For four years he paid a stranger to say his name

It's evening, and Alex Flores is sitting at his computer in headphones, watching a live stream. It's long dark outside, the only light in the flat is the monitor, and the evening looks like many others: alone, but not quite. The stream is about to start, and the room feels a little less empty, as if someone had walked in and sat down beside him. This is Twitch, where one person plays a game while thousands watch, type in the chat, and send small tips. Alex found this streamer years ago and never left; by now he knows his voice better than the neighbour through the wall. He's just sent him a few dollars, his username is blinking in the chat, and the streamer stops the game for a second to read his name aloud to the thousands watching. He told Kotaku, a site that writes about games and the people who play them, what kept him coming back :

It eventually turned into this weird habitual thing; the whole ritual of seeing your name in lights and a streamer acknowledging your presence made me feel good.— Alex Flores, speaking to Kotaku (2020)[1]

Watching cost nothing. Over four years the tips added up to a few thousand dollars , all of it for the couple of seconds when someone on a screen said "thanks, Alex."

It didn't stop at one streamer, either. Alex told Kotaku that over time he began sending small amounts to smaller creators too, for the very same thing . It was never really about that one man. It was about the flicker of being noticed at all, someone on the other side of the glass saying your name as if he knew you.

There's a word for this, and it's older than the internet. Two sociologists, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, described it in 1956, back when the thing on the other end was a radio or a black-and-white TV . They called it a parasocial relationship: the closeness you feel toward someone who has no idea you exist.

The interaction, characteristically, is one-sided, nondialectical, controlled by the performer, and not susceptible of mutual development.— Donald Horton & R. Richard Wohl (1956)[2]

None of this was ever only theory. Long before, Britain had been leaning on the voices coming out of the radio. In the first uneasy months of the war, its favourite was Sandy Macpherson, an organist who played soothing tunes on the BBC. People wrote to him as if to a friend. "Sandy Macpherson's quiet voice is very reassuring at a time when our ears are on the alert for warning sirens," one family wrote in September 1939 . That Christmas they showered him with flowers, handkerchiefs and pots of jam, all for a man they knew only through a speaker. The same pull as now: someone speaking to you calmly in a dark, uncertain time, even from the far side of the radio waves.

The bond only ever ran one way. Alex could have told you the streamer's habits, his catchphrases, the way he reacted to a bad round; the streamer wouldn't have picked Alex out of the chat. And Alex knew it. He knew that if he stopped logging in tomorrow, no one in the chat would notice the empty seat. He came back anyway, because being there, even invisibly, beat not being there at all.

But the other side of the glass has its own interest, worth keeping in mind. That closeness is often built on purpose: hosts have long spoken to 'you,' as if to one person in the room rather than a crowd. A streamer, after all, is also a small business, where your sense of closeness is exactly what turns a viewer into someone who leaves a tip.

Still, even when someone on the far side really is thinking of somebody, it's somebody imagined, not you by name. And they won't reach you personally, however much they might want to. Both sides are calling into a crowd where the other person can't quite be seen.

And yet it feels real, for a reason. Every time you look at a face, your brain automatically guesses what that person is thinking and feeling. It does this so automatically that it can't tell a face across the table from a face on a screen; with a streamer or a host, it runs the very same circuitry . That's why, after a few evenings, you really do feel you know someone who knows nothing about you. You can tell when he's annoyed. You hear a rough day in his voice, and you're pleased when things go his way. Your brain gathers those small signals the same way it would about a colleague at the next desk.

Alex isn't the only one. Another viewer of the same streamer, Joshua Caleb, told Kotaku why he keeps coming back :

His streams have helped me to kind of relax and zone-out when I'm dealing with a lot of anxiety.— Joshua Caleb, speaking to Kotaku (2020)[1]

For Joshua the stream was a place to step out of his anxiety for a while; someone was telling him in a calm voice that things would work out somehow, even while saying it to thousands at once and knowing nothing about him. Two different people, back for the same thing: a voice that made the evening easier to bear.

It's a daily habit for millions. Ask anyone who listens to a podcast every week, and the host usually matters more to them than any actor or musician they follow . Headphones in, for hours, with someone who will never answer, because they don't know they're being heard. One person listens while washing up; someone else has it on in traffic; a third falls asleep to it every night; for a lot of us it's the closest thing to a conversation we'll have all day.

Psychologists even have a name for it: a social surrogate. When people feel lonely, they reach for a favourite show, and it really does make them feel less alone while it's on . What Alex felt was never fake. Your brain doesn't send you a bill because the comfort came from a screen; what counts to it is that it came at all.

It isn't only lonely evenings, either. When people are reminded of a fight or a rejection, they turn to a favourite show then too, and it softens the blow. In the same research, after such a painful reminder, beloved programs protected people's mood and even their sense of self-worth . The screen turns up exactly where a real relationship has just stung.

You can even measure it. Ask someone to spend a few minutes thinking about a favourite streamer or host, and their mood lifts about as much as thinking about a close friend .

But it's still only a stand-in. The same study found it did almost nothing for the loneliness itself; that eased only at the thought of someone genuinely close .

For Alex, a good stream was worth an hour or two of feeling better. It did nothing about the quiet that was still there once he closed the laptop. That silence after the screen goes dark has its own weight. The voices linger for a minute, and then it's just the hum of the fridge and his own thoughts.

The gaps between tips had a rhythm of their own. A month would go by without a tip and he'd start to feel himself fade from the chat, unnoticed. And honestly, who wouldn't. When the only place anyone says your name out loud is a chat window, wanting to be seen there is as human as it gets. The closeness ran on money, and without it, it wore off .

None of which makes the bond worthless. A study of a few thousand people found that a strong tie to a favourite creator does more for you than a loose work acquaintance does, but still less than someone truly close . It's real comfort, just one-directional: it warms you, but it can't warm you back on the night when you're the one who needs someone to ask how you're doing.

It can genuinely hurt when it ends, too. When Friends went off the air, researchers asked nearly three hundred people how they were taking the goodbye, and parting with a favourite character stung like a real breakup, most of all for the ones who had felt closest to them . People grieved a TV show as if a friend had moved away, not a series simply ending.

Gayle Stever has spent thirty years studying this, and one of her findings is worth holding onto: it isn't only lonely people who form these attachments. People with busy, crowded social lives do it just as much . Alex wasn't a sucker; he just wanted to hear his own name out loud once in a while, which is about the most ordinary thing a person can want. If any of this sounds familiar, if you too sometimes play a familiar voice in the evening so the room isn't so quiet, there's nothing to be ashamed of. It's the ordinary hunger for closeness, the same one that makes you call your parents or text an old friend. The wish to hear your own name out loud isn't a weakness. It's a sign you still want people around.

That ordinary want can carry you further than the screen. Alex stopped tipping in the end. No decision, really; one evening those two seconds simply stopped being enough. Because a voice on the other side, however warm, doesn't know your name and will never write back. Someone real, on your side of the screen, can. So if you feel like it tonight, message one person: about the weather, about something silly, about nothing at all. Sometimes it's that kind of 'nothing' that warms an evening up. The episode will wait.