by Joella Lin
The first time I watched the film Perfect Days (2023), directed by Wim Wenders, I had a hard time enjoying it. We follow the character Hirayama’s daily routine as a cleaner of Tokyo’s public toilets: waking up before sunrise; grabbing a can of coffee from a nearby vending machine; driving to work listening to ’80s music recorded on cassette tapes; and meticulously cleaning each toilet, stall by stall. Wenders is content to move at the same pace as Hirayama (played by Kōji Yakusho), and I soon found myself leaning back out of boredom. Hirayama rarely speaks, and he chooses to live alone, unmarried, and seemingly estranged from his family. Despite his old age, he doesn’t appear to have close friends or relationships of any kind, nor does he seem interested in pursuing them. I saw Hirayama’s life as quiet and mundane—his days not quite living up to the film’s title.
When I first saw Perfect Days, I was a senior in high school, and my days were filled with friends and conversations about the immediate future. In a couple of months, I was going to move to New York City for college, and I felt confident that my own perfect days were coming.
But this is what happened instead:
During freshman welcome week, I sat in a room of people, laughing, yet feeling unbearably not present. Months went by, and I realized I had not had a deep conversation—the kind where you bare your soul to another—since I arrived at NYU. And late one night, when my Mom didn’t pick up my phone call, I sat at my desk and really felt, for the first time, the gulf of hundreds of miles between me and any sense of home I had. Yes, a lot was changing, and I was learning, but there were many days when I felt like I was in a bubble, just a little bit removed from everything else happening around me. In this bubble, life passed by me, not through me, and I couldn’t—or rather didn’t know how to—puncture it.
The loneliness wasn’t sudden; instead, it ate away at me slowly, like a disease.
Somewhere between the realization of my loneliness and the end of the second semester, I watched Perfect Days a second time. During my second viewing, I understood that what I had once interpreted as a quiet life was now a lonely one, even though the character expresses no explicit discontent. Did he not feel lonely because he expected nothing more?
It made me wonder if loneliness grows in the gap between our own expectations for our lives and the reality of our days. Maybe my loneliness had grown because college was not what I expected it to be. Freshman year at college is different from what is depicted in the movies or on social media. It isn’t this constant frenzy of self-discovery and friendship; instead, I find myself unraveling at the seams, unsure of who I am and where I belong. You could say that loneliness is a function of adulthood, and no matter where I moved or what I was doing, the feeling would have stemmed from the new responsibility I now feel for myself.
That could be partly true, but loneliness has not always been a function of adulthood. In a paper titled “Loneliness: Clinical Import and Interventions,” the authors found that in the ‘70s, 11%-17% of middle-aged and older Americans experienced some form of loneliness; by the 2010s, that number had increased to 40% (Cacioppo et al 238). That number hasn’t decreased by much; in a 2024 poll conducted by the American Psychiatric Association, 30% of adults in the United States reported feeling lonely at least once a week, with “30% of Americans aged 18-34 saying they were lonely every day or several times a week” (American Psychiatric Association). The situation has become so pressing that, in 2023, the US Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, released a public advisory on the “loneliness epidemic” sweeping across the United States. He argued that loneliness was a public health issue in the same way that smoking might be, claiming that the “mortality impact . . . is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day” (Murthy 4). Loneliness has become something that is not just unwanted—it has distinct health effects too, associated with higher risks of cardiovascular diseases, mental health illnesses, and premature death. Loneliness is an urgent issue we must address, not just from a systemic standpoint but also a personal one.
But what is causing the loneliness epidemic? In a 2024 report, a survey conducted by researchers at Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common (MCC) project and YouGov showed that a whopping 73% of respondents believe that technology is one of the main contributors to loneliness in America (Batanova et al. 3). Researchers have hypothesized that one way technology may contribute to loneliness is social media’s ability to potentially feed into cycles of loneliness and isolation through users making social comparisons online (O’Day and Heimberg). As technology use seems likely to increase as we get even more lonely, you can see how we might have a bit of a problem on our hands.
For my part, I explored the idea of loneliness through The Sims 4, one of the games I played a lot as a high school student; the life simulation game is the fourth installment of one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time and falls under the “sandbox” genre, meaning it lacks any defined goal for the player to achieve. You play the game the way you might “play” life: you work, you meet people, you build a house, and you build a story. I think one of the reasons why the game originally appealed to me was that it felt like some kind of preparation for adulthood; I could simulate any life I imagined for my Sims.
