A city employs people to act strangely to order to make others feel normal.

Walking around town, a man acts as a good samaritan, offering money and assistance to anyone he passes by. He seems to be genuinely kind-hearted until his conversation with his wife upon returning home suggests his compassion is only performative.

An older woman and self-proclaimed loner is forced to engage with others at her accounting job after she is pushed to socialize by her managers. This, as well as her invasive obsession with the young woman next door, leads her into uncomfortable self-reflection and new experiences.

A man reflects on the loneliness of his childhood home, where his family would fervently clean the house every Saturday for guests on Sunday who would never show.

A lonely man makes calls to automated call services and anonymous strangers as he searches for comfort in the hollow telephone conversations he shares with answering machine.

After her father kills himself, a young girl runs away with a traveling, unhoused stranger she meets at the bus stop. The two scrape and save for a life together until one day, she wakes up and he's gone. After looking for him in the cold, surviving an assault, and accepting help from a stranger, the girl realizes he's betrayed her, taking their savings and leaving. The next year, she gives birth to their child.

In intense discussion a group leader ponders aloud, asking why hermits hide and what defines outcasts, among other cerebral queries. A group of friends discusses the oddities they have seen and perceived in their lives leather-clad hermits and criminal astronauts among them. They debate the purpose of hermitage, the classification of outcasts, and the purpose of their own reflections.

When aliens land on a planet new to them, they find a population obsessed with a virtual reality and uninterested in the intense beauty of the natural world around them.

Fearing a lonely life in the company of her ailing husband, a woman begins an extramarital affair with her friend, but soon realizes that her worst nightmare might come true anyway.

When a woman finds her purse stolen, she retraces the steps of her eventful day only to realize that the encounters, and her life as a whole, are empty and purposeless.