Someone posted this in another thread:
I’ve known a few NEETs in my time. The kind of people who never managed to get their lives off the ground, stuck in a cycle of self-loathing and stagnation. Some of them were lazy, sure, but it was never just about that. There was always something deeper at play, and after seeing the pattern repeat enough times, the common denominator became clear: their parents.
Not just bad parents in the usual sense—these weren’t violent abusers or neglectful junkies. No, these were the absent yet omnipresent types. The ones who managed to be both overbearing and useless, hovering over their children’s lives just enough to stifle any real independence while never actually guiding them toward anything productive. They raised their kids to be weak, dependent, and afraid of the world while doing nothing to prepare them for it.
These parents kept them on a tight leash, controlling them just enough to ensure they couldn’t grow on their own. They made their kids fear failure while never encouraging success. They taught helplessness, ridiculed ambition, and instilled a baseline assumption that the world was too hard, too cruel, and not worth engaging with. Then they turned around and sneered at their kids for turning out exactly as they were molded—passive, broken, directionless.
It’s a perfect cycle of failure. Raise your child to be a loser, then blame them for losing. Teach them to avoid risk, then mock them for never taking any. Smother them just enough to kill their spirit, but not enough to make them resent you enough to break free. The perfect conditions for breeding a NEET.