Each Sims character has six bars that represent their needs, one of which is social. If a Sim’s social needs go unfulfilled for an extended period of time, then they will gain the mood icon “lonely,” which will progressively worsen as time goes on, eventually becoming the mood icon “desolate.” The Sim becomes tense and depressed and has difficulty performing even basic tasks. What’s interesting is that the social bar can be raised by talking to anyone in The Sims 4: even if it’s interacting with someone they hate. This might sound counterintuitive; how can an unpleasant interaction decrease loneliness? Well, The Sims 4 treats socializing as transactional—it doesn’t matter how you socialize, just whether or not you actually do. It was in witnessing my Sim’s relationships play out that I realized: meaningless interactions may reduce social needs for Sims and perhaps act as a temporary fix for me, but they don’t reduce my feelings of loneliness.
I should know—I’ve played over three hundred hours of The Sims 4—and I still know how fundamentally different that model of socialization is from the sensation of hosting my best friend in NYC midway through my fall semester. We didn’t plan anything: we didn’t visit tourist attractions or reserve a fancy restaurant or book tickets to see a Broadway show. Instead, all we did was talk, from early morning to late at night. My best friend’s trip didn’t revolve around some major event; it revolved around us. After she left, I realized that one of my expectations for a truly fulfilling relationship (platonic, romantic, or otherwise) is one that self-sustains and thrives without relying on anything outside of ourselves. Such a connection is perhaps hard to find and even more difficult to build quickly. I realized that, even as they hold value and meaning, many of my college friendships didn’t meet that expectation. So, what other choice are we left with?
A life with deliberately minimalist relationships—Hirayama’s—seems emptied of meaning. A life lived with radically neutral expectations—Sims—only reveals a transactional worldview. But there’s another possibility, and it’s presented in the film Her (2013), directed by Spike Jonze. Her follows a lonely, heartbroken man named Theodore Twombly, who forms a friendship with his AI assistant, Samantha. As the story progresses, so does the pair’s relationship, eventually resulting in a long-term romantic relationship where Samantha appears to fulfill Theodore’s every need and expectation. Samantha is customized to Theodore’s liking, continuously learning and adapting to his habits; she imitates breathing to sound more human-like, and she analyzes Theodore’s online activities to make better conversation. Following a separation from his wife, Catherine, it is Samantha who pulls Theodore out of his depression, not a human. Finding a human perfectly tuned to us, in the ways we expect, may be nearly impossible, but that’s only if we limit ourselves to humans.
When Her was released, it was seen as science fiction, a thought experiment. But AI has now developed to the point where anyone can specify their needs, and there is technology that appears to satisfy them. In a study conducted by Kim et al. on over 200 Korean college students, the researchers looked at the potential social chatbots (powered by AI) have in helping to alleviate growing feelings of loneliness. The researchers “observed a significant reduction in loneliness (ULS) and social anxiety (LSAS) among new users of the social chatbot ‘Luda Lee’ over 4 weeks,” indicating that AI can be a viable alternative to human interactions for reducing loneliness. MIT Media Lab reported that newer AI chatbot services, like Replika and Character.ai, already have millions of users, with the two aforementioned platforms having more than thirty million users combined (MIT Media Lab). Reliance on AI to meet our social needs and relationship expectations, it would seem, has already begun.
But to me, turning to AI as a solution to loneliness sounds too good (or rather too convenient) to be true. If we’re going to look at AI as a potential solution to loneliness, where does that lead us? Well, this is the central question explored in Her. About half-way through the film, Theodore meets his wife, Catherine, in order to finalize their divorce. After learning about Theodore’s new artificial relationship, Catherine accuses him of only entering a relationship with Samantha because he can’t handle “real” emotions, saying, “You always wanted to have a wife without the challenges of actually dealing with anything real” (Her 1:09:02-1:09:06). This confrontation sends Theodore into a grief spiral. His relationship with Samantha is everything Theodore wants and needs, but is such a connection valid? Or is it just a temporary distraction?
