From the memoir: A ‘rental person’ on providing services to lonely and socially anxious people

I want to taste a Starbucks hojicha frappuccino. I like sweet things normally and I’ve heard that it isn’t that sweet, but I’d still like to try it. I don’t think I’d be able to drink it all, so would you share it with me? I wouldn’t like to leave any.

@morimotoshoji I liked this request. It was simple, sincere and a bit sentimental. The client suggested we meet on a weekday, a sunny one, because rain would be a nuisance. That was nice, but I also liked the fact that, in the end, it poured.

Why did I start this Do-nothing Rental service? One reason was the idea of ‘payment for being’ which I saw in a blog written by health counsellor Jinnosuke Kokoroya. My wife follows this blog and I happened to notice that particular expression on her screen. I’d never really thought much of Kokoroya. His solutions always seemed too easy. But some of his sayings struck a chord with me, and “payment for being” was one of those.

Essentially, pay is given for work. It’s exchanged for something being done. But Kokoroya argued that people should be paid for just being there – that people have a value even if they do nothing. The idea didn’t hit me that forcibly at first, but it sounded interesting. It slipped into a corner of my brain and took root. I began to wonder if ‘payment for being’ might be a real possibility. Not long afterwards, I heard about Pro-Ogorareya, the professional guest, a man whose “job” is having meals with people.

He has no fixed address. He just asks people on Twitter to give him food and somewhere to stay. Of the offers he gets, he chooses the ones that look most appealing. People criticise his way of life. They get angry that he doesn’t get a job and feed himself, or they laugh at him, saying he’s just a “gigolo”. But I thought it sounded like a great way to live. Here was someone being paid for just “being” – proof that it was possible. In that moment, something that had been hidden inside me sprang to life – a wish to live without doing anything. I thought about what Pro-Ogorareya- had done – or rather I practically copied his ideas – and before long, my do-nothing service was up and running. Things can be different simply because someone is there. They don’t have to be there, but if they are, something changes. In this chapter, I want to think about some of the requests I’ve had just ‘to be there’: going to a restaurant with someone who doesn’t feel comfortable going on their own; watching a drama rehearsal; sitting with someone while they work; watching someone doing household chores. How do such situations change when a person is rented out simply “to be there”?

I’d like you to think of me sometime tomorrow or the next day. Just say to yourself, “Is she OK?” or something like that. Think of it as support for a newly employed graduate who’s had their day off cancelled. There’s no very strong reason for this request. I was feeling tired and it just kind of came into my head. 

@morimotoshoji A request from someone who wanted me to think of them for a moment over the next couple of days. I read the request again and again, because I wasn’t sure I understood it. But I accepted it on the assumption that it really was just a matter of thinking of her. I let her know later that I’d done so and in her reply she said that it had had an effect – a response that provided both relief and a degree of worry.

Before I became a Rental Person Who Does Nothing, I did, of course, do something. I’ll talk more about it later, but for now I’ll give a brief CV. I studied science to postgraduate level and then joined a company that published educational materials and provided distance-learning services. I left after a few years and started calling myself a “freelance writer”. I’d been freelance for two years when I came across Kokoraya’s “payment for being” idea. By that stage, I wasn’t actually doing much writing. I had no respectable reason for this – it was a question of the work being boring and the pay unattractive.

The expression “freelance writer” covers quite a wide spectrum, including advertising copywriters, anonymous magazine and website writers, columnists who write under their own name, and so on. What they have in common is that they make their living through fee-based writing. My main freelance work was similar to what I had been doing at the company – writing questions for practice test books and explanations for reference books. Besides that, I wrote copy for business pamphlets and summaries of interviews.

At first, I just got on and did the work without thinking much about it, but I gradually began to realize how dull it was. I couldn’t dissuade myself from feeling that I was doing something that I simply didn’t want to do. The job of writing had become stressful. Of course, the amount of money people are paid for work (in my case, writing fees) depends on the market and no account is taken of the stress involved. This didn’t feel right to me. It seemed unfair that people who wanted to do the work, and didn’t feel at all stressed by it, got paid the same as people who didn’t want to do it and did feel stressed by it. It seemed wrong that I was getting nothing for the mental burden the work was giving me.

I can imagine people muttering to themselves, “Well, there’s no such thing as an easy job”, and I fully appreciate that there’s nothing unusual about work stress. But even so, the situation really bothered me. Some people may wonder, Why not look for another job? That’s exactly what I’d been thinking when I left the company. I’d decided to go freelance and only take on jobs I wanted – writing about things that interested me and interviewing people I wanted to interview. But it ended up feeling repetitive. You accept one assignment and you end up doing a series on the same subject, or you are asked to do something very similar for another company in the same field. People are always looking for a good result to be repeated. I found it depressing. I didn’t enjoy writing like that. It was stressful to have to meet expectations.

For example, when a company wants exam practice questions, they’re looking for a certain standard with delivery by a certain date. If I managed to meet those expectations, then I was likely to get similar work with the equivalent or higher levels of expectation – they might say, “Make the explanations briefer this time,” or “How about adding some hints for the students?” Having these external pressures was bad enough. But there was something inside too. I like to feel my work is fresh and meaningful, so, rather than just re-hashing old questions, I always tried to think of new material.

Unfortunately, though, I’m not that creative and I soon ran out of ideas, which meant I had to do research. I got no pay for this research, but I felt I had to do it, nonetheless. This stressed me out even more – stress that I wasn’t paid for. Inevitably there are times when you end up with more stress than pay. That’s when I don’t want to do the work. And that’s the reason I’ve given up all the jobs I’ve ever had.

Excerpted with permission from Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir, Shoji Morimoto, translated from the Japanese by Angus Turvill, Picador.