When you are renting a room to a tenant, you naturally have more of a relationship with them than you would if you lived somewhere else.

What would you do if your tenant/roommate had been isolating himself for months now and almost never leaves his room for any reason?

That is what is happening to the landlord in this story, and he has grown very concerned about his tenant, even though he does pay rent on time. He has even reached out to his family, but they haven’t helped.

So, he is now thinking about evicting him to try to get him to reengage with the world, but he is worried that it will just leave him on the streets.

Read through the full story below and see what you think he should do.

My roommate cut off everyone, is unemployed, and plays non stop video games

I (36M) have a roommate (31M) who cut off most people in his life about a year ago.

This would definitely be weird.

He cut me off nine months ago and hasn’t spoken to me since. For months, he worked and then shut himself in his room to play video games in the evenings.

For the past 12 weeks, he’s been unemployed by choice and has done virtually nothing but sleep and game. This is an incredibly awkward feeling to me living with someone who doesn’t interact with me.

He is right to be concerned about his roommate’s behavior.

He’s always been someone who enjoys being around people and having conversations, although he’s also protective of certain topics and avoids discussing things he doesn’t want to talk about.

From October 2025 through January 2026, he still acted normally around me. Mutual acquaintances told me they hadn’t heard from him since October.

When I finally brought this up on January 26, he shut down and I had to push him to explain. He gave several reasons for withdrawing, primarily a health issue, but none seemed to justify cutting everyone off completely. After that conversation, he never spoke to me again.

His roommate gets obsessive about things.

Just before Christmas, he bought a gaming PC. He’s always had intense fixations on hobbies, such as guitar, Muay Thai, and financial literacy, which he would either master or get bored of and drop for something new.

I assumed gaming would be another passing interest, but this time he isolated himself completely, spending hours playing an online FPS without interacting with anyone outside the game.

It is good that he is getting other loved ones involved.

He rejected attempts to reach him, including one from someone he used to think highly of. He stopped helping around the house and eating properly. Since he still paid rent (he pays more than required) and wasn’t causing problems, I gave him space.

At the end of July, his work van disappeared and he stopped leaving the house. After two weeks, I contacted his mom. His stepdad visited and walked with him for an hour. I was told he wasn’t considered a risk to himself or others and had quit work because he needed time to rest. His family said they’d try to help.

There is something seriously wrong with him.

Nine weeks later and he was still unemployed hardly leaving the house. He began getting food delivered but frequently left the food uneaten until it spoiled.

Sometimes leaving a completely unopened bag of food on the counter unrefrigerated until it got cold or warming something in the microwave and I would find it the next time I needed to use the microwave and it was cold (if you know anything about food safety, it’s no longer safe to eat).

He needs some mental health care.

I don’t know if it was absentmindedness and being so engrossed in his game he lost track of time or he’s actually losing his mind. I eventually threw away nearly two trash bags of expired food because there was no room left for my food in the fridge.

The last 2-3 weeks he barely orders any food. He eats on a Taco Bell order over the course of a week and some days just doesn’t eat anything that comes from the kitchen, so he may have less perishable food in his room.

I haven’t seen him in person in a long time, and I’m concerned about his physical condition. As of now the last time he left the house was September 23 and before that it was like five weeks prior.

It is good that he is so concerned about his tenant.

He gets almost no sunlight or exercise, eats poorly, and has virtually no social interaction outside gaming. I own the house and rent him a room cheaply, which allows him to continue living this way without needing to work.

I feel like I’m just enabling this behavior by allowing him to continue living here. He’s at the very least got to be trying to avoid real life for some reason and create his own world where his real life problems don’t exist by gaming and only talking with the people in the game who have no personal connection to him and they are much easier to dump if he is offended by them.

At the very least, he needs to keep up with cleaning and other basic requirements.

Much of the time he does basically nothing to help out, but then at times he shows that he hasn’t completely given up and will collect the dishes he accumulates in his room (I shudder to think what his room looks like) and run them through the dishwasher or actually take out the full trash bag.

I left him a note once because his car’s registration was five months expired and the city will tow your vehicle for that, especially considering the fact that it hadn’t driven in over a month, so it actually looked abandoned. It took him a week to get around to it, but he finally did.

Evicting him might be the kindest thing to do. But he should talk to him first.

I’m starting to think he needs to move out. Living alone would be more expensive for him, and his parents might not let him spend his days gaming if he lived with them.

Perhaps having to leave would force him to get a job and reengage with life. But he used to be my friend, and I don’t want to hurt him. At the same time, I’m exhausted from living with someone who wants nothing to do with me. It’s affecting my mental health.

His parents aren’t being aggressive enough.

His family seems to be the only people who might reach him, but they’ve repeatedly promised to visit and then failed to follow through. After I told his mom I was considering asking him to move out, she finally came by on October 10.

Apparently, he was trying to sleep, and she said they’d arrange another time to talk. I told her he’s probably just trying to push her away and he has no intention of actually following up and she needs to come back if he doesn’t respond.

He is in a really bad position as a landlord.

His mom told me she was terrified of the idea of him ending up homeless as a way to tell me not to tell him to move out, but in all reality, he has the option to move in with them probably for free and if he chooses homelessness that’s his choice.

A couple of hours after she left, he was gaming again. I updated her, but she never followed up, and he still hasn’t left the house. I really wanted her to actually come back and bother him again, but her lack of willingness to do that makes me feel like they aren’t really wanting to help him that much.

If he chooses homelessness, at least he can’t play video games all day.

I’m at a loss. I don’t want to abandon someone who may be struggling, but I also don’t think enabling this situation is helping him.

He won’t talk to me so I can’t really help him if he is struggling anyway. I know at the end of the day he is an adult and he is allowed to make a bad decision like choosing to be homeless just as he has with choosing to be unemployed and wasting his life on video games.

There are no good options here.

How would you approach this? Would you give his family another chance to intervene, or is it time to ask him to move out?

Perhaps he should give him a warning that if he doesn’t change his ways, he will be evicted by a certain date (not too far in the future). This might be the motivation he needs to get out of the house and reengage with his life.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

This really does seem like a mental health issue.

Here is someone who has struggled with depression.

This commenter thinks he is enabling him.

Many people go through things like this.

This commenter thinks his roommate is depressed.

His roommate needs help, but he may not be able to provide it. Evicting him might end up being the best option.