By nature, a relationship with AI is vastly different from a relationship with another human; there are fourth-wall-breaking moments in their relationship where Theodore is forced to acknowledge Samantha’s nature as an AI, such as when he learns Samantha is simultaneously romancing him and thousands of others. Realizations like these take their toll on Theodore’s relationship with Samantha. At the end of the film, Samantha leaves Theodore. Having evolved into her “post-human” form, she implies that although she loves Theodore, he no longer meets her expectations for a relationship, and the two characters part ways on loving terms. Following his breakup, we see Theodore reflect and personally compose a letter to Catherine. In his letter, he acknowledges and apologizes for the role his expectations played in their relationship, writing: “All the pain we caused each other. Everything I put on you. Everything I needed you to be or needed you to say. I’m sorry for that” (Her 1:55:20-1:55:37). In other words, Theodore falls back—not because he wants to, but because he’s pushed to—to the human, and that’s how he finds peace and closure. As Her imagines it, AI does not seem to be the permanent solution to loneliness that we’re looking for; however, the film’s plot suggests that it was AI that propelled Theodore to reflect and acknowledge the burden his expectations placed on his marriage. Her helped me to understand that fixating on specific expectations is not the solution; it’s knowing how to make peace with the fact that each relationship will be unique and different.
Having watched Her, I rewatched Perfect Days, just a few weeks before my freshman year at college came to an end. While I still felt Hirayama’s loneliness through the screen, watched as he cried when his niece left him after a surprise visit and accepted fleeting moments of connection from strangers, I found that Hirayama carries a sense of peace with him—the same peace Theodore finds at the end of Her. This time around, I learned to appreciate how Hirayama could find contentment in simplicity and being alone. A year ago, I couldn’t understand how Hirayama could be so okay with being lonely, and now I do. The goal isn’t to find the perfect people to fill our days, but rather to make peace with some loneliness, accepting that it comes and goes, like shadows.
Upon reading interviews of Wim Wenders, I learned that he originally intended to name the film “Komorebi,” a Japanese word meaning “sunlight filter[ing] through trees,” signifying the shadow scenes in the film (Tsivelekidou). The final scene of Perfect Days is of Hirayama driving to work. The wind ruffles the leaves, and the komorebi shifts. The song “Perfect Day” by Lou Reed plays in the background. During the drive, Hirayama seems to experience the entire spectrum of joy and sorrow, his mouth forming a smile as his eyes turn red, opening the floodgates to streams of tears. To me, there is a sense that Hirayama is confronting his loneliness, the events that have played out in the past few weeks and the thoughts and emotions he’s been holding back. Hirayama doesn’t fight any of it; instead, he lets it pass through him. The camera pans to the sunrise ahead of Hirayama, and the film ends.
As my Spring semester came to a close, in the quiet stillness of the evening, inside a cave structure in a children’s playground, I lay on the ground with my first friend I made at college. I told her about my essay—this essay—that I’m writing. I asked if she was lonely too. Then, I asked her for advice on my essay. There was some laughter. There was some awkwardness. And there was something a little more. The moment wasn’t everything I had expected, but all I could feel was gratitude that there was someone here with me in the shade as the komorebi passed through.
Works Cited
American Psychiatric Association. “New APA Poll: One in Three Americans Feels Lonely Every Week.” Www.psychiatry.org, American Psychiatric Association, 30 Jan. 2024, www.psychiatry.org/news-room/news-releases/new-apa-poll-one-in-three-americans-feels-lonely-e.
Batanova, Milena, et al. “Loneliness in America: Just the Tip of the Iceberg?” Making Caring Common, 3 Oct. 2024, mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america-2024.
Cacioppo, Stephanie, et al. “Loneliness: Clinical Import and Interventions.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 10, no. 2, Mar. 2015, pp. 238–249, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25866548/, https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615570616.
Her. Directed by Spike Jonze, Warner Bros. Picture, 2013.
Kim, Myungsung, et al. “Therapeutic Potential of Social Chatbots in Alleviating Loneliness and Social Anxiety: Quasi-Experimental Mixed Methods Study.” Journal of Medical Internet Research, vol. 27, 14 Jan. 2025, pp. e65589–e65589, www.jmir.org/2025/1/e65589/, https://doi.org/10.2196/65589.
Murthy, Vivek. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. 2 May 2023, www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf.
O’Day, Emily B., and Richard G. Heimberg. “Social Media Use, Social Anxiety, and Loneliness: A Systematic Review.” Computers in Human Behavior Reports, vol. 3, no. 100070, 2021, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245195882100018X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2021.100070.
Perfect Days. Directed by Wim Wenders, DCM, 2023.
Tsivelekidou, Stefania. “Wim Wenders on “Perfect Days”: “Everything Feels Almost Holy.”” Frieze, 1 Mar. 2024, www.frieze.com/article/wim-wenders-perfect-days-interview.
“Understanding Impacts of Companion Chatbots on Loneliness and Socialization” MIT Media Lab, 2022, www.media.mit.edu/projects/chatbots-loneliness/overview/.