I Live Alone, I Train Alone, I Win the Title Alone
I am currently on month four of living completely by myself and it’s been quite the experience so far. And if you didn’t get the above title reference from Rocky III, shame on you.
From the time I could ever remember, I always had roommates of some sorts. Obviously, growing up I had my sisters and parents. And then my sisters moved out and it was still my parents. And then college came and I had at least 1 or 2 roommates each year.
These first couple years out of college, I just stuck with the roommate thing since it worked well and allowed us to save a bunch of money.
But now, here I am. By myself. Living in a one-bedroom apartment. Gentle. Quiet. Alone. Left to my own devices. What did I do…
What I Did
Well, honestly, I probably made one of the best decisions of my life to date. There is a lot of rapid growth that occurs in this first solo apartment.
Let me clarify real quick, it is NOT all sunshine and rainbows living by yourself. But that’s not what I said. What I did say was there is a lot of growth that occurs. It’s this growth that is so rewarding but also so terrifying.
Anytime you have growth, there’s discomfort. And living by yourself for the first time is the ultimate chaotic mix of total comfort and total discomfort. Whenever I thought how I was going to feel by myself before moving in, I thought of it in such a binary way; all good or all bad. No grey in sight. Just black and white, and my time spent would fall into either one of those.
The truth is, it’s not true at all. Nothing’s clean like that and there are these weird juxtapositions and dichotomies that exist throughout the entire lone living situation. Things I wasn’t ready for. Things nobody ever told me. Things I honestly just didn’t think about.
Shall we break them down?
1. The Ultimate Sense of Freedom—A Stubborn Burden at Times
So, the good news about living alone is you can do whatever you want, whenever you want. The bad news about living alone is you can do whatever you want, whenever you want.
The same freedom that can let you get a workout in, read 20 pages, go on a long walk, and clean your room, all within 4 hours, also can lead you to spend those same 4 hours slumped on the couch with the only reason you got up being to grab a bag of chips. You think I’m kidding.
Sure, these are totally extreme and contrasting things, but the point is there. You notice time exists, like really exists. And when you feel like you have all the time in the world, that’s almost when you have the least amount of time.
Using Your Time in Effective Spaces
You have to be super intentional about filling up your time wisely. Sure, you need rest periods and one of the best parts of living alone is you have your time with yourself where you can totally decompress. But there’s also nobody else to hold you accountable. There’s nobody else break up your time of meaningless scrolling. There’s nobody there to have deep conversations with. In order to have a healthy life balance, you need to use this time to your benefit.
That’s where I have found the importance of building routines and executing on them. Since living alone, I have made it a part of my day to wake up at 6am, no matter if it’s the weekday or the weekend. In order to wake up fully, I need light and I need noise. I never did this before because I didn’t want to be the person to wake everybody else up.
Once I am up, I can tackle my day. Workout, eat, shower, go to work during the week or write on the weekends. If you need help building your morning routine, check out this blog post.
It doesn’t just go for mornings but definitely the nighttime as well. It is the easiest thing to do, especially in the winter months when there’s less daylight, to get home from work, eat, and then hit the couch until bed. I have certain tasks that I try to tackle each night and once that’s complete, I can put the pressure behind me and totally relax.
Finding Things to Do
I thought about this the other day. Here’s an extensive list of the only 10 things I do nowadays:
- Sleep
- Cook/eat
- Personal hygiene
- Workout
- Go on walks
- Go to work
- Work on blog/podcast
- Play guitar
- Watch IG reels/TV
- Read (kinda)
Yeah, it made me a little depressed, not gonna lie.
But with that being said, it’s actually nice in a way to have such a simple list. I think it’s modern culture that leads us into “needing” more than the basics. Having this list as my baseline activities gives more power to the one-offs and uncommon experiences I may have. Find your core activities, even if it takes extensive discovery.
What are your hobbies? Or what would you like to be your hobbies? I saw a great piece one time that everybody needs 4 categories of hobbies: physical, creative, cerebral, and service. Take a look at the graphic to see what those might look like.
And for those of you who want to go above and beyond, maybe start that project or side business that you’ve always wanted to start and let it consume you a bit. As I discussed on the podcast with my friend Jimmy Chatfield (check that out here), sometimes the lack of distractions is what helps actually pursue something you have a greater passion for. Sometimes, I even feel like if I have nothing to do, I might as well write.
2. Loneliness Doesn’t Always Look Like Sadness
There’s this warfare of internal dialogue that often goes on between feeling lonely yet not feeling like conducting any social interactions.
Previously to living by myself, I would have thought of loneliness as a source of sad emotion—which sometimes it is—but that isn’t the whole story. It’s weird where loneliness appears at times; not in all of the expected places.
The Roommate Dynamic Versus Being ‘Just Friends’
I’ve found that the roommate dynamic is something that can be admired deeply when done well. There’s something warming about feeling presence without needing to actively participate in shared activity. Even doing something by yourself doesn’t feel lonely.
