The traveler

This content was translated using artificial intelligence and may therefore contain errors.

Over a two-year period, the conversation adds up to approximately 9,000 messages. One party (me) accounts for ≈50% of the volume, sending messages in clusters and reopening the dialogue; the other party (her) contributes ≈40% in more widely spaced, conclusive replies. Translated into spoken conversation, the yearly exchange adds up to around 150 hours of talking. That’s equivalent to:

• 300 calls lasting 30 minutes each.
• 150 one-hour meetups (one long conversation every other day).
• 8 to 15 books of 350–500 pages.
• 12 to 15 audiobooks lasting 10–12 hours.
• 200 45-minute podcast episodes.

The rhythm of the chat is shaped by the time difference. Close to 50% of one party’s messages are sent during the early hours of the morning in Argentina (22:00–04:00), while the other mostly writes between 09:00 and 21:00. The average response lag is around 8 hours, with delays of 12 to 24 hours being common. The conversation doesn’t stop, but functions as a deferred presence, sustained more by recurrence than by synchrony. In terms of form, short messages and a colloquial register predominate. Greetings and chat reopenings (“hello,” “hii,” “hellooo”) are generally initiated by the party with the higher volume. Laughter (“haha,” “hahaha”) goes both ways, but is more frequent from the person who replies in batches, where it serves as a sign-off or softener. Explicit expressions of affection (“I love you,” “I adore you”) are rare and occasional; they aren’t a verbal tic or a sustained ritual.

In terms of subject matter, exchanges directly related to Japan make up a minority of the total. Excluding messages explicitly requested for this book, content about life in Japan—city, language, customs, work—accounts for approximately 7–10% of the conversation. The remaining 90–93% concerns other topics: relationships, work, exhaustion, everyday logistics, humor, trivial comments, and emotional support.

Overall, the chat shows a relationship sustained more by continuity and availability than by expressive intensity or discussion of its context. Japan provides the structural frame for the experience, but isn’t the dominant focus of everyday exchanges. The conversations keep the same everyday tone they had when they took place in the same location.

She told me she’d seen a dead man.

“Girl, there was a dead guy lying in the middle of the street for three or four days. In a really busy place. And no one stopped to do anything.”

The first day went by and she saw him there, lying down, not moving. She said to herself, “That’s weird.” “This is weird, huh.” She thought he was sleeping, or drunk, or that something was wrong with him, but she wasn’t sure what. She kept walking, thought it was normal.

The next day she passed the same place again, and the body was still there. Just the same. People walked by as usual. She thought maybe she was exaggerating, that it was her, that she was feeling sensitive because of the trip. “But it was weird,” she told me. “Really weird.”

It wasn’t until the third or fourth day that it started to smell. Someone reported it. An ambulance arrived. They picked him up, put him in a bag, and left. “That was it. They took him away and that was that.”

The street carried on as usual. People kept walking by. That was how Tokyo welcomed her.

Macarena had moved to Japan for four years to follow her partner’s job. It wasn’t a long-awaited move or a personal project that had been taking shape over time. It was a decision they made together, in which her own life was, at least at first, put on hold. With a degree in Literature and used to moving comfortably through language, she arrived somewhere where no words could support her. “I don’t understand anything,” she said in her first messages. “But it’s not just that I don’t understand. It’s that none of the words sound familiar to me.” Not being able to explain herself, clarify anything, or defend herself because the language offered no foothold. Buying something, asking for directions, walking into a place. Every gesture took effort. Every interaction demanded extra energy.

And yet Tokyo didn’t strike her as an overwhelming city, but as a strangely quiet place. Even when there were people around. Even in crowded spaces. The sound seemed muffled, as if the city were designed not to intrude. The neighborhoods functioned almost like self-sufficient villages. Everything was orderly, planned, in its place. No one seemed out of step except her. After a week, she discovered she couldn’t get into any gym. In Buenos Aires, she went four times a week as a way to regulate her emotions: her exercise routine was one of the few things that gave structure to her day. But Macarena has a lot of tattoos, and in Japan tattoos are still associated with the yakuza. As a result, signs saying “no tattoos” are everywhere—in gyms, saunas, universities, some temples, and museums. She tried wearing gloves to cover the ones on her hands and long pants to cover the ones on her ankles, but Tokyo gets very hot in the summer. “I feel ridiculous,” she told me. Then she added, “As if I don’t belong and never will.”

