Overview

Anomie (from the French, “normlessness”) is a sociological concept introduced by Émile Durkheim in his 1897 book Suicide. It describes a condition in which the stable, shared norms and rules that bind people into a moral community are weakened or absent, leaving individuals without clear guidance, purpose, or constraint. Durkheim argued that modernity — with its rapid change, geographic mobility, and erosion of traditional religion — fostered anomie, and that anomie was a leading social cause of suicide. Individuals in an anomic state do not feel liberated; they feel lost, purposeless, and anxious.

If this [binding social order] dissolves, if we no longer feel it in existence and action about and above us, whatever is social in us is deprived of all objective foundation. All that remains is an artificial combination of illusory images, a phantasmagoria vanishing at the least reflection; that is, nothing which can be a goal for our action.

(Durkheim, Suicide, 1897)

Durkheim’s core argument

Durkheim observed that suicide rates in Europe were lower among people more tightly bound into communities with the moral authority to restrain desires. When binding social structures dissolve, the result is not freedom but existential anxiety. His key insight was that human desires are not naturally satisfied — left without external structure, they become infinite and ungovernable. A community with norms does not merely limit people; it gives their striving meaning and direction.

Anomie and the phone-based childhood

Jonathan Haidt applies Durkheim’s concept to explain why boys and girls — despite following very different paths through the Great Rewiring — ended up in the same place: a sharp increase after 2012 in the sense that “life often feels meaningless.”

Girls were pulled into social media’s relational drama and appearance competition; boys were pulled into gaming, pornography, and online male communities. The paths differ, but both amount to the same thing: departure from real-world, stable communities (families, neighbourhoods, schools) and entry into rapidly shifting, anonymous online networks. These networks cannot generate norms, because their membership is in constant flux and nobody is accountable to anyone else.

Boys and girls have taken different paths through the Great Rewiring, yet somehow they have ended up in the same pit, where many are drowning in anomie and despair. It is very difficult to construct a meaningful life on one’s own, drifting through multiple disembodied networks.

(Haidt, The Anxious Generation)

Communities vs. networks

Haidt draws a sharp distinction between communities and networks, drawing on Durkheim:

Norms cannot form when membership and context are always in flux. Without stable norms, human desires have no direction; without direction, there is anomie.

Hikikomori as an extreme expression of anomie

The Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori — young men (and some women) who withdraw entirely to their childhood bedrooms, emerging only at odd hours, meeting agency and communion needs through internet use alone — represents an extreme manifestation of anomie. Such individuals are trapped in a self-reinforcing loop: social withdrawal reduces real-world competence, which increases anxiety about the outside world, which deepens the withdrawal. The internet makes this retreat sustainable in a way it never was before, when isolation meant confronting boredom and unimaginable loneliness.

The NEET category (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) represents a milder version of the same dynamic: young people, predominantly male, who are economically inactive and disengaged. NEETs and hikikomori both represent the downstream social consequences of anomie.

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