In 2018, a man in Tokyo, Japan was fired from his office job for doing nothing. So he turned doing nothing into a career. His name is Shoji Morimoto. He posted a single message on social media offering to rent himself out to anyone who needed a person present but not involved. He would show up. He would not initiate conversation. He would not give opinions or advice. He would simply be there. The requests that came in revealed something quietly extraordinary about loneliness. People hired him to sit across from them while they ate alone in restaurants. To wave goodbye from the platform as their train departed. To stand at the finish line of a marathon. To sit in the corner of a cafe while a woman served divorce papers to her husband, just so she would not be completely alone when she did it. One person hired him to be video called while they cleaned their room. One person has hired him over two hundred and seventy times. He has handled over four thousand sessions. He charges whatever his clients feel is fair. Last year he earned around eighty thousand US dollars. His former boss told him he was useless. He said doing nothing was not a skill. Morimoto now has half a million followers, a television series based on his work, and four published books. "People do not have to be useful in any specific way," he said. What is something you would actually pay someone to simply show up for?