During the first few months, she spent much of her time between her apartment and a screen. “I’d stay home watching Netflix.” She didn’t go out much. Japan, often imagined from the outside as a hyperconnected society, felt in her everyday experience like a place where contact with others didn’t happen automatically. No one started casual conversations. No one talked just for the sake of talking. Spontaneous interaction wasn’t part of the landscape.

This normality has consequences. Japan is one of the few countries where loneliness has not only been named, but managed. The term kodokushi refers to lonely deaths: people who die without anyone noticing for days or weeks. The phenomenon is so widespread that there are specialized companies—tokushu sōji—that clean these apartments, remove belongings, decontaminate them, and get the homes ready to return to the real estate market.

Maca didn’t tell me about it in those terms. She had seen it. Smelled it. Passed through it in a hallway. She didn’t need to know the name to understand the logic. I had to Google it from over here.

As the months went by, she started working through the little things. A skincare routine that gave her a sense of control. Products she understood. Textures. A gym that had been modernized and allowed tattoos. She learned routes. Automated gestures. Each small victory gave her back a little of herself in a place where she still didn’t feel there was room for her.

She also told me that in Japan, there were times when she felt everything she did was wrong. The world around her seemed to move according to such precise choreography that any gesture of her own seemed out of place. “People are crossing their arms at you like this all the time,” she said, crossing her forearms over her chest in an X, “like when they tell you no, not that, not that way, not here, not like that.”

No one scolded her. No one corrected her. It was the feeling that the environment was designed so you would know what to do without anyone having to explain it, and not knowing left you immediately on the outside. Her body learned quickly: lower your voice, take up less space, don’t ask too much, don’t make anyone uncomfortable. But something remained stuck. That X across her chest wouldn’t come undone.

Becoming visible didn’t start as a project or a strategy. It started as a clumsy, almost physical defense against a recurring feeling: that she was always doing something wrong. That’s when the idea of showing things came up. At first, they were scattered photos on Instagram, small scenes: a street, a sign, a route. Then she started talking to the camera. Not with ease. With effort. “I was so embarrassed,” she told me. “I thought I looked horrible. I didn’t like how I looked or how my voice sounded.” She found it hard to record herself. She found it hard to watch herself. She found it hard to do it again. Everything that’s assumed to come naturally to someone who puts themselves out there was difficult for her.

There was something deeply contradictory about that scene: someone who describes herself as having social phobia, anxiety about replying to messages, and difficulty sustaining exchanges, beginning to speak to thousands of people. She herself pointed out the paradox. She said she felt anxious about replying to emails, direct messages, even WhatsApp messages. That she took days. That she put it off. That replying created a pressure she found hard to explain. And yet there she was, recording herself, uploading videos, putting herself out there.

The difference was control. Speaking to a camera didn’t involve immediate friction. She didn’t have to decode someone else’s gestures, reply in real time, or sustain an open-ended conversation. She could record again. Delete. Repeat. Choose what to show and what not to show. Simply broadcast. Let herself be seen through the broadcast, because broadcasting is less threatening than direct interaction.

Then she started talking about her surroundings, translating signs, explaining customs. She showed possible routes for people who might visit or even be thinking of moving there. There was something very concrete about it: telling others, “You can go this way,” “This is how it works,” “It’s not that bad.” In the end, it was what she wished someone had told her when she arrived. A modest guide to survival. She didn’t want the same thing to happen to others. She didn’t want them to feel that permanent X, that vague sense of prohibition, that constant awkwardness. Supporting others was a way to put the world back in order. To make it legible. To give it back some continuity.

That gesture also marked the first time a project of her own began to emerge since she had moved. Until then, her stay in Japan had been organized entirely around her partner’s work. Her time, her decisions, her movements were all subordinate to it. She had no schedule of her own. No direction of her own. Starting to post content was a way of carving out a separate space. “I felt like I had something of my own,” she said. Even though she still wasn’t sure what it was she was beginning to have.

