“People can die because of the stress of adapting to society. Or they can lose every ounce of their energy. I’ve seen it happen.”
–Shoji Morimoto, Rental Person Who Does Nothing
I’ve been writing a book about the stress of graduate school. During that time, I suffered severe burnout. It’s been a couple of years now, though I feel as if I am constantly on the edge of burnout. How do you recover from burnout? I quit my job and moved to Montana where my partner took a new job. I’ve been floating in unemployment while I work on my book, travelling a little. Is idleness the solution to burnout?
I think and read a lot about idleness as a concept which seems radically other to our moment. We must be doing or consuming at every moment. I find it hard to do nothing, to take a day where nothing must be planned or done. Days filled with TV, online scrolling, work, reproductive labor, it all feels very overwhelming. I’ve always wanted to write a book but that’s still work! And I have a graduate school hangover: every moment could be for writing, so why isn’t it? This is really unhealthy and unhelpful. But difficult to shake.
I just finished reading Shoji Morimoto’s Rental Person Who Does Nothing, a surprisingly moving account of resisting work and labor. It has made me reflect on my ingrained worked tendencies. It also makes me think about what makes work, well, work and how we might recover from burnout. There is no prescription here: no bubble baths or long walks. (Though you should definitely do those things.) But rather, Morimoto helps us see a way out of burnout through being with others.
Morimoto became famous a few years ago for receiving requests on twitter, mostly for companionship, and he obliges. He does not get paid, though he often gets his travel reimbursed and gifts from those he fulfills requests for. He lives on savings to support his partner and their kid, spending his day fulfilling requests to do nothing. Often, he watches someone while they work on an essay, goes with them to an event, or eats at a restaurant with him. He does not do labor for others. It is almost a performance art piece, this doing of nothing. And it really is “nothing,” in Morimoto’s words, as he tries to think nothing and say as little as possible in these encounters.
As I said, reading about idleness a lot, I have come across work with similar ideas to Morimoto’s. I can see parallels between Morimoto and the work of Emi Yagi (Diary of A Void), Jenny O’Dell (How to Do Nothing) and even Luo Huazhong’s “Lie Flat is Justice.” I think Morimoto gets to the heart of what is so radical about doing nothing in his work, much better than I have ever read.
The origin story of Morimoto’s Rental Person persona is complex and has at least three causes. First, his own alienation at work and through job hunting (of having to be defined by your abilities and skills). Second, tragedy in his own family: his brother’s breakdown and his sister’s suicide. Both were work related. Third, the birth of his child which showed to him that there are points in a human life where we live according to our desires with no repression from within and we receive the unconditional care and resources we need without any expectations for payment. (Later, your parents may blackmail you, but for a while, you’re safe.)
A central fear that connects all three of these causes is a fear of calcifying into a character, of being made to inhabit a role. Morimoto’s work, as in the book and in his “do nothing” rentals (which aren’t even rentals!), refuses roles entirely. In fact, part of what alienated him about seeking work and then being a worker was that he had to describe himself as if he were a character. Morimoto has an almost superstitious relation to language in that he felt he had to constantly renarrate himself on Twitter to avoid becoming a kind of “character” defined by his consumption, strengths, abilities, and so on.
Morimoto totally rejects the definition of life as achieving some kind of identity, of stepping into roles that we use to define us, even if they do not encapsulate us–even if they hurt us. Part of what is alienating about roles, as I finally saw reading Morimoto, despite years of thinking about alienation, is that they are always relations of exchange. The worker role sells labor for life. The spouse/child/friend/relation role is about exchanging labor for affection, social status, belonging.
Morimoto discovers that his own role as Rental Person allows other people to leave the alienating reciprocity of their relationships. He frequently wonders why he is the one receiving requests rather than family or friends. He soon thinks about it this way:
In Japan people are very conscious of reciprocity. Someone receiving a gift will try to reciprocate with a gift of greater value. This mentality promotes a gift-giving cycle, which helps to sustain relationships. I think people look for similar reciprocity in terms of behaviour between friends. If A does something for B, then B will try to do something more for A. The writer Tomoaki Kageyama describes the sense of obligation that a recipient feels as ‘a healthy feeling of debt’. For me, though, there’s nothing healthy about it at all.
I think this emphasis on the gift has particular social manifestations in Japan but I feel this acutely in my own life. I feel I must monitor constantly to avoid being a state of social debt. I don’t know why this is the case, except I feel it as an infringement on my freedom, as if every action I take has to be somehow repaid and vice versa. In simpler terms, we are working even in our personal relationships.
Morimoto argues that the somewhat impersonal nature of social media actually provides a new set of social relations that are less stressful, more human and more humane. He writes that the social media relationship “which falls short of ‘friendship’, can be quite convenient. You don’t feel you have to worry too much about the other person – there’s no sense of expecting anything from each other.” This is why many people do not contact their friends and family, but contact Morimoto instead. There is no social contract. (Except that he needs his travel reimbursement.) Like character, relationships can calcify, become “fixed” and “carry restrictions and responsibilities. Every named relationship entails particular things you have to do, certain expectations that you have to meet.” Thus the unnamed relationships of social media provide us a different model of relating without expectation or obligation.
This reminds me of Byung-Chul Han’s amazing essay The Burnout Society (video linked, but you should find the book too!). The Burnout Society concludes with a description of a utopian society of the tired. Han hopes for a new kind of social relationship which he calls “friendliness-as-indifference, where “no one and nothing dominates or commands,” a relation that requires “the I [ego] grows smaller” (33). But for the I to get smaller requires a certain giving up of the narcissism and “I”- centeredness of our society of work and competition. Think of Morimoto’s refusal of crafting an identity. That giving up of the “I,” for Han, appears, or originates, as tiredness.
I find this passage so beautiful:
This tiredness founds a deep friendship and makes it possible to conceive of a community that requires neither belonging nor relation [Verwandtschaft]. Human beings and things show themselves to be connected through a friendly and.
This “deep friendship” rests on a “friendly and” something that Morimoto’s work demonstrates clearly, as he feels free to say yes or no to encounters he chooses and never feels constrained by them. Equally, this idea of community predicated on “neither belonging nor relation” is radical and strikes to the heart of almost every political conception of community, left or right. What could friendly tiredness give us, as a society, if we just decided to stop working so hard?
For Morimoto, like for Luo Huazhong, existing deserves its own recognition and is its own reward. Morimoto’s refusal of exchange in its most oppressive manifestations as well as his refusal to be someone, to try to be a character defined by work and consumption, is about showing to us the ugliness of our social reality. But it also shows us that maybe through each other we can be different.
Kaelie Giffel 