The limbic alibi
When the attention economy becomes the closing argument in a dismissal. On the rise in the number of young people on social assistance, and the figure in which a structurally produced outcome is attributed to the damaged brain of the person carrying it.
On 14 August 2026, NRC published a background piece on the continuing rise in the number of young people on social assistance. The article names five causes: the housing and labour markets, hesitating and switching jobs, debt, the tightening of the Wajong disability scheme, and mental health problems. It is careful work. It contains most of the facts needed to understand the rise.
It also contains a figure worth naming, because it turns up increasingly often outside this article, and because it borrows the language of the critique of the attention economy.
Two youth workers in the piece describe the same causal chain. Constant scrolling leaves a young person unable to concentrate for long. That shows up as lateness. A conversation with the supervisor follows. The conversation escalates. The employer ends the arrangement. The young person is at home, the money runs out, and an application for social assistance is filed.
Every link in that chain is recognisable on its own. As a whole, it does something other than describe. It attributes an outcome made possible by a series of institutional decisions to the impaired attention span of the person involved. The temporary contract drops out of the reasoning. The three months of unemployment insurance drop out. The employer who gave no room drops out. What remains is a young person who cannot sit still for five minutes.
That is the limbic alibi: the figure in which a structurally produced outcome is explained by the damaged brain of the person carrying it, in the vocabulary of the critique itself.
The figure is attractive because it sounds progressive. It points not at laziness but at neurology, not at character but at exposure. It thereby looks like the opposite of the old reproach. It is not. It only moves the organ to which the shortcoming is attributed.
The counter changed too
Before the question of causes makes sense, the question of measurement has to be asked. Almost nobody asks it.
Statistics Netherlands (CBS) reports that the number of people under 27 receiving social assistance stood at 42,500 at the end of March 2026, and that this figure had been higher than a year earlier for thirteen quarters running. The steepest rise fell at the end of 2023, at 9.2 per cent, after which the pace slackened. (1)
The Divosa Benchmark adds something that almost never returns in the public debate. In 2025, anticipating the Participation Act in Balance reform, municipalities had already departed from the four-week search period for vulnerable young people. That change formally took effect on 1 January 2026. (2)
The four-week search period was not a neutral procedure. A young person who came forward had to search on their own for four weeks before an application was taken into consideration. Anyone who dropped out during those four weeks never appeared in the statistics. The period suppressed not the need, but the registration of the need. Abolishing it makes existing invisible precarity administratively visible.
That means part of the rising line is a repair being read as a deterioration. How large that part is, nobody knows, because it has not been investigated. That it has not been investigated while the line runs for thirteen quarters is itself a finding.
The picture asks for two further corrections, in both directions. The share of young people in the total social-assistance caseload stayed at eleven per cent in 2025, the same as in 2024, whereas between 2018 and 2023 it lay between nine and ten per cent. In absolute numbers this is an increase from 40,145 to 41,657. (3) Young people, moreover, enter and leave more often than any other age group; a considerable part of social-assistance dependency among the young is short-lived. The rise is therefore real, but more modest than the quarterly percentages suggest, and the chief economist at CBS points out that part of it is connected to young refugees holding residence permits, without this being the main explanation. (4)
What has unmistakably shifted is where these young people end up institutionally.
Three doors upstream
Social assistance is the last safety net. That means every narrowing of a scheme upstream translates downstream into volume, without anyone deciding to let the caseload grow.
Three narrowings are identifiable and dated. The Wajong, the national scheme for young people with disabilities, was closed in 2015 to everyone not permanently and fully incapacitated for work, moving young people with autism or ADHD from a national scheme into the municipal domain. The duration of unemployment insurance is tied to employment history, so that whoever has worked briefly is entitled to three months and is dependent on social assistance afterwards. The Bbz, the assistance scheme for the self-employed, sets requirements that a starting freelancer without a client base generally does not meet.
The number of people under 27 with a reintegration provision in 2024 was roughly as large as the number of young people receiving social assistance, and for young people wage-cost subsidies, job coaching and sheltered work are deployed substantially more often than for other age groups. (5) That is the Wajong displacement made visible in a different counter. The support has not disappeared. It has moved to a scheme with a different name, a different funder and a different stigma.
The number of young people on social assistance is therefore not a measurement of young people. It is the negative imprint of what has been closed off upstream.
The category already exists
The limbic alibi is not only a way of speaking among youth workers. It has an administrative twin.
The national register of sanctions contains the category “insufficient sense of responsibility”, code 28/04. It can apply when someone has run through their assets too quickly, for instance by buying something that really was not necessary. In 2025, 9.6 per cent of all imposed sanctions were booked under this code. (6)
That is the figure in codified form. A judgement about someone’s inner disposition, with a number, a legal consequence and a counter. The limbic vocabulary need not even be involved; it only supplies a more modern and medical-sounding argument for it. Anyone who believes the attention economy erodes young people’s judgement, and who carries that conviction into a conversation about a sanction, is giving an existing form a new justification.
