Edel Coffey: It’s not just what we do for friends - but for strangers - that makes a big difference
Picture: Bríd O'Donovan
I was intrigued recently to read about a Japanese man, Shoji Morimoto, who has become a celebrity in his home country for offering a peculiar service.
His service is called ‘Do-Nothing Rental’ and he now charges £165 per job.
Jobs vary from sitting with someone in a restaurant as they eat a meal, holding a balloon for someone’s class project, or holding a person’s place in a queue.
The service started off as a free service, as something to occupy his time after he left his job, but gradually Morimoto found that people were willing to pay for his ‘do-nothing’ service.
I tried to think of an occasion where I might hire someone to be with me.
Frankly, I’m closer to the point of paying people to leave me alone, but I understand that’s just the phase I’m at in my own life cycle and I was intrigued by the fact that demand for this man’s services is so high.
Morimoto puts part of his popularity down to the fact that he does things that cannot be replicated by or outsourced to AI.
It’s encouraging to think that there are things for which humans are still required.
But I also wondered what it says about our world, our communities, that we are willing to pay a stranger to do the things that ordinarily our friends, families, colleagues or loved ones might do for us?
The knee-jerk assumption is that we have reached a nadir in the loneliness epidemic. So many of the jobs Morimoto carried out seemed to have their basis in loneliness.
One man requested that he spend six hours a day in his house just so he could remember what it was like to have someone else in his home.
Some people hired him to wait at the finish line of a marathon for example, to cheer them on or congratulate them, or just offer support.
Others hired him to stand outside their restaurant at opening times so they would feel motivated to open promptly.
Others hired him to sit with them as they studied, while others just wanted him to text them to remind them to pack a certain bag on a certain day or even just to ‘think of them’ on a certain day when they had a difficult task or challenge to complete.
Another woman hired him to wave her off from the train platform as she left her city for a new home in another city.
Another person wanted him to make a fuss of her dog as her dog got sad when people didn’t give it the attention it craved.
These all seem like terribly poignant reasons to hire a stranger, because it feels like these are things that should be freely available to us as members of families, friendship groups, or even just a society.
Or is it that we conduct so much of our social functions online that the in-person function is missing from our lives and our friendships?
Or maybe Morimoto’s appeal is in the non-judgment of strangers.
He said that some of the people who hired him did indeed have families, relationships, friendship groups, but they didn’t want to talk to them about or ask them to do the things they needed from Morimoto.
For example, in the pandemic, he was hired by frontline health workers to provide a listening ear for their complaints about how difficult their work was in the covid crisis.
Likewise, teachers contacted him to tell him their guilty secrets — how happy they were not having to teach children every day.
Sometimes strangers are a better fit when we need to reveal our vulnerabilities or when we need to be brutally honest.
Some people, it seems, just want to tell their secrets anonymously, and often it’s easier to talk to a stranger about our most complicated feelings.
Because it’s not just the things we do for friends, but the things we do for strangers that make a big difference to our lives. We discovered this when all of our random and ad-hoc interactions disappeared during lockdown.
I was on the beach recently and saw a cute puppy with her owner. I couldn’t resist saying hello, petting the dog and giving her lots of attention.
That moment led to a deep and wide-ranging conversation with her owner about moving cities, having children or not, being lonely, being with family and returning to the communities we come from.
I think we both left the conversation a little elevated, a little lighter… and all because of a random ‘do-nothing’ act of making a fuss of a stranger’s dog.
I firmly believe, no, I know from experience, that these little ‘do-nothing’ actions are not nothing.
To mangle my Japanese metaphors, these little do-nothing actions feel like the kintsugi of life, the gold glue that heals the broken cracks in us and makes us beautiful again.
These do-nothing gestures add meaning to our lives, they show us that we are not alone, and that we are seen.
