Honestly, I've caught myself asking these same questions.
When you hear about socially withdrawn young people (in Korea, "은둔·고립 청년" — reclusive, isolated youth), a certain picture comes to mind first, right? Someone at home watching YouTube, scrolling Reels, gaming, binge-reading webtoons. When they get hungry, they order delivery; when they need something, it shows up from Coupang (Korea's Amazon). These days you can run an entire life without ever stepping outside. The world has gotten that convenient.
And once you start down that road, your thoughts drift somewhere uncomfortable. Why should we look at someone who's freely doing what they want, in their own space, and label them "depressed" or "someone who needs help"? Because they don't earn money? Plenty of people make a living inside a game now. Aren't we the ones interfering — blocking what they want to do right now, trying to overhaul their whole life in the name of "helping"?
I'm embarrassed to admit it, but my thinking has gone that far. And I suspect this is a question a lot of people have quietly asked themselves at least once, even if they'd never say it out loud.
Then, not long ago, I visited the Seoul Youth Gijigae Center (a public center that supports reclusive and isolated young people). Afterward, my question shifted a little.
"Livable from home" might not be the comfort it sounds like#
The first thing that cracked was the premise: "the world got better, so home is livable now."
It's true. Delivery apps, streaming, games, online shopping. Things that once forced you outside now wrap up inside your four walls. But think about it: what used to pull people back out into the world was never some grand occasion. The part-timer you passed on a snack run. The few words traded while buying something. The small frictions that sent you outside whether you wanted to go or not. Those tiny contacts were quietly keeping people tethered to the world.
Technology erased all that friction. Convenient, yes. But for the same reason, someone can now quietly vanish from the world and, at least for a while, nothing happens. No hunger, no real inconvenience. You can disappear without dying.
So "home is livable now" no longer sounds like reassurance to me. It sounds more like the quietest kind of warning sign.
The illusion of "freely doing what they want"#
The second thing that snagged me was "they're freely doing what they want — why stop them?"
There was a hole in that logic I'd missed. There's a phrase that almost always comes up when people talk about withdrawal and isolation: they know, themselves, that they shouldn't be living this way.
That's where it stops adding up. If it were a truly free choice, there'd be no reason to feel you shouldn't. Wanting to come out but having lost the way out; telling yourself "tomorrow I'll live differently" every day and never clearing that threshold — that isn't freedom. It's closer to being trapped.
So more precisely: it isn't that they're doing what they want. It's that this is the only thing left they can do. Calling a set of options that has shrunk to one "freedom" is a mistake.
Reading "the indoor homeless" differently#
I once cynically thought of withdrawn youth as a kind of "indoor homeless." They're just inside a house, but they've dropped out of society all the same — isn't that similar?
But flip the phrase over and it actually reveals the point. A homeless person has lost their home. A withdrawn young person has a home but has lost the world outside the door. What they've lost looks different, but in the end it's the same thing: their connection to the world.
Just as a homeless person needs not blame but a place to lie down again, a withdrawn young person needs not the stigma of "why do you live like that" but a place to reconnect. Actually, my first instinct — that the stigma is the problem — was half right. The moment you define someone as a pitiful person who needs saving, coming out gets harder. What I had wrong was the direction: once you strip the stigma away, what belongs in its place isn't neglect — it's an open door.
So what "helping" actually means#
Let's go back to the first question. "Why help? Isn't that forcing a change on someone's life?"
What I saw at the Gijigae Center wasn't anyone being dragged out. It was the opposite. Start with the name. "Gijigae" is the stretch you do when you wake up. No one stretches you by force — you do it yourself, when your body is ready, as you come out of sleep. All the people beside you can do is keep the room from getting too cold until then, and leave a door you can walk through when you wake.
Helping wasn't about denying someone's present and remodeling it. It was laying down a bridge for when they want to come out, and keeping a seat open for them to return to. That was the help.
And this isn't only a story for reclusive, isolated youth. It's also a story for people like me, who once asked "why should we help?" If we stigmatize a little less and keep the seat open a little more, then someone behind a door right now will find, when they're ready, that the door is still open.
Having a home but nowhere to go doesn't mean you've lost that somewhere forever. It only means you haven't opened the door yet. So our job isn't to break the door down for them — it's to leave it unlocked.
Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.
— John Dewey
