In search of aloneness
This post first appeared as a series of comments on HackerNews
Sometimes I miss being alone so much I could cry.
Just over a year ago, I could get up in the morning to my empty apartment, stay inside all day, work from home, and only see people when I wanted to. Throwing massive parties for 50+ people every few weeks works great for both socialization and increasing your social standing.
An apartment full of people, mixing disparate social groups, cooking delicious food, making sure everyone has a good time, and being the orchestrator of it all. What more could you want? It’s amazing.
Just like Gatsby said:
And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
But now I work in an office and I live with a girlfriend and a parrot who doesn’t understand the concept of personal space.
All day every day surrounded by people.
Go to office, people. Go to gym, people everywhere. Come home, there’s your girlfriend. Go to bed, there she is. Wake up, yup — right there. Go to office …
I love my girlfriend and she’s great, and if I’m going to have roommates anyway it better be my girlfriend, but sometimes I just wish I could come home to an empty apartment, you know?
Yes, yes, you shouldn’t use love to solve rent-related problems. Romantic ideals! Boyish notions of love! Chivalry, maidens, all that jazz. No.
Real love is 50% romance and 50% pragmatic outcomes from joining your lives together. It’s like getting a business partner for personal life.
And so I retreat into the night. The last bastion of aloneness I can get. 11pm to 3am is where I find my bliss. My space to be alone. Bird and parrot are asleep. The street outside is mostly quiet. There’s little traffic. The bar across the street and the bar under my apartment are closed for the night.
Peace. Solitude. Zen.
But how long can I maintain a schedule of going to bed past 2am and being bright and ready at the office by 10am? It works for now, but I’ll be 30 soon. Surely there are limits.
What do people do when they grow older and can’t afford to stay up at night?
nibs had a great suggestion:
My fiance is extremely introverted. We eventually realized that she needed this “apartment to myself” feeling at least once a week in order to function in the real world and do the extrovert obligations she needed to do. So we instituted “introvert time”, where I work late until around 10PM and leave our place to her for about five hours after she gets home. This is enough for her to take the time to walk around undressed, read articles, make some food, watch junk TV and enjoy the silence before I get home. I similarly enjoy working late knowing it is creating value (as opposed to feeling guilty and conflicted, which eventually becomes burnout).
This practice resulted in a:
Relationship-defining quality of life improvement.
And new_hackers made a great point that:
this is the same as what most suburbanites experience. The “garage”, “man-cave”, “fishing” etc is not always just for the guys. It basically allows the women to have some downtime for themselves.
spending Saturday morning doing outside chores allowed me to have a much more satisfying Saturday night.
Is this why people buy big houses?
PS: I write about being an engineer and creative [almost] every weekend. You should subscribe by email.
