I'll be your baby tonight ... for $75US an hour
I meet my friend Andy in a cafe. Over a coffee we chat about music, current events and the ups and downs of our working lives. We don't spend a lot of time talking about our feelings or our relationship, or rehashing the past. It's just not that kind of friendship. I prefer it that way, and I know Andy feels the same, because I'm paying him to feel the same. In fact, I'm paying him £40 an hour to feel the same.
Not so long ago, friendship belonged to a dwindling list of desirable outcomes – including happiness, wisdom and good weather – that money couldn't buy. In a cold and indifferent world full of cold and indifferent strangers, a friend was something you had to make yourself. But no more: now you can purchase friendship at your convenience, by the hour. For a certain consideration, you can hire someone to go to a museum with you, or hang out at the gym, or keep you company while you shop. A stranger, you might say, is just a friend who hasn't invoiced you yet.
This disturbing development has its origins in Japan, but it has also become big in the US. The website rentafriend.com maintains a database with 218,000 names on it, chums-for-hire from all over the US and Canada. Apparently, 2,000 people pay to subscribe in order to find friends to take to dinner or to invite round for some scrapbooking. (For reasons that elude me, scrapbooking is huge in the US. You'd certainly have to pay me to do it with you.) It may all sound a bit suspicious, but Rentafriend founder Scott Rosenbaum insists that the service furnishes platonic friendship only. Those seeking or offering more are struck off.
If this sounds like the final phase of a bid to commodify every aspect of being human (should we not hire out our souls and be done with it?), those numbers – 218,000 rentafriends against 2,000 no-mates – probably say more about what people will do for money in today's economic climate than how lonely people are in our dysfunctional society. An LA Times reporter rang up three random rentafriends and found that none had been contacted by anyone. Although rentafriend.com has plans to bring this alarming innovation to Britain, as has been widely reported this week, there is currently no such service on offer. So I have had to make my own arrangements.
posted by Tom Nadeau at 1:19 PM
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