Basic Trope: A character who's not in employment, education, or training.
- Straight: Alex stays at home, playing video games and watching television, and has never applied for a job. As a result, this earns him mockery and contempt from others and the indignation of his friends.
- Exaggerated: Alex never went to school in his childhood and has never worked in his adult life, yet he still earns money on a monthly basis. Others hate him to the point of considering him worse than a murderer and a rapist. Even other jobless people hate him for this.
- Downplayed: Alex stays home and plays video games most of the time. He also watches the kids and occasionally does odd jobs or works from home.
- Justified:
- Alex is Dismotivated.
- Alex has been discouraged
by having formerly sought employment but denied it for so long. - Alex doesn't like the idea of having to work all his life just to maintain his house, gas, electricity, etc., and considers it to be a pointless rat race.
- Alex has no marketable life skills and no way to acquire them.
- Alex is severely disabled/mentally ill.
- Alex lives this way as a form of protest against toxic work culture and the life that's been mapped out for him at birth, as in the "Lying Flat" movement.
- Alex has a large enough inheritance that he doesn't need to work to live for the rest of his life so long as he keeps his living expenses low enough.
- Inverted: Alex has a job and loves working. This earns him the scorn and contempt from others who think he should quit his job.
- Subverted: It turns out that Alex is employed at an online job and earns a good amount of money.
- Double Subverted:
- It was a lie he made up to get people to leave him alone.
- He gets fired for misconduct and bad performance.
- Parodied:
- Alex constantly has nightmares about working at an office under the watchful eye of a Mean Boss. This prompts him to stay at home as long as he wants.
- Whenever Alex is employed, he is treated with respect, but whenever he's unemployed, everyone considers him a heretic and throws tomatoes at him.
- Alex goes to ridiculous lengths to avoid going to any sort of school or work.
- Despite not going to school or working, Alex becomes the richest person in town when he finds a large amount of some highly in-demand commodity or cash.
- Zig-Zagged: Depending on the Writer, Alex may be unemployed or may work at home. People's attitudes also vary.
- Averted: Alex attends school and/or works regularly.
- Enforced: The writer feels the need to target those who are currently unemployed, so he creates Alex.
- Lampshaded: "Hey, Alex, have you found a job yet?"
- Invoked:
- Alex quits his job with the intention to do this.
- Alex realizes that because he was born rich, he can afford to sleep and play video games all day and do nothing productive.
- Exploited: A Corrupt Corporate Executive hires Alex to carry out an Evil Plan with the promise he will get respect without doing much work.
- Defied:
- Alex's friends take the initiative to get Alex out of his house and find a job.
- Alex decides to go to school or find a job just to shut up his critics.
- Discussed:
- "What's the deal with the rest of you hating others for not having a job? Has the capitalist propaganda brainwashed you all?!"
- "It should be a crime not to want to work for a living."
- Conversed: Alex watches a Show Within a Show and relates to its Loser Protagonist, Bob, who's also NEET. Mike tries to point out to Alex that he shouldn't be following Bob's example.
- Implied: Alex seems pretty lazy, but it's not explicitly said that he is unemployed.
- Deconstructed:
- Alex is not only ostracized by society for not wanting to work, he becomes unhappy, homeless, and suicidal.
- Alex is mocked for being jobless so long that this pressures him into finding a job. It turns out that the job he applied for is an awful experience because he is paid very little or never at all, and he is bullied and abused by his boss and his co-workers, especially if they knew this was his first time working. All that Alex wishes for is to drop out of society.
- The Job-Stealing Robot has become so good at their job that a large proportion of humans like Alex are not only unemployed, they are unemployable because there simply isn't any job in existence that a robot couldn't do more efficiently. Large swathes of the population are now looked down upon with no means of getting out of it.
- Reconstructed:
- It's shown that Alex could solve his problems if he just found a job that looked better and applied to it, but he never does. This makes it his fault; not that he cares.
- Due to Job Stealing Robots obsoleting unskilled human labor, universal basic income is introduced to ensure everyone can maintain a basic standard of living. Reaching a point where everyone can be NEETs is a sign that society is progressing towards an ideal utopia.
- Played for Drama: Alex is Driven to Suicide after being endlessly targeted for being jobless.
- Played for Laughs: Alex's mother, Alice, calls on him for the first time in a long time. She's convinced he must have gotten a good, steady job by now. Cue Cringe Comedy as he tries to pretend he has.
Back to NEET
