I’m considering living in the wild, just trotting around the globe with little money,” reads a post on a Reddit forum for Neets. “I was working a retail store and the first few hours were OK, then I had to deal with customers,” reads another. “I packed my bag and just left.” In this forum, a community of 44,000 people from around the world share advice and discuss the challenges of being a Neet — an acronym for not in education, employment or training. It is not just an online phenomenon.
“I could never go back to working a normal job again,” Morgan, who left his role in 2020 and asked to remain anonymous, told the FT. “With inflation and rents rising, the incentive to devote all of my time to an employer to barely scrape by didn’t make sense any more.” In the third quarter of this year, official UK figures showed 13 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds were Neets, nearly 1mn people. Two-fifths of these were looking for work; the rest were “economically inactive”, neither working nor looking, opting out of the labour market completely. This puts the number of economically inactive young people close to its highest level — a similar story in Europe and the US, where more than 1 in 10 young people are Neets. While the term first gained traction in 1990s UK government policy, which sought to help older teenagers into work, it has since been adopted internationally and by a wider subculture of economically inactive people. Reddit’s Neet forum includes people in their 50s; recent posts depict a “self-loathing man of inaction late 20s/early 30s” or ask if “30+ NEETS turn their life around?” After starting out as a car salesman ten years ago, Morgan, now 30, was forced out of work by depression and an illness that took him in and out of hospital. When he recovered, the pandemic had shut his industry down: he opted out of work, using the time to teach himself how to repair old cars and post videos onlin