It used to be that if you wanted to ride the see-saw, you could just ask one of your friends. Thank goodness those days are over. Now we have the convenience of being able to rent a friend.
Seriously.
RentAFriend.com offers up friends for hire with prices ranging from $10 to $150. If you need someone to go to a movie with, go for dinner with or be a wingman on a night out with, you can just search the site and connect with someone who’s willing to do it with you—for a fee.
I haven’t seen the site. Frankly, I’m really curious about who sets the price. I think it would make more sense to do it as an auction, but that’s just me.
Time Magazine observes (rightly, I believe) the inherent absurdity of the whole thing:
While some of the suggested uses for the site do seem pretty practical (having someone show you around town or teach you a skill), many of them seem a bit like a crutch. Has social networking changed real-life interaction to the point where we need to pay someone to be a real-time friend? Is this the next step in social networking fads that continue to kill, you know, being social?
In his popular book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam describes what he calls “social capital,” the idea that “social networks have value.” “[S]ocial capital,” Putnam writes, “calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations. A society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital. (p. 18)”
Basically, what it all means is this: our quests for individualism and self-esteem has only led to a profound sense of isolation, a state that author Douglas Coupland refers to as a “cult of aloneness.” The end result is a society where friends may be requested, added and even (apparently) rented, but deep relational connections are few and far between.
The friend-rental site already has 200,000 members, and climbing. Clearly there’s something to this. The good news here is that the church can provide opportunities for deep social connections, both within generational boundaries and without.
Though I suppose I should warn all my friends out there:
I’m billing you all retroactively.