Why I Live Alone

The first time I lived alone, my landlord was a potbellied middle-aged man. He looked exactly like the classic small-town tycoon: dark floral shirt, briefcase in hand, pointy leather shoes.

He'd split one apartment into an upstairs and a downstairs and rented them to two tenants. I took the upstairs.

The location wasn't great, honestly. It was a fair walk from the Changshengqiao light rail station. But it was close to my workplace, and biking to work every day was easy enough.

The rent wasn't cheap. It ate up a seventh of my monthly income at the time, a bit more than my ideal budget of "one eighth." But I wanted to live alone so badly that I didn't want to spend any more time looking.

Before I decided to live alone, I'd been in a two-person company dorm room.

**The seed of living alone had actually been planted in me a long time ago.**​ Once my job settled down and my income went up a bit, I couldn't hold the urge back anymore.

And once my job was stable and my income had gone up, I couldn't hold back that urge any longer, so I went out and rented a place.

Living in the company dorm would have saved me a hundred percent of my rent. So why was I so determined to move out?

Because the concrete hassles of daily life are far more real than abstract numbers.

First, there's the simple fact of having a roommate.

When you live with someone, you have to adjust to each other. There's no way around it.

Maybe my schedule is a bit unusual. I go to sleep before eleven every night, which is probably too early for a lot of people. When I'm going to sleep, I need the lights off, and I want it completely quiet.

But as a roommate, I can't just demand that the other person fit my schedule. This isn't a student dorm. There's no official lights-out time. It comes down to understanding and putting up with each other.

My roommate really did his best to accommodate me. He turned off the lights on time and kept things as quiet as he could. Still, I never felt right about it.

On one hand, I worried I was becoming a burden on him. On the other, I wanted out of this delicate state of constant "mutual understanding." I wanted to fix the problem for both of us, once and for all.

Second, the dorm itself just wasn't a nice place to live.

It was a converted old factory building. People had been moving in and out for years, and the hygiene had built up into something hard to describe.

Take my room. The cabinets and the floor had years of grime on them, and cockroaches and other such roommates were regular visitors.

So improving my most basic living conditions was the main reason I moved out.

So what did I actually get out of living alone?

1. A space that's entirely mine.

   The most obvious thing is space. On my own, I had a whole bedroom, living room, kitchen and bathroom. Going from half a room in a shared dorm to a complete, fully equipped home, that physical expansion brought the most basic kind of happiness.

2. A relaxed, easy state of mind.

   The best thing about living alone is that I can live completely by my own habits. I don't bother anyone, and no one bothers me.

   When you share a place, the only fixes for different habits are both sides compromising or one side putting up with it. Either way, it's an unstable balance.

**Now I can shape the environment I want directly, with my own hands and my own effort, and that's without a doubt the best way to improve my mood.**​ After work, I want my life to be just me. That way I don't make myself miserable, and I don't cause anyone else trouble either.

Since high school, my family hasn't really kept tabs on me, and even less so in college.

But in school there was no clear line between life and work, so the idea of living alone never crossed my mind.

Once I started working, work and life suddenly split apart. Life is life, and work is work.

Like right now, I can sit at home and write this post in peace. I have a hard time getting used to another person being around when I'm writing or reading.

When I lived in the company dorm, I could hardