If the Long After-Effects of Covid Mean You Have no Real Family or Friends to Talk to This Christmas, Why Not Pay Random Strangers to Pretend to be Them Instead?

The Christmas holidays are here, but what if you have nobody close to spend them with? Rates of loneliness are rising right across the West, with the WHO declaring the condition to be an official “global health concern” back in 2023; possibly because the WHO had also declared everyone should remain quarantined hermetically inside their own homes for several months at a time back in 2020. Either that, or because of the ever-plummeting rates of global fertility and family-size I talked about in a previous article on this site.

Within such a solitary environment, some people are just so desperate for someone – anyone! – to talk to, that they will hand over escorts good money to listen to their incredibly dull conversations about how nobody truly understands or loves them properly these days. Trouble is, many whores take Christmas off too, leaving some poor punters still lonely anyway. What could be the solution?

Rather than paying an actual prostitute to perform such tasks for you, isolated individuals do now have another option: approach one of the growing number of rent-a-friend or rent-a-family services now available to use online. The idea began in low-fertility Japan, with the first known such service provided by a corporate-training company, Japan Efficiency Corporation, in 1991. To cater for Japan’s many modern lifelong loners, rival companies offering rent-a-family services have since bloomed, such as Family Romance, started by businessman-cum-actor Yuichi Ishii in 2009, which offers