Her following grew unexpectedly fast. Thousands of people started watching. Asking questions. Saying thank you. Asking for recommendations. Hundreds of followers, TV features, people talking to me about her without knowing she was my friend. I was so proud to see her so at ease, as if it had all happened naturally, as if she belonged in all those places.

But beyond the jokes her family and I made about how she was famous now, another layer of anxiety started to emerge for her. “I feel obligated to post,” she said. “Like if I don’t post, I’m failing.” The algorithm imposed a pace that didn’t always match her energy. Posting gave the week structure, but it also wore her out. The digital routine was both support and pressure.

The more visible she became, the more careful she had to be. She learned to delete comments. To block people. Not to read everything. Not to get drawn in. “If I give the haters the time of day, I can’t post anything. Ten of them will message me because they disagree with the subway card I recommended; they’ll argue with me if I say a place is nice to visit and it isn’t the one they like. I ask my partner to filter out the people who comment on my appearance or personality before I see them, because otherwise it’s impossible.” Being exposed brought noise, a lot of noise. Noise she could sometimes manage and sometimes couldn’t; sometimes she was simply overwhelmed. “If I answer everything, I’ll die.”

“I still don’t know when to use emojis, and you have no idea how important they are for the metrics,” she worried. But she worried less about the metrics than the emojis. I know because she kept telling me, explaining again and again how she felt that emojis said things she wasn’t sure she wanted to say, and that maybe she was using one with an associated meaning without knowing it. That sometimes she used them to end conversations, not start them. That they worked as a way out. Aren’t emojis trivial? Apparently not. There’s the distance, the deep difficulty with the codes of digital communication and affection. That expectation of constant closeness, a quick reply, visible enthusiasm. For someone with social phobia, every emoji is a gamble.

Being an influencer didn’t make her less lonely, but it kept her busy. It gave her one more reason to leave the house at a time when there weren’t many. To explore the city. To inhabit it differently. “Now I don’t feel lonely because I’m busy,” she told me. Loneliness, like hunger, is managed with tasks. It’s administered.

That shift—from someone who feels out of place, doesn’t understand the rules, has a body marked as a problem, and feels distressed by direct contact, to someone who nevertheless becomes a guide, a translator, a point of reference—may say something central about how we inhabit loneliness today. Perhaps we don’t leave loneliness by entering into relationships, but by building interfaces: indirect ways of being with others that reduce discomfort without eliminating presence entirely, while avoiding simultaneity.

Macarena didn’t become an influencer because she liked putting herself out there. She became an influencer so she wouldn’t be trapped in that permanent X, so she could turn a vague prohibition into a path, support others, and, through that gesture, build a place of her own in a city that didn’t seem made to welcome her.

The figure of the influencer began to be taken seriously when it stopped being a novelty and started organizing time, attention, and emotional expectations. At first, people spoke of parasocial relationships to describe the phenomenon. Horton and Wohl, American sociologists and communication scholars, used the term in the 1950s to explain the bond between viewers and television personalities. The difference today is one of scale and form. That relationship was sporadic and distant. This one is everyday, continuous, almost domestic.

The influencer doesn’t show up like someone who bursts in, but like someone who keeps you company. They don’t switch on at a fixed time. They’re there. They come back. They appear while you’re having breakfast, waiting for something, doing something else. They don’t demand your full attention. They blend into life. That constant presence is part of their power.

Another key difference from celebrities is that influencers conceal the production process. Television and film show the artifice. There are studios, cameras, visible crews. The influencer appears as if no work went into it. As if everything were spontaneous. That naturalness is constructed. Behind it are hours of recording, editing, repeating, learning the metrics, rehearsing tones. But all of that stays offscreen. The product is the feeling of effortless closeness.

Various authors who have studied the attention economy point out that this is central. Trust today isn’t built through authority or exceptionalism, but through familiarity. Seeing the same person again and again creates a kind of intimacy that doesn’t need to be deep. It’s not about knowing them better, but about recognizing them. Repetition creates a sense of ease.

In this context, not all influencers serve the same function or have the same effect. There’s an important difference between aspirational influencers and practical influencers. The first show desirable lifestyles, ideal bodies, inaccessible forms of consumption. They work through comparison. They create distance. They often trigger frustration or a sense of inadequacy. They have been widely studied in relation to self-esteem, anxiety, and the culture of performance.

The second kind works differently. They don’t promise you can become someone else; they promise to help you get by. They explain, translate, organize. They teach you how to get around a place, understand a system, solve a concrete problem. You don’t watch them to wish for their life, but to make your own more livable. What Macarena does belongs in this category. She doesn’t show an ideal life, but possible lives. She offers not aspirational identification, but guidance.

This difference is key to understanding why some accounts keep people company while others make them feel more isolated. It’s less a question of content than of social function. Practical influencers reduce uncertainty. Aspirational ones amplify it. But where is the line, and who draws it?

Influencer culture promises closeness, but organizes distance. That asymmetry is what makes it possible. For the person watching, there’s companionship without commitment. For the person creating, there’s visibility without constant dialogue. Maca says she often meets someone for the first time and that person tells her things about their life as if they’d known each other forever. But for her, it’s the first time; it unsettles her, and she can’t quite understand how she has come to occupy a place in other people’s lives.

Authors studying digital labor point out that exhaustion comes not from putting yourself out there, but from managing expectations. Replying, keeping up, minding your tone, not starting conversations you can’t bring to a close. That’s why strategies for managing it emerge. At this point, influencer culture both keeps you company and leaves you alone. Both sides participate in a bond that relieves something and displaces something else.

That’s why this phenomenon is taking hold now. Not at a moment of total isolation, but at a moment of relational exhaustion. Without replacing relationships, the influencer offers a form of contact without direct friction. It’s no coincidence that this format coexists with cultures where being alone is normalized, or that it becomes central in cities where everyday life demands more and more effort to interact. Nor is it a coincidence that many people who create content aren’t looking for intimacy, but for structure.

Influencer culture doesn’t solve loneliness or create it from scratch. It reconfigures it. Makes it compatible with everyday life. Leaving influencers or streamers on while you work because “they’re company,” just as people have always done with the radio or a soap opera blaring from the TV. But on platforms that balance seems more fragile because the illusion of closeness is stronger, it’s “like my friend, like the kids.” It works as long as repetition doesn’t become wearisome and the illusion doesn’t turn into a demand.

Constant presence loses its meaning when it stops giving structure and starts draining you. When it becomes too constraining. When it doesn’t allow the influencer to make a mistake or change their mind. When public callouts and hate scare off anyone who dares to show themselves. When my friend can’t come to Buenos Aires without continuing to film, even when she’s with family she hasn’t seen in a long time, because otherwise the algorithm punishes her, sends her into the shadows (shadow banning), and reduces her chances of finding clients for the tours. In the end, after all that, the tours are what allow her to earn money and stick to a routine, no matter what time zone she’s in.

The first few times she returned to Argentina, she experienced it as a kind of interruption. Her body was attuned to a different rhythm, and the contrast was immediate. The noise. People speaking loudly. Conversations overlapping. Long greetings. Questions. Physical closeness. All the things that used to feel normal started to feel excessive. “My head hurts,” she’d say after a few days. Her body, accustomed to Tokyo’s regulated silence, reacted.

It wasn’t just Buenos Aires. It was the airports, the lobbies, the hallways full of voices, the crowded lines. She said she didn’t remember the world being this noisy. That she had trouble concentrating. That she needed to leave places early. It was something subtler than nostalgia for Japan or rejection of the South American way of life: a sensory desynchronization. Her body had learned a different pattern and still didn’t know how to go back.

On those trips back, a comparison that hadn’t existed before also began to surface. In Japan, being alone didn’t draw attention. Here, loneliness was still read as an anomaly. Going out alone, eating alone, having no plans, having no stories to tell. “Over there, no one looks at you,” she’d say. “Here, people are always reading into it.” That difference, which at first had been a relief, was beginning to become ambiguous. Japan had protected her from certain demands, but it had also gently confined her. Japan hadn’t isolated her; it had recalibrated her. Silence was now a threshold. Noise, an invasion.

Then she’d return to Tokyo, and it would take her body a few days to adjust. The sequence repeated itself. Each trip back and forth made something unplanned more visible: adapting to one environment also means losing tolerance for others. It isn’t a matter of cultural preference. It’s physiology, attention, energy expenditure. Loneliness doesn’t disappear, but it can be managed.

