Last week, I came across a documentary about hikikomori. It was about young people in Singapore who have stopped leaving their homes. Not for a week. Not because they’re sick. But for months. Sometimes years.
They eat, sleep, and do everything in their rooms. They live — if you can call it that — entirely within four walls.
The news story called the phenomenon hikikomori.
What is Hikikomori — and Why are We Talking About it Now?
The word hikikomori comes from Japanese: hiku (to pull back) and komoru (to seclude oneself). It describes a state of severe social withdrawal, in which a person retreats from the world entirely, sometimes for months or years.
What began as a recognized social phenomenon in Japan has quietly been showing up across Asia, including here in Singapore.
If you’ve been following local news recently, you may have come across coverage of this issue where young people are withdrawing from school, from work, from relationships, from life as we know it.
The public reaction tends to be swift: Something is wrong with them. They’re being irresponsible. They need help.
And yes, support is often needed. But before we get there, it’s worth slowing down and asking a different question. Not “What is wrong with this person,” but “What is this person’s withdrawal trying to tell us?”
The Reflex to Individualize
When we encounter something as striking as a person who refuses to leave their room, our instinct is to locate the problem inside that person. We reach for a diagnosis. We talk about fear, avoidance, and mental illness. We ask what treatment they need.
This is understandable. But it is also incomplete.
As therapists working in the existential tradition, one thing we return to again and again is how quickly we reduce human struggles to the individual, as if the person exists in a vacuum, independent of the world that shaped them.
In mental health, people often come in asking: “Is the problem me? Why is it so hard for me?” And yet, sometimes, the answer isn’t simply about the individual. Sometimes, it’s about the structure.
Consider what actually shows up in the stories of those who withdraw.
Many were bullied. Many found school intolerable. Many experienced a world that felt, at some fundamental level, unsafe or untrustworthy. One way to understand hikikomori is not as a failure of the individual, but as the individual’s lived response to a world that has, in their experience, let them down.
Could it be that what we’re witnessing is not simply someone who is broken, but someone whose withdrawal is, in some sense, a form of self-protection?
The System is Also Part of the Story
Singapore is a high-performing society. We are proud of our efficiency, our meritocracy, our ability to get things done. But that same structure carries a weight and not everyone carries it equally.
Consider what it means to grow up in this city.
At twelve years old, children sit for the PSLE, an examination that many families treat as a defining moment. The pressure to perform, to conform, to compete begins early.
For some, these experiences are formative in ways that are never fully processed. Your own experience…if you do not think about it, will influence how you become a parent too. Because you’ll say: “I had to fight for my results, fight for my grades. I’m going to make my kids do it too. That’s what I value.”
This is what the philosopher Thieu Yuen points toward: It is not only that our values shape how we live, but that how we live shapes what we value.
The conditions we are born into, the schools we attend, the families we grow up in, the social systems we navigate, leave marks on who we become. When we ignore this, we risk blaming the individual for what is partly a structural wound.
In the case of hikikomori, the question worth sitting with is: Is the world this person is withdrawing from one that was ever truly welcoming to them?
Is Withdrawal Right or Wrong?
This is the question many people want answered. And it’s the question we’re most reluctant to answer directly…not because we’re avoiding it, but because we think it’s the wrong place to start.
People do not do things that don’t benefit them in some way. This might sound counterintuitive when we’re talking about hikikomori and someone who refuses to leave their home. But if we sit with it, it opens something up. There is a reason for what this person is doing.
There is something being gained, which could be safety, control, relief from an unbearable external pressure. And there is something being lost, like connection, possibility, growth.
The work, then, is not to immediately determine whether the withdrawal is right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy. The work is to genuinely understand it. As we’ve reflected in our own clinical practice: “It’s not simply you either get out of your room or you stay in your room. It’s not as black and white as that.”
We do not dismiss the fact that sustained social isolation is neither healthy nor sustainable. That matters. But empathy has to come before instruction. Understanding has to come before intervention.
Otherwise, we are not really helping but are simply telling someone to conform to a world they’ve already decided they can’t trust.
What Isolation Might Really Be About
In existential therapy, we often work with the idea that we are fundamentally relational beings. We cannot exist in true isolation because who we are is always shaped, in part, by our relationships with others.
This creates a tension that every human being navigates, in one form or another: How do I remain myself while living alongside other people?
For most of us, this tension is manageable. We make compromises. We wear different versions of ourselves in different contexts. We push ourselves to show up even when we don’t want to.
But for some people, the tension becomes unbearable. The gap between who they are and what the world expects of them grows so wide that withdrawal feels like the only way to preserve something essential.
This is not madness. This is a very human response to an impossible-feeling bind.
Some might look at the hikikomori phenomenon and see irresponsibility, or illness, or failure. But from where we sit, the more curious question is: What does it mean for a young person that the world feels that hostile? And what does it say about the world, not just the person, that this is their conclusion?
What We Do Not Want to Do
We do not want to romanticize hikikomori and withdrawal. Staying in a room indefinitely is not a solution to the pressures of modern life, and we would never encourage it.
But neither do we want to fall into the trap of treating re-entry into society as the automatic goal of therapy. The question “how do we get this person back out into the world?” can sometimes be premature and occasionally misguided if we haven’t first asked what kind of world are we asking them to return to. Are we willing to take seriously what they’ve been telling us about it?
A therapeutic approach rooted in existential principles would start from a place of genuine curiosity: What does the person gain from their withdrawal? What does it cost them? What were the conditions — in their family, their school, their culture — that led them here?
And importantly: What would need to be different for the outside world to feel survivable again?
These are not questions with quick answers. But they are questions that could lead to understanding.
Authenticity, Isolation, and the Question We Often Avoid
There is a deeper thread running through all this hikikomori issues, one we work with often in our practice: the question of authenticity.
We live in a culture that tells people — implicitly and explicitly — who they should be.
The good student. The filial child. The productive employee. The person who pushes through. For many young people, performing these identities for long enough eventually produces a crisis.
They don’t know who they are outside of what’s expected of them. And for some, the only way to find out is to stop, completely.
Withdrawal, in this reading, is not simply avoidance. It may be, at least in part, a search. A desperate, imperfect, and ultimately unsustainable search for a self that feels real.
The work of therapy, then, is not to extract a person from their room and slot them back into society unchanged. It is to understand what they have been protecting, what they have been grieving, and what they are trying to find, however painful it gets.
If You’re Worried About Someone — or Yourself
If someone you know has been withdrawing from the world or in hikikomori state, the most important thing you can offer is not a solution. It is presence, and patience, and a willingness to understand before you advise.
If you recognize something of yourself in what’s been described here…
- a sense that the world is too much
- that you’ve been performing a version of yourself that doesn’t feel real
- that connection feels more dangerous than isolation,
…then, we’d gently encourage you to talk to someone.
Not because there is something wrong with you. But because these questions are hard to carry alone, and you don’t have to.
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This article reflects the clinical perspectives and views of our therapists. If you are concerned about yourself or someone you know, we welcome you to reach out and have a conversation with us.
Explore our work on identity and the authentic self or read more about how Existential Therapy approaches questions of meaning, belonging, and the self.
About the Author
I am a BPS-accredited and SPS-accredited Counselling Psychologist with a Doctorate in Existential Psychology from the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in London, U.K. My care philosophy is not to diagnose, label, or categorise but rather to work with the individual in front of me in the here and now.
My clinical credentials certainly play a significant role in defining my professional identity. But to foster a deeper connection and authenticity, I invite you to discover my other “Selves”, the various facets of who I am.
