TLDR: Lately I’ve been spending a lot less time at home and more time out and it’s been personally enriching in a bunch of ways that are at least interesting to me.
For the past four months, I’ve been running an experiment where I spend as little time at my apartment as possible. I just sleep there, basically. Most days, I leave at 6 a.m. and come back around 9 or 10 p.m. I do this on weekdays and weekends. If I don’t already have somewhere to be, I improvise a plan and go with that. The experiment has gone well enough that I’ve kept doing it.
I started this mostly out of necessity. I was experiencing some loneliness, and life had started to feel repetitive—putting together a social circle in a new place was stalling out, online dating continued to be futile, and I was working a lot. A friend suggested I “increase variance” as a possible solution, and the idea resonated with me. One of the longer levers I identified for increasing variance was simply staying out instead of staying home.
I tend to like staying home—I was one of those people who wasn’t totally ready for quarantine to end, lol. Even by 2024, I don’t think I had fully reembodied to pre-pandemic levels, honestly. So naturally my whereabouts were ripe for variance.
I figured I’d last a week or two. But now it’s second nature, and it’s been, like, really successful, actually?
The Sub-Strategies
To make the routine work, I reconsidered some of my habits and replaced them with new sub-strategies. Here are a few of them.
(By the way, I’m preemptively letting go of the self-awareness creeping in about sounding too well-resourced. I’ll just go for it.)
1. I Broke Up with Cooking
I gave myself permission to stop cooking entirely and eat out for every meal. I saw the cost as an investment in improving my life. When I buy a $15 burrito at 7:00 p.m., I’m purchasing dinner and a ticket to staying out, in The Show.
It’s also recaptured a lot of bandwidth that otherwise got taken up by all the side quests of cooking—Tupperware, grocery shopping, portioning, dishes, realizing I’m missing an ingredient (I hope to never buy paprika again, honestly). Now, meals are tastier, and always hot. I do enough hands-on work with other projects that I don’t miss the “therapeutic” part of cooking.
2. I Take Uber Now
I decided I’ll take Ubers whenever it makes sense. If there’s an event 20 or 45 minutes away or the weather’s freezing, I just go. This keeps me from defaulting to staying in, and it’s expanded my radius in the city pretty substantially.
Similar to cutting out cooking, it’s freed up a bunch of latent time and energy that I now put into better activities.
3. I Work in the Office Every Day
I go into the office five days a week. I’m really into it, actually. Going in wasn’t a totally new routine for me, but what is new is that I stopped even attempting work-from-home days.
I can’t do work-from-home, I’ve come to realize. I spiral. 2:00 p.m. rolls around and I start feeling weird and lonely, and the whole thing just seems off. Beside fixing some loneliness, going into the office is one of the easiest ways to build a good professional reputation, and is just really low hanging fruit in that way. If my boss needs something done or an impromptu tour given, I’m one of the people he calls. I’m The Guy Who’s Probably There. I believe there are more benefits to the office but I’ll save them for another time.
4. I Found a Third Space
I experimented with third spaces and landed on a social club in a fun neighborhood. It has a gym, a bunch of what I guess you’d call “lounge space,” and a nice rooftop. A major benefit is that I’m always bouncing off of (mostly) interesting people. There’s some cringe, for sure, but not the majority.
Sort of a hack I’ve discovered: people mostly go in the evenings, not the mornings. So, sometimes I’ll head over in the morning for some focus work, and it’s just me and a few other Morning People, with this fantastic space to ourselves. Pretty cool. I’ve put most of my website together sitting by the fireplace there.
5. Packing Like It’s a Trip
The scenes in Batman where he’s gearing up in the Batcave before heading out to avenge crime? I’m, like, kind of into that energy?
Not to say that I identify with Batman or have his posters on my wall, but there’s something therapeutic about finding precision and craft in assembling your pack. I’ve enjoyed it for travel, and now I’ve found it extends to these full days out. So in the morning, it’s a fun ritual for me to pack my bag.
Some things about what I bring:
I bring my Zojirushi thermos with homemade coffee. It looks like a Stormtrooper. It’s fantastic. (Not an affiliate link, by the way, lol.)
A travel fragrance. I’m just into mini bottles (re: Tobasco). But also, I love fragrances. A friend once called them “portable environments,” which I think is true, and it makes them especially fun to experiment with while traveling.
Not in the bag, but about the bag—I keep it clean with this detergent that works strikingly well. I wash it once a week, and when it’s clean, it just feels nicer to keep my things in and “keep on my person,” as it were.
There’s more I could say about The Bag, but that seems like enough for now.
The Benefits
1. I Have More Friends Now
So I have, like, a bunch more friends now? A basic recipe for making friends that I’m surprised I didn’t prioritize sooner: if you spend a lot of time in the same places, and other people are doing the same, it’s easy to make friends. And it compounds quickly enough, because people introduce you to more people, and so on.
2. I’m A Regular
Not to be confused with Irregular—although that too probably, lol—I’m now A Regular at a bunch of places. At the smoothie spot I go to, the girl behind the counter and I just make eye contact when I arrive, and she starts making my order. I love that? The shake is cheaper to make at home, but there is no whimsical telepathic communication happening between me and another person there.
3. Chicago Feels Like New York
The all-day-out routine makes Chicago feel more like New York, which scratches an itch. Being out all day and just using your apartment to sleep is a New York thing. It’s made Chicago feel faster, more exciting, more cosmopolitan.
4. It’s Portable
The routine also works when I’m traveling in another city. I was—not sure if anyone heard—in Tokyo recently, and I adapted pretty easily to being out all day and just crashing at the hotel. Wandering at night in Tokyo is spooky and weird, so the routine made it easier to access a side of the city I might have missed otherwise.
5. Rethinking the Long Term
For a few years, especially during quarantine, I was warming up to the idea of buying a little house in Cape Cod, making it cozy, putting a milling machine in the basement, working remotely. That feels more like a side project again, and not the main plan. While I’m still youngish, a faster-paced city lifestyle feels like the way to go. It’s really nice to be inhabiting that kind of way of living again.
Last Thought
Would love to keep going, but I just need to post this now.
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