Recently, I read an article in a Japanese media outlet about why young people today no longer “read the room” or adjust themselves to unspoken expectations.
The article divided today’s young people, including middle and high school students, into roughly three groups: the 10 percent who actively pursue self-realization, the 50 percent who see effort in a negative light and seek stability, and the remaining 30 to 40 percent who fall somewhere in between.
My first reaction was simple: Haven’t stability-oriented people always been the majority?
Japanese society has long been deeply stability-oriented. Enter a good school, join a good company, become a full-time employee, get married, buy a house, and work until retirement. For a long time, that route was treated as the standard model of a “proper life.” In that sense, the faith in stability may have been even stronger in the past than it is now.
But the content of that stability orientation has changed.
In the past, people pursued stability by making an effort to obtain it. They joined organizations, read the room, adjusted themselves to seniors and superiors, and endured a certain amount of irrationality. There was an underlying assumption that if they did so, stability would eventually be returned to them.
Today’s stability orientation seems to move in a different direction. People avoid unreasonable effort precisely because they want stability. They do not assume that schools, companies, or society will protect them. So they protect their own energy, time, and mental health first.
If the old form of stability orientation tended to move toward obedience, the newer form tends to move toward distance. I think this is a significant shift.
I belong somewhere around the border between Millennials and Gen Z, and I am no longer young in the usual sense. Still, I was not particularly surprised by this way of thinking. If anything, my reaction was: of course this is where things would go.
For a long time, I have felt that neither companies nor schools would protect me in any special way. I never believed unconditionally in the phrase, “If you work hard, you will be rewarded.” If that is the case, then it makes sense to protect my own time and energy first. It makes sense not to participate in atmospheres that make no sense.
I feel that I have lived with that sensibility for quite some time.
The difference is that, in the environment I grew up in, this was not yet considered normal. There was still a strong pressure to obey hierarchy and conform to the group. To think, “Does this even make sense?” and actually distance oneself from that environment required a certain amount of will. For some young people today, that same rationality seems to exist more naturally as a shared atmosphere.
“We don’t have to push ourselves that hard.” “What is the point of trying that much?” “If it feels wrong, we can just leave.”
Those ideas are not necessarily acts of rebellion anymore. They exist from the beginning as available options.
So I do feel that I can understand the younger generation in many ways. But at the same time, I also feel a difference.
For me, rationality was a tool for separating myself from the atmosphere of the group. But once that rationality becomes standard equipment for society as a whole, another kind of atmosphere begins to form around it.
If the old atmosphere said, “Working hard is normal. Don’t rest. Read the room,” the new atmosphere may begin to say, “Trying too hard is uncool. Don’t let yourself be exploited. Why would you push yourself for no reason?”
And I probably cannot fully belong to that atmosphere either.
Because what I truly dislike is not only old-fashioned endurance culture. What I dislike, on a more instinctive level, is when a group starts becoming the same color. Even if that color is “rational” and “healthy,” if everyone begins to take it for granted, I will probably think: That is also just another atmosphere.
Recently, I have seen ideas and instincts that I considered rational ten or twenty years ago become ordinary topics in discussions about young people and society. Part of me thinks, “See? I was right.” But I do not feel relieved.
If anything, I feel a strange disappointment. Not because I dislike being right, but because something that once felt like a wild judgment I used to protect myself is being absorbed into society, named, categorized, standardized, and turned into something that companies and schools can “respond to.”
“Time performance.” “Mental health.” “Not being exploited.” “Rational young people.”
Once these become words, articles, policies, and training materials, something that once belonged to personal instinct suddenly becomes part of a system and a market.
Of course, I do not want to return to endurance culture or conformist pressure.
Meaningless suffering, irrational hierarchy, long hours, and being controlled through atmosphere are better left behind. But I also cannot say that a rationalized society is simply good.
Rationalization removes waste. It reduces pain, avoids meaningless effort, organizes relationships, draws boundaries, and protects the self. These are all important.
But if it goes too far, then emotions, groups, schools, labor, and friction with others may all be treated as waste.
“Emotions are inefficient.” “Groups are unnecessary.” “If work does not reward you, why work?” “If relationships hurt you, why get involved?”
Each of these statements can be correct in certain situations. But if all of them are adopted at once, human beings may become quite fragile.
Because only people with a certain foundation can stand firmly after removing so much waste. A person who knows their limits, understands their desires, can adjust distance with others, can endure solitude, can ask for help when necessary, can process emotion, and has experience working on something over time may use rationalization as a form of self-protection.
But if all friction is avoided before that foundation has been formed, one may simply remain immature and isolated.
What matters here is that I am not trying to return to the old idea that “suffering builds character.” I have always disliked that kind of experience-worship. There are people who have gone through many things and absorbed almost nothing from them. There are people who wear hardship like a medal and then demand that others suffer in the same way. Whenever I have seen such people, I have felt that experience itself is not valuable.
What matters is not the amount of experience one has accumulated, but what has been updated within oneself through that experience.
The old society confused pain with friction. That is why it said, “Suffer,” “Endure,” and “Experience hardship.” Today’s rationalized society tends to avoid pain and friction together. That is why it says, “If it is pointless, quit,” “If you dislike it, leave,” and “If it hurts, do not get involved.”
But perhaps the truth is this: Pain can be reduced. But I am not sure friction should be eliminated entirely.
Clashing with others. Failing to make oneself understood. Compromising. Refusing. Feeling embarrassed. Being helped. Waiting. Being criticized. Being forgiven. Working on something for a long time. Carrying something that does not go well.
From the perspective of efficiency, these things are extremely wasteful. But there may be parts of the human foundation that can only grow inside that kind of waste.
This rationalization is not unique to Japan.
Similar phenomena are taking place, in different forms, in the United States, Europe, South Korea, China, and elsewhere. People are less willing to devote their lives to companies. They emphasize work-life balance. They withdraw from excessive competition. They no longer treat marriage or childbirth as mandatory life paths.
But the way this appears differs by country and culture.
In Japan, it is easily seen as “young people who do not read the room,” because Japanese society has long demanded that people sense the atmosphere, avoid causing trouble, and process hierarchy carefully.
In the United States, it appears more as low-context individualism. People do not enter too deeply into each other’s lives. Necessary things are confirmed through language and contracts. If something does not work, people leave.
This is freedom. It is also rough.
Living in New York, I feel both the relief and the difficulty of such a low-context society. It is comfortable that people do not interfere too deeply in other people’s lives. But relationships can also become thin, and responsibility or consideration often depends heavily on the individual.
At the same time, religious communities, Latin American communities, immigrant communities, and other groups seem to preserve a different kind of force.
People move for family and friends. They pray, sing, eat, gather, express emotion, and sometimes prioritize relationships over rationality.
From the perspective of a rationalized society, such values can look troublesome, emotional, or unstable. But within that communal quality, there may also be something that rationalized society is losing: the sense that human beings do not live alone, and that when someone is in trouble, someone nearby may intervene.
Of course, I do not mean to romanticize community. Community can support people, but it can also bind them. Emotional richness can become vitality, but it can also become instability. Family, religion, and communal ties can prevent isolation, but they can also take away the individual’s escape route.
So this is not a simple matter of saying that communal societies are better. Still, as rationalization organizes everything, such values may leave some kind of human margin within society.
Then there is the question of class.
In a rationalized world, the wealthy will likely begin to incorporate “managed irrationality” into education.
Not only efficient study, but art, sports, theater, philosophy, nature, physical experience, emotional education, failure, leadership, and community experience. These will be given to children as educational resources.
The upper classes know that rationality alone is not enough to win in a rationalized society. So they buy “waste” in a controlled form.
Meanwhile, the middle and lower classes, especially those with fewer economic resources, may be exposed mainly to the negative side of rationalization.
Schools become minimal. Families have little room to spare. Local communities grow thin. Labor does not feel rewarding. People are optimized through AI and the internet, yet have little access to real experiences with others, mentorship, long-term cultivation, art, travel, or meaningful failure.
In such a future, the wealthy buy “human depth” as education, while everyone else is pressured to cut away “humanity” as a cost.
That feels like a deeply unpleasant future.
And after thinking this far, I begin to doubt my own assumptions.
“Human beings need depth.” “Emotion and cooperation matter.” “A desirable person should be independent, yet capable of relating to others.”
Are these not simply values that humans have decided to call good?
Sometimes I think of life as a bug in the universe.
Life is a self-preserving noise that appeared within the universe. It was not necessary to the universe. It did not appear because it had meaning. It simply appeared, somehow.
That bug preserved itself, multiplied, changed, developed emotion, reason, community, art, and meaning.
But were any of these truly necessary to the universe? Probably not.
From the perspective of the universe, it makes little difference whether human beings become rationalized or retain their depth. Stars are born and burn out. Life appears, worries, builds societies, and eventually disappears. All of it is simply phenomenon.
If seen that way, the question of whether a rationalized society is good or bad eventually begins to feel meaningless.
But the matter does not end there.
Because what is meaningless from the perspective of the universe can be extremely significant from inside a living being.
Death. Suffering. Love. Loneliness. The loss of human depth. The disappearance of something one found beautiful.
These may make little difference to the universe, but they make an enormous difference to living beings.
Value does not exist outside the universe. It arises inside the local bug called life. Meaning may not be a universal law. It may be a bias created within a self-preserving vortex.
That is why “ultimately, it does not matter” and “nevertheless, it matters” do not contradict each other.
From the perspective of the universe, it does not matter. From the perspective of life, it cannot help but matter.
Both are true at the same time.
In that sense, my discomfort with a rationalized society is probably not a matter of absolute good or evil.
I am not saying that human beings must be a certain way. I do not believe that humanity must continue forever. I do not necessarily believe that effort or emotion must be rewarded.
Still, when I imagine a society where everyone is rationalized in the same way, avoids harm in the same way, and organizes relationships in the same way, I feel as if the smell of life is thinning.
Life may be a bug in the universe. But even a bug has its own behavior.
It wavers. It multiplies. It branches. It mixes. It breaks. It is born again. It carries unnecessary things. It holds inexplicable biases.
Perhaps the strength of life lies not in homogenization, but in difference and fluctuation.
When rationalization organizes everything, prevents injury, avoids failure, and optimizes everyone in the same direction, I feel a faint presence of death there.
Not because it is morally wrong. It simply looks thin as a living thing.
Rationality matters. Meaningless pain should be reduced. There is no need to return to irrational endurance culture or conformist pressure.
But if rationalization cuts away emotion, friction, chance, inefficiency, and excess, then perhaps life is trying to correct its own bug-like nature.
And if that bug-like nature were completely corrected, could life still remain life?
I do not think there is a clear answer.
From the perspective of the universe, it does not matter. But a local point has appeared that cannot help feeling that it matters.
That, I think, is life. That, perhaps, is being human.
When I look at a rationalizing society, I am not surprised. Of course it would go this way, I think. At the same time, I cannot call it good without hesitation.
This discomfort may simply be the resistance of my old values. Or it may be a small noise emitted by life, as a bug, in response to its own erasure.
Either way, for now, this is all I can say.
From the perspective of the universe, everything is only phenomenon. But within that phenomenon, what we find beautiful, and what we find repulsive, may reveal what kind of bug we are.
And I still feel the smell of life more strongly in things that are slightly distorted, wasteful, unstable, and difficult to explain than in things that are too perfectly arranged.
Recorded on June 1, 2026