Alisa Chung dropped out of high school in grade ten, severely depressed and suicidal. She rarely left her room or home, too scared to go outside. “A very common scene for me to see was just the ceiling of my bedroom,” she says. At sixteen, she became a NEET—a person not in employment, education, or training.
According to Statistics Canada, 11 percent of Canadian youth, those in the fifteen to twenty-nine age range, fall under the label. Chung is now twenty-three and spends part of her days documenting her life on social media, including her YouTube channel of 600,000 subscribers. (Her “About” page reads, “Professional NEET making mundane life interesting.”) Chung generates income by selling her art through her website but still considers herself a NEET as she doesn’t have stable employment. She is now able to go outside to get groceries and lives with her grandparents in Oshawa. She’d still like to improve her living standards.
The term NEET traces its origins to the United Kingdom, where academics coined it in the late ’80s after concerns grew over a potential lost generation of youth at the time. Fears about NEETs took off in Japan after the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare published “White Paper on Labor Economy 2004.” While the term wasn’t mentioned directly, it did usher the issue into wider discussion. Over the years, the term became infused into Japanese pop culture—the acclaimed 2006 anime adaptation of Welcome to the NHK followed Satou Tatsuhiro, a twenty-two-year-old NEET.
By the 2010s, NEETs entered the mainstream globally. And concern over the demographic has been bubbling up in more recent times. Molly Doan is a director at Blueprint, a Canadian non-profit research organization that published a report on NEETs in 2018. She notes that young people who graduated high school or entered the labour market during the COVID-19 pandemic faced specific challenges. “There was this cohort of groups who at such a formative age, a critical age, their worlds got flipped upside down,” she says.
“In economics, there’s something called labour market scarring. And this can happen when, let’s say, I just graduated school or finished high school, and I’m trying to get into the labour market and there’s a big shock event [like a pandemic] that makes it extremely hard for me to find work. This can have a lifelong impact,” Doan says.
Those at the greatest risk of being considered NEETs often have low academic qualifications, poor mental health, a disability or special education needs, or have become a parent at a relatively young age. The Global Employment Trends for Youth 2024 report showed that despite some improvements, post-COVID-19 recovery for youth employment has not been universal. About one in five young people worldwide were NEET in 2023. Even those without the label are struggling: almost half of those with jobs have only informal employment. Meanwhile, a World Values Survey found that about 64 percent of young people aged fifteen to twenty-nine globally were worried about losing their job.
Vacancy rates in jobs that favour young people have also been at their lowest since 2017, according to a report from the National Bank of Canada. And, based on unemployment data going back to July 2022, around 80 percent of the increased unemployment rate comes from those under thirty-five, specifically students and new graduates who experienced a longer job hunt for their first job, according to a report from the Royal Bank of Canada published this past summer.
Despite this, the dominant image online of the NEET skirts toward ridicule and disparaging sentiments. The man child mooching off their parents, armed with no desire for independence, preferring to waste away playing an array of niche video games in their messy room. It’s on display in a Chinese documentary (which made its way to r/NEETS), where a mother begs her thirty-eight-year-old NEET son in anguish to find work and move out.
When looking back at history, a callous sentiment toward youth is nothing new. The hippies of the 1960s were painted unserious “Free Love” rebels who were corrupting the foundation of tradition by meandering around the fields of Woodstock with nothing but the smell of weed, orgies, and the sound of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar licks to fill the air. The slackers of the ’90s were seen as edgy contrarians that rejected the corporate ladder and raged against materialism. They were depicted as a lazy generation raised by TV and recreational drugs.
But hippies, slackers, or even NEETs are all fundamentally a reaction to decaying conditions in their surroundings. Facing off against a dwindling and more competitive job market, skyrocketing housing prices, and the unknown effects of AI, the world NEETs inherited has a different set of rules than that of previous generations. Even the National Bank of Canada says the current rise in youth unemployment is disproportionate to historical norms of previous recessions.
“I do sometimes think folks have an assumption that young people don’t want to work and that NEET youth are NEET because they don’t want to be connected to education and employment,” Doan says.
The misunderstanding that whatever circumstances brought someone to be a NEET are self-inflicted couldn’t be further from the truth. Factors such as lack of soft skills; intergenerational poverty; existing health issues; discrimination, as many NEETs come from marginalized groups; and even proximity to work all play a role in keeping someone trapped under the NEET label.
A high number of NEETs reported a mental health or physical condition, or both, as impacting their day-to-day lives, with 64.5 percent of participants in the Blueprint survey reporting these factors as having to be taken care of before finding employment. A high number of NEETs also have kids and families they’re supporting, with 15 percent reporting needing support with their children.
The burden from a steady population of NEETs can have negative effects on many sectors. In Ontario, according to the Blueprint study, the fiscal cost for all NEET youth in the province is $1.92 billion per year. That would be $6,069 per individual NEET.
The report also found that “the cost of doing nothing is high.” Doan adds, “When governments understand how much they need to invest in preventing someone from becoming a NEET, or supporting someone who is a NEET, sometimes it can be compelling to say, ‘If you don’t make this investment, there is quite a longer-term cost associated on a number of systems that exist.’”
In terms of solutions, Doan says it all starts with accessibility to what young people need, including employment, affordable housing, mental health and child care supports, among other things.
Where NEETs also trail away from all sibling groups from past generations is in their isolation; in a very twenty-first-century fashion, the NEET experience is largely solitary and online. Left behind by a society that they believe has no place for them—whether shame, anger, or grief over their situation keeping them there—the NEET often retreats into the sole safety they know. Doan says it’s especially important to create spaces where young people can form a community and connect with others.
That’s what Chung is trying to address with her online presence. By speaking about her experience as a NEET candidly, she’s aided in ushering a community where NEETs like her are able to find solace among each other. Chung’s videos have additionally helped raise the profile of the term and lifestyle, something she hopes can in turn help make those who feel hopeless in their situation a little less so. Knowing first-hand how the trappings of depression and loneliness can deepen when a young person becomes a NEET, Chung feels a responsibility to extend a hand. “I’d like [to help] people step out of their room for the day,” she says.
