For the last three months, I’ve been working from home. People will periodically ask me how that’s going, and they’re usually surprised when I tell them that I’ve been more productive than I ever was in an office. But they’re always surprised when I tell them that I wake up at 6 to start working early. They almost always say something like, “I could never do that! I’m lucky to make it out of bed in time for work at 9!” And, while the mechanics of my uber-productive workday are a mindlessly boring subject unto themselves, suffice it to say that getting up early is not the hardest thing about working from home.
I had a mini-breakdown in college when I realized I could literally never escape being at school, and I thought that would be the driving force in my slow descent into insanity. That’s actually been pretty easy to handle; it’s the fact that when I’m done with work I have no one to talk to that’s been slowly eroding my wits over the past several months. By far the hardest thing about working from home is that I live alone.
Let’s look at a typical week in the life of the self-employed, clientless 20-something man. On Sunday, I go to the grocery store and get enough food to last me the week; I cook at home that night. On Monday, I wake up, get to work, stop working, and eat leftovers. On Tuesday, I wake up, get to work, stop working, eat leftovers, and go to trivia. Wednesday through Friday, I wake up, get to work, stop working, and eat leftovers. On Saturday I eventually wake up, eventually write a blog post maybe, and eventually eat leftovers (there’s a lot of TV or Internet reading involved). On Sunday I go back to the grocery store. I go to the gym down the street three times during that period (twice a week I work out on a treadmill, and the treadmills at my apartment are better than the ones at the gym), where I say hello (literally, I just say, “hello”) to whoever’s manning the check-in counter. I can spend three or four days at a time without leaving my apartment building, two or three at a time without leaving my apartment at all. My second-best weekly human interaction is talking to the overly-friendly Trader Joe’s checkout guys. I spend more time talking to my cat than I do to other human beings.
This got especially bad over the winter, which contained, by the way, the coldest month in DC in over 20 years. Since my gym is too cheap to give free towels, and I’m too cheap to pay for them, I run to the gym in workout clothes since I can’t shower there. It turns out this gets significantly harder to do if it’s 20 degrees outside, so I spent even more time in my apartment’s gym in February. At one point it had been so long with just me and my cat that, when I finally made it out to the gym down the street, I just meowed at the front desk check-in lady.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this experience, it’s that it’s important to get out of the house and actually see other people, and that you have to put forth an effort to do so. Fortunately, over the last month or so, the weather has improved, and I’ve also managed to travel — first to Atlanta, where I hung out with my totally rad parents, then to New Orleans, where I hung out with Olivia Wilde*, then to Indianapolis, where I hung out with your 2015 NCAA Men’s Basketball Champions, the Duke University Blue Devils — and where my seats were quite literally in the nosebleed section.
And today’s looking like a beautiful day, so I’m going to go check out the cherry blossoms with some friends. Human friends. My cat is not invited.
*Olivia Wilde walked past me while I was there and it was awesome.