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Need a Friend? Rent One Online
crimeandpunishment writes "Housewives, college students, and others are working for a website that charges users an hourly rate for their companionship. No, it's not an escort service — at least it's not one 'with benefits.' It's a site called rentafriend.com, that's trying to carve out a niche in the 'everything's available online' business world. The seven-month-old site, patterned after hugely successful sites in Asia, has nearly 2,000 members who pay either a monthly or yearly fee to check out the pictures and profiles of more than 160,000 potential pals." I thought Craigslist had already cornered the market on renting a friend for an hour or two.
I don't know, kind of creapy, but cheaper than a therapist (I'm assuming didn't look at pricing). And probably better for your social life than complaining to your actual friends all the time. I wonder how many people just use this thing as a sounding board to talk out their problems. I don't think anybody really needs to pay for friends on the internet. There's tons of forums and chat channels on just about any topic you can think of. However, most of these places, as in real life, people will start to ignore you if you complain too much. But I wonder if having a person who is paid to sit there and listen to your ranting would be helpful to people, and would accomplish a large amount of what therapists are paid to do.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
If you have actually no interests that can be spun in a social manner, then I think you're either pretty rare or living in the wrong place. My grandpa is a ranking member of the OddFellows, and I think that most of the appeal of the "club" is the ability for older people in your situation to have a social life. Most members seems to be engineers, school teachers, middle-class businessmen, people like that.
Emotions! In your brain!
Assuming this is strictly online (I can't be bothered with reading TFA) then it sounds like a very clever scam or an awesome Turing competition with unwitting participants.
Dude, I'm an aspie. I have about as much savvy and finesse for social occasions as my cat has for scuba diving.
But what's being proposed here doesn't boil down to "go pick up a super-model in a bar", nor even something as radical as finding someone you can live with all day long for a marriage, but basically to "there must be other people at your age and with the same interests." Since you tried and failed, exactly what _was_ the problem? No, seriously, I'm curious.
As I've been saying before, there are literally thousands of retired seniors in any town worth that name. Some hundreds to thousands of them profess being terminally lonely and badly in need to talk to someone. The OP even basically proposes to pay for someone to talk to.
Exactly what _is_ the great impediment that prevents all this pool of people who badly want to talk to someone, from talking to each other?
I mean, really. You want to talk to someone. They want to talk to someone. Some even desperately. I'm obviously missing something, because to me it sounds like the problem is its own solution. Surely if you're that badly in need of social interaction, you can tolerate another willing interlocutor for an hour or two even if their personality isn't exactly bride/groom class. What _is_ preventing it?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.