It might sound weird, but just the knowledge of another person being in the next room provides a strange element of comfort. When you live alone, you no longer have this. The baseline with roommates is companionship, with the option for self-seclusion. The current baseline living by myself is self-seclusion, with the option for companionship.
I guess I still could, but it would feel weird now to invite a friend over just to be in another room doing something else than I’m doing. Or even something like asking if they want to go to join to go to the grocery store. Or just both be scrolling through TikTok while half-watching a TV show.
There becomes added pressure and formality to planned hang-outs. It’s that same pressure that makes it easier to just be alone. But constantly being alone isn’t really great for you. Trust me.
How to Disrupt This Loneliness Pattern
Instead of having this sense of leased-in camaraderie, you have to put in effort in order to break up this loneliness pattern. I think the best bet is to plan stuff ahead of time, for two reasons. For one, you’re way less likely to cancel last minute. And two, you’ll get a bigger rush looking forward to plans.
Here are some other ways to break this pattern:
- Be the one to initiate plans and don’t be the one to flake (both qualities mentioned in this blog post about being a quality friend)
- Create a shared routine/ritual that doesn’t require continual advanced planning (ie. Saturday morning basketball)
- Phone calls, especially when doing tasks like cooking, or dishes, or laundry
- Send “text messages by association” to people you haven’t connected with in a while (check out this blog post if you don’t know what I’m referencing)
- Hosting a dinner (if you want to learn why and how, check out this blog post)
- Go to the store or sit in a coffee shop (sometimes you just need to get out of your apartment and be around people)
That’s just tip of the iceberg. Possibilities for pattern disruption are endless. All I know is, you don’t have to be lonely if you don’t want to. Also, if you do want to be lonely, try to be healthy and break that up—again, for your own well being.
3. The Quiet Pride of Making a Space Your Own
You can always tell a lot about a person based on their apartment. And I say that for the best, and the worst.
When you live alone, your apartment stops being just where you sleep—it becomes proof that you can take care of yourself, it becomes a means of expression, and it shows what you prioritize in life. How many times have you saw a friend’s place for the first time and thought, this checks out?
In the Obvious Stuff, Obviously
With no roommates means no compromise, no negotiation, and no explanations.
If you want to have nothing aside from a 10 ft beanbag chair and a 4’x3′ portrait of King Louis XVIII on your wall, you can. If you want to have everything in your apartment to be orange, you can. If you want to be normal, by all means.
But regardless of how things are setup or designed, there’s a great sense of responsibility and pride from maintaining a sharp looking place. Working a job and getting paid and using that money to buy things for your apartment that get used and noticed by guests is a good feeling, however shallow that may come off.
With that, any kind of mess or foul order or inefficiency present in your apartment is of nobody’s fault but your own. If you don’t mind a few dirty dishes hanging out in the sink, that’s fine, but you will need to tackle those at some point. No courteous roommate to bail you out.
In the Small Details Too
The small things in life matter too. And they might not be glamorous or really make much of a difference to visitors/outsiders, but they certainly matter to you when you’re in your own place.
Maybe it’s a random Tuesday night realignment of furniture, or a Sunday morning deep clean, or switching out a cooler lightbulb for a warmer toned one. Whatever it may be, the micro changes are important and really transform the space that you choose to live in.
The way I look at, I am locked into a lease for at least a year (with a good chance of it being longer than that). I might as well really enjoy all aspects of my living area. Does that mean I am going to go out and blow a bunch of cabbage on flashy furnishings and decor? Probably not.
But I will go to Lowe’s and buy an extra extension cord to declutter wires patched across the room. Or I will go to HomeGoods to buy a glass cookie jar to store my Nespresso pods in. Or I will buy some smart LED light bulbs from Walmart to be able to wake up with the lights on.
Conclusion: You’ll Exit a Different Person Than You Came In
You know how if you took a picture every day for a couple of years, you really wouldn’t notice a difference in the daily photos? However, if you took a look at day 1 and day 730, you would say “holy shit?”
Well, that’s how life is I guess in general, but especially when you start living alone.
Sure, there isn’t an <i> in “team”… but there’s also no “team” in living in a one-bedroom apartment by yourself. It’s you. That’s the team. Maybe I’m just a little nutty, but I find myself having no problems having long, in-depth conversations with this team. The good, the bad, the uncomfortable—you name it.
But look, all this is to say it’s a transformative time, whether you’ll realize it or not. It’s one of those milestones that really puts you one step further to death (aka the phase past adulthood). And it’ll really shape who you are, what you want, what you do, who you spend time with, and how happy you’ll be.
My advice is to try it out as soon as you can. The biggest hurdle seems to be the financial ability to do so, which I totally get. But if you can make it work, make it work.
The sooner you figure out some of these quirks of life on your own, the better. Hey, I even found enough time to write a blog post every week and start recording and editing a podcast. Who knows what you can do.
A wise man (my father told me to refer to him as such) once told me, “nothing grows in the comfort zone”. And there’s nothing more uncomfortable sometimes than the sound of your own steps, breath, and thoughts.
Here’s to being a little more uncomfortable. Keep writing your story.
—Will
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