On one of those trips back, or just before one of them, a coincidence in timing came up. I was about to give a presentation at a mental health conference in Mar del Plata on hikikomori, a social category that was already beginning to appear in other contexts, including Argentina. Young people who stop leaving their homes for months or years. In Japan, hikikomori isn’t a psychiatric diagnosis. It’s an administrative classification. The Ministry of Health defines it according to the duration of withdrawal: short, medium, or long term. It doesn’t ask about the personal reason, but about how long someone has been outside public life. And the associated policies don’t aim to “cure” withdrawal, but to reduce the friction of reentry: unrecorded home visits, minimal goals, gradual support, vocational training with reduced hours. The premise is simple and radical at the same time: if the world has become too costly, the cost of getting back in has to come down.

While I was preparing that presentation, I was talking to Macarena. This time, not to interview her. We talked as friends about what was going on with her. Her exhaustion. Her ambiguous comfort in Japan. How hard it had been at first to leave the house. How Netflix and the gym had been a refuge. How, if it weren’t for work and filming, she probably would have stayed inside for much longer.

She told me she doesn’t identify with the figure of the hikikomori. She isn’t confined. She works. She gets around. She puts herself out there. “After all, you can live like this,” she told me. Nothing is more tempting to a tired person. At the conference, when I spoke about hikikomori, community health teams from Greater Buenos Aires came up to me. They told me about cases they’d encountered recently in their municipalities. Young people who hadn’t left their homes in months. Families who didn’t know how to intervene. Protocols that didn’t work because they required an “available body” that wasn’t there. There was no local name for what was happening. There were no low-threshold policies. The phenomenon was there, but without a name or the infrastructure to address it.

After talking with Macarena, I started reading more and more about Japan’s loneliness industry. Services, companies, revenues, sustained growth. A whole established sector.

Rental relationships —renting relationships—are one of the best-known examples. Companies that offer family members, friends, or partners by the hour. A rented girlfriend who comes to your home can cost between 5,000 and 10,000 yen an hour, plus extras for specific events. The contract sets clear limits: no sex, no contact outside the agreed hours, no emotional reciprocity. You rent the presence, not the relationship. The service is used for dinners, social introductions, and company at events. It stages relationships.

Some companies have been devoted exclusively to this for more than a decade. Some report double-digit annual growth, driven by demographic shifts, an aging population, declining marriage rates, and a rise in one-person households. Today, more than 38% of households in Japan consist of just one person. Loneliness isn’t marginal. It is the majority experience in certain age groups.

Then there are the services related to kodokushi: specialized cleaning, remote monitoring, sensors that track water and electricity use to detect inactivity, scheduled calls. Municipalities and private companies work together to reduce unclaimed deaths. To manage loneliness—or, better yet, its consequences.

There’s also the market for spaces. Restaurants for solo diners, karaoke booths, capsule hotels, coworking spaces by the hour, quiet cafés. Everything designed for one person, without friction, without negotiation. The promise is autonomy. The result is a life that can be lived without human interaction.

Macarena’s work as an influencer began to brush up against that market without her intending it to. She accompanied people who were about to travel. She translated codes. She showed them possible paths. In a sense, she offered a service that countered loneliness. Not emotional, more guidance-oriented. She didn’t talk about feelings. She talked about how to get around. Where to go. What to avoid. How not to feel so lost.

What’s striking is that none of this happened as a sudden realization. There was no epiphany. She lived. I read. She got tired. I prepared a presentation. She came back and felt overwhelmed by the noise. In Mar del Plata, I listened to teams who didn’t know how to get someone out of the house without using force.

The distance between theory and experience kept narrowing as Japan stopped being an exception and became a preview of what was to come.

Macarena isn’t hikikomori. She doesn’t rent boyfriends. She doesn’t live shut away. But she inhabits a city that has made a life with minimal human contact viable. And within that city, she found a way to sustain herself by making solitude a habitable space. And when she considers returning to Argentina for good, she wonders what she’ll do about the noise, the constant demand for presence, the expectation that she be available. What part of that learned silence will stay with her? Ultimately, she wonders whether she’ll be able to return.