard but their grades don't improve, so they lose motivation to study, right?
I sometimes wonder whether people who aren't cut out for earning money should even have material desire in the first place.
Something like — it's better not to make what you're not good at your own measure of value.
So what even is "talent for earning money" in the first place?
You can just work a normal job as an employee.
Nobody said you have to satisfy material desires beyond your means.
so I'm putting almost my entire paycheck into investments and aiming for FIRE.
Earning enough through investing right now to get through the rest of your life without working —
that's a move steeped in material desire, backed by solid calculations of what the rest of your life will cost.
Would you really call that material desire? I feel like material desire is specifically about wanting things.
What Re: #84 has is more like a desire to take it easy, maybe.
I don't really get what "material desire that fits your means" means,
but if that means just a bare-minimum standard of living,
then in some cases the motivation to work disappears too.
Re: #88
It's not a hard number I have in mind, but for me —
something like earning 100,000 yen a month through struggle so intense you can't focus on anything else, never getting used to the job, and that situation never changing —
that's when I'd say someone has no talent for earning money.
Isn't that just a sign the job itself isn't a good fit?
Same opinion as Re: #97.
There are a huge number of different jobs just among employee positions, so it'd be better to switch jobs.
Background and Key Points
Japan’s NEET category (“Not in Employment, Education, or Training”) isn’t just slang — it’s a statistic the Cabinet Office and Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare have tracked since the early 2000s, originally covering ages 15–34, with numbers hovering in the mid-hundred-thousands for over a decade. The term overlaps heavily in public discourse with hikikomori (social withdrawal), and posts like #25’s image of a shut-in “wasting away” after their parents die are a direct, if unlabeled, reference to Japan’s “8050 problem” — aging parents in their 80s still housing and supporting children in their 50s who never entered the workforce, a crisis that becomes visible only when the parent dies or can no longer provide care. FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) and its “Lean FIRE” variant are imported Western finance-culture terms that have found a receptive audience in Japan’s low-wage, high-cost-of-living urban economy, explaining why several posters frame early retirement as their actual motivator.
The thread’s real fault line isn’t whether material desire matters, but whether it’s the only legitimate kind of desire — posts #84, #92, and #98 argue over whether wanting to stop working (via FIRE) even counts as “material desire,” or whether it’s a separate craving for ease that happens to require money. A second, sharper split is over method: can external pressure (cutting off a NEET’s support, as in #6) substitute for desire that has to come from inside, as #12, #25, and #28 insist it can’t.
What the thread never spells out is why this matters publicly: yami baito, the shady gig-work scams mentioned in passing at #10, have become a genuine crime wave in Japan since around 2022, with anonymous social-media recruiters pulling underemployed or desperate young people into robbery and fraud rings — the dark mirror of the “material desire” the thread otherwise treats lightly.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “I Think Material Desire Is What Drives People Out of NEET Life.”
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