Why more Hong Kong youths are opting out of work

With June comes the summer break for Hong Kong’s tertiary institutions. Over a meal with some younger students last week, one mentioned she was looking for a part-time job. When I asked if this was due to financial pressure, she sheepishly admitted it was not — she wanted to save up money so she could travel to meet her favourite idols. She visits South Korea, Japan or Taiwan around three or four times a year to see her favourite celebrities, with each trip costing several thousand Hong Kong dollars (1,000 HKD is about US$127), taking into account concert tickets, transport and accommodation.

I teased her for sparing no expense when it came to chasing idols, to which she retorted that she was quite restrained. Some of her peers were far more extreme, splurging tens of thousands of dollars at a time to get close to celebs, collect autographs and take photos, constantly pouring money into their fandom.

For students, such decadent spending clearly creates heavy financial pressure. But if these young people are not doing anything productive, there is another group of youths in an even worse state, with no life goals — not even idol-chasing. A recent study released by Hong Kong’s Legislative Council showed that the number of NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) rose to around 36,200 last year, accounting for roughly 6% of the total youth population.

The NEET phenomenon

NEETs mainly refers to youths aged 15 to 24 who are not studying, not working and not enrolled in any vocational training, and who are full of pessimism in their outlook on life.

In recent years the number of NEETs has grown steadily, becoming a global phenomenon. A recent UK survey found that more than one million young people now fall into the NEET category, the highest number in 12 years. The report warned that if the situation continues to worsen, within five years, one in six young people in Britain could be out of work, out of school and out of training.

Traditionally, the Chinese are longtime advocates of “diligence brings success, play brings no benefit” (勤有功、戏无益), taking pride in hard work and self-reliance, with a deep-rooted notion of earning one’s place through diligence. The emergence in Hong Kong of a sizeable group of idle NEETs challenges these societal assumptions, and has sparked widespread concern.

Objectively, the emergence of NEETs in Hong Kong reflects structural shifts in the times. On the one hand, today’s core youth cohort are the Gen Zs, raised in material abundance and steeped in post-materialist values. They no longer see a stable job and a lifetime of work as the only life goal — instead, they place greater emphasis on freedom and quality of life, rejecting low-paid, high-burnout, entry-level roles.

Reality hits

On the other hand, a university degree once guaranteed a stable white collar job — now, a bachelor’s degree is merely an entry ticket, and it is the norm for master’s graduates to compete for junior posts. As times change, curricula have lagged behind industry needs. There is a glut of humanities, arts and general management degree holders, and course content is out of step with corporate practice. Graduates lack practical skills, and repeated setbacks while job-hunting erodes their confidence, gradually edging them out of the labour market.

Given Hong Kong’s extremely high private-housing burden, even hard work might not make home ownership and self-reliance realistic. Some young people have therefore chosen to “lie flat” (躺平), giving up on promotion and pay rises, even deliberately keeping their income low so as to qualify for public rental housing as single applicants, ultimately slowly morphing into NEETs.

In addition, the postwar baby boomers have relatively ample savings, and most Hong Kong families can afford to let adult children live at home. With no need to worry about basic sustenance, many young people lose the sense of urgency to find work, preferring to stay home to regroup and bide their time. Their parents, having lived through hardship, often adopt a compensatory parenting mindset, reluctant for their children to suffer as they did, and indulging them in their temporary “lying flat” at home. The result is that some youths become full-blown recluses, barely leaving the house for years at a stretch, living on the internet and gradually dropping out of society altogether.

Greater social acceptance

In the past, “feeding off one’s parents” and long‑term unemployment was strongly stigmatised in Hong Kong, and indolence was perceived as shameful. Today, society is more tolerant. It is becoming increasingly normal for youths to opt for “intermittent unemployment” or take breaks between jobs, which in turn has encouraged more young people to actively choose a NEET lifestyle.

However, young NEETs who remain outside the social mainstream for long periods face not only employment issues but also mental health concerns. In the long run, if youths are always walled up at home, their social skills would atrophy. They become increasingly fearful of human interaction, and a host of social problems could arise.

One such problem is the idling of a large pool of young labour, which is a  waste of human resources. If graduates take a short break and return to study or work within a few months to a year, this is just a transitional phase, and not a serious issue. But if they stay away from school, work and training for more than two years consecutively, living at home on family support and slipping into all-out seclusion, overall productivity would be squeezed, which is no good for economic development.

Hong Kong has begun to reflect seriously on the NEET phenomenon, with lively debates on how to improve the employment environment and revive a positive culture of hard work and work ethic. But resolving the NEET problem is not just about encouraging the young to get jobs. In the long run, multiple facets must be addressed — industry structure, the alignment between education and employment, social attitudes — and different policies must be adopted before results can be achieved.

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “香港涌现“尼特族”青年的背后”.

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