That is precisely where the critique of the attention economy becomes dangerous. Not in the book, but in the interview room of an organisation deciding on someone’s income.
Margin for error
There is a reason the scrolling explanation cannot do what is asked of it.
Exposure to the attention economy is close to universal. The variable “scrolling” is largely constant across the youth of an entire country. A quantity that barely varies cannot explain an outcome that varies strongly. The young person who scrolls and begins a master’s degree and the young person who scrolls and appears in the statistics do not differ appreciably in exposure.
What does differ is the margin for error. By that we mean the whole of the resources determining what a misstep costs: a parental home to fall back on, parents who can top things up, a diploma with signalling value, a financial upbringing, and the right to make a wrong choice at twenty-two without it lasting three years.
The law explicitly assumes that margin. A lower benefit rate applies to people aged eighteen to twenty-one, and the reason given is that parents carry a maintenance obligation until the age of twenty-one and are expected to supplement. The scheme thus presupposes the presence of a private buffer. For those without that buffer, the rate is inadequate, justified by a maintenance obligation that in their case is in fact not met.
Here it also becomes visible that limiting screen time is not a competing explanation but an expression of the same inequality. Parental limits on screen use cost time, presence and authority. Those are scarce goods, unequally distributed. The advice to put the phone away is priced for people who can afford distraction.
The attention economy therefore does not produce a single kind of damage. It produces an exchange rate, and that rate is steepest where the margin for error is narrowest.
Why the mental register wins
That leaves the question of why institutions do register this phenomenon, but in a different category.
Existential insecurity is a property over time. The official system measures at a moment: income, labour participation, education level, benefit status. Insecurity across time is not a quantity in that ledger. The phenomenon is thereby structurally unmeasurable.
Mental health is not. There is a monitor, there are instruments, there is a treatment apparatus and there are budget lines. The unmeasurable is therefore translated into the only category in which the person carrying it can hold on to it, and the toolkit then follows the translation: therapy, youth work, a development programme. Not: building up unemployment-insurance entitlements, contract security, access to housing.
That the translation does not hold can be read off the practice itself. Municipalities report that support services for young people are jammed and that many are on a waiting list. (7) Social assistance thereby functions in part as the waiting room of a care system that is full. And in the NRC article, one of the interviewees says that being on social assistance was itself mentally hard, because it felt as though you were adding nothing. The arrow runs the other way there.
Both registers appear in the same publication. They do not correct each other.
What this asks of frontline practice
Limbic Literacy is not an instrument for teaching young people to handle their phones better. That would put the problem back with the person already carrying it. The first layer, recognition, applies here to the assessor, not the assessed.
Three questions are enough to intercept the figure at the moment it presents itself.
The first: does the attention explanation account for the difference, or only for the behaviour? If nearly everyone in the age group shares the same exposure, that exposure does not explain why this young person is sitting here and another is not.
The second: which door closed upstream? Ask about the employment history, the contract type, the moment of turning eighteen, the rejection under another scheme. Whoever does not ask ends up with a file that begins with the lateness.
The third: what would a young person with a wider margin for error have done in the same situation? If the answer is that they would have lived with their parents for six months and started again, then the difference is not neurological.
The attention economy is real, the business model is real, and the damage is documented. That is exactly why the diagnosis must not be used to explain why someone lost their job. A structural critique that ends in a judgement about an individual is no longer a structural critique. It has become an alibi for the system it set out against.
Notes
- CBS, “Aantal mensen met bijstand elf kwartalen op rij hoger dan een jaar eerder”, 12 June 2026.
- Divosa Benchmark Werk & Inkomen, annual report 2025, section on the composition of the social-assistance caseload, last updated 6 April 2026. The Participation Act in Balance was passed by the House of Representatives on 22 April 2025 and by the Senate on 30 September 2025; implementation is phased across 2026 and 2027.
- Divosa Benchmark Werk & Inkomen, annual report 2025.
- Peter Hein van Mulligen (CBS), quoted in Binnenlands Bestuur, “Waarom stijgt het aantal jongeren in de bijstand?”, May 2026.
- Significant APE, Re-integratiedienstverlening door gemeenten, November 2025.
- Divosa Benchmark Werk & Inkomen, annual report 2025, section on sanctions. The categorisation follows the CBS social-assistance statistics (Bijstands Uitkeringen Statistiek).
- Quotation from a benchmark interview, included in Divosa Benchmark Werk & Inkomen, annual report 2025.
The article discussed: Sezen Moeliker, “Hoe kan het toch dat het aantal jongeren in de bijstand toeneemt?”, NRC, 14 August 2026.