A Hundred Likes, Minimum

You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway. That’s the basic proposition behind Family Romance, a Japanese company that rents out human beings by the hour to serve as friends, colleagues, family members—whatever gap in your social life you need temporarily filled. Founded by Yuichi Ishii, who by all accounts genuinely believes in what he’s building, the company places actors into whatever role the client needs: birthday party guests, a supportive older sibling, a crowd of strangers who seem to like you.

VICE writer Kumpei Kuwamoto hired the service for his own birthday rather than spend the evening alone with a cake. Ishii guarantees not only a good time with the rented companions but at least a hundred Instagram likes. Minimum. Because of course that’s part of the package now—the social proof, the photographic record of a social life that looks, from outside, indistinguishable from a real one.

The loneliness this points at is real, particularly in Japanese urban life where the distance between people living alone in close proximity reaches a kind of architectural perfection. But the Instagram angle is the part that stays with me. Not the paid friendship itself—that’s ancient, in various forms—but the bundling of it with a follower metric. You’re not just buying a warm body in the room. You’re buying evidence that you’re the kind of person who has warm bodies in the room. The performance of having a life, outsourced and guaranteed.

What you get when the rented friends go home, Family Romance doesn’t cover. The empty apartment. The leftover delivery containers. That part’s included at no extra charge.