I’ve lived alone for a while now. No flatmates, no compromises, no one eating my food from the fridge.
I would do it again without hesitation. Now I’ve seen both sides of the coin, and I’ve chosen this one.
Table of Contents
My first week
When I finally got my own apartment, after a period of living with flatmates I didn’t get along with, the first thing I noticed was the predictability. An extremely strange feeling that only the people who had the wrong flatmates can understand, but I’ll try to explain it anyway.
When I got back home from the office the first time, everything in the apartment was precisely as I had left it. The fridge contained exactly what I had put in it, the dishes were where I had placed them. The state of every room was a direct consequence of my own decisions, nothing else. If I had cleaned something, it was still clean; if I hadn’t, it was dirty. After months of shared spaces and small daily frictions, that predictability felt like an enormous relief.
I hadn’t expected to feel so immediately at ease. I had thought it would feel lonely, but it felt like the first proper exhale in a long time.
I was just starting to become accustomed to the right kind of loneliness. That’s real power, right there.
The power of your choices
By living on my own, I had obviously chosen the right solitude over the wrong companionship. Believe it or not, this was actually a choice between two different kinds of loneliness, and I chose the best one.
When you live with the wrong people, it is a constant drain of energy that could be better spent elsewhere. Just imagine the fights, the frictions, the need to put on a pleasant mask when you get out of your room and you have to act politely while in reality you just want to burn the house to the ground. This is made even worse when you’re preparing to drive 90 minutes to go work a job you hate with a passion, which is not that unlikely. This is, in my opinion, much more lonely than living alone.
There’s also another kind of solitude, the one I had while growing up. That was imposed. It was the absence of connection I couldn’t build, not a state I had selected. It is just plain emptiness, an emptiness that doesn’t fill you.
Living alone is different. When I’m at home, I’m alone by design. When I leave — for the gym, for the supermarket, for karate, for an evening with my girlfriend — I’m surrounded by people. The solitude is bounded, chosen, and therefore mine in a way that the other kinds never were.
I rarely feel lonely at home now. When I do, there’s no one to talk to, and I have to sit with that. But it happens less often than you might expect, and much less often than it did when I had flatmates.
The unexpected side
Not everything is sunshine and diamonds under the sky.
Nobody, for example, warns you about the laundry. It’s a minor but persistent presence in your life, it accumulates relentlessly and it reminds you that the washing machine can only contain so much weight before you need to use it one more time and take even longer.
Cooking surprised me too. Of course, since it’s about eating my perspective is filtered through my particular lens, but I want to talk about it anyway. Cooking is not hard, but choosing what to eat can be such a boring process that sometimes you wonder if it’s worth it. When you have an eating disorder, though, following a schedule can help a lot.
My desk is also permanently chaotic. I’ve accepted this, I’m not even trying to change it anymore. Everything on it is there for a reason — I work from home, and the desk is the center of most of my daily activities. I’ve optimized it for function rather than appearance, which is probably what an engineer like me would do.
Why am I telling you all of this? Well, it’s simple: living alone comes with its own set of duties that no one can escape, and you have to take care of them, unless you want to live in the trash. It’s not all fun and games, but there’s time for fun and games when you’re not constantly worried about war with your flatmates.
I can do better, though. What I’m still working on is enjoying the space more fully. I’ve built something that works, it’s mine, and it’s beautiful. I want to learn to live it rather than just use it.
Your apartment is your mirror
My apartment has changed as I’ve changed. The two processes have been parallel — I’ve been adjusting the space to fit who I’m becoming at the same time that I’ve been adjusting myself.
I don’t think I’m finished with either project. But then again, nobody ever is.
There’s something clarifying about having a space that reflects only your own decisions. Every object is there because you put it there. Every arrangement is yours. There’s no one else’s taste to negotiate with, no compromise aesthetic. It’s a small but genuine form of self-knowledge — you learn what you actually want when you’re the only person whose wants matter.
The dark side
The benefits of living alone are well-documented, I’m a living proof of it. Freedom, silence, autonomy, the absence of daily friction. These are real and I value them.
The costs are seldom discussed.
When I’m genuinely fed up with doing something, there’s no one to share it with. When I’m in a low period — and everyone has them — I have to pull myself out without external help. When I want to talk to someone and nobody is around, there’s just the quiet.
These moments don’t happen often. But when they do, they are heavy. The same conditions that make the good days feel excellent make the difficult days feel draining too.
I wouldn’t change the choice. I’ve made that calculation, and the answer comes out the same every time. But I want anyone considering this to know what they’re signing up for. The good comes with the bad, and their weight depends on your personal scale.
The words that can help you
The difficult periods become less frequent with time. That’s the most important thing.
In the beginning, the loneliness will sometimes feel like too much, especially if you’re not used to it or you don’t come from a living arrangement that was making you lose your will to live (as it was for me). You’ll have a bad day and there will be nobody to absorb it with you. You’ll get tired of handling everything yourself. You’ll miss the company, even the imperfect company of flatmates you complained about.
That passes. Just like all the negatives, it will become more and more rare, the intervals between those moments will be longer and longer. They will leave you with a space that is fully and uncontestably yours.
Do with it as you please.