A few years ago, I was going a little mad.
Materially, my life was comfortable. My partner and I had just bought a house. I was doing okay in a freelance writing career. And we were living the sort of middle class-ish lifestyle where we could afford multiple foreign holidays a year.
But there was something I found disturbing. I didn’t have any reason to ever leave the house.
That’s not much of an exaggeration. Through a combination of luck and circumstance, I’d landed in a work-from-home career where almost everything happened over email or Zoom. Amazon could drop anything I wanted at my door within 24 hours. Deliveroo and Ocado took care of food. And because my partner and I don’t have—nor want—kids, we didn’t have that automatic tether to our local area either.
So far, this may not sound so difficult. Lucky me, right? But what made living like this difficult was that my social life had also ground to a halt.
Sure, I had friends and perhaps even hundreds of looser connections, by virtue of being a middle-ranking character on British Politics Twitter, but I only rarely saw people in person. Our closest friends did not live locally, nor was there any mechanism that would regularly bring us together.
How did this happen? I think the cause of this social collapse was down to a few different factors. The first was obviously the pandemic, which made us all too comfortable with staying indoors. The second is a function of getting older – a significant proportion of the people you used to hang out with have kids and disappear off the face of the Earth for two decades. And the third was, frankly, my comfortable circumstances.
Simply put, I really like being in my house. It’s extremely pleasant to live in. The person who I like spending time with more than anyone else lives here with me, and our cats are here too. I have a massive TV, a Playstation 5 and a gigabit internet connection.
But clearly you can have too much of a good thing, as it has the effect of making staying in more desirable, and makes the prospect of heading outside seem less appealing.
Perhaps, though, you can’t really see the problem? You might even be reading what I’ve written so far with envy. After all, I’ve lucked my way into an extremely pleasant life of no dependents and few commitments, so what could possibly be wrong? Objectively, this was an incredibly unsympathetic situation to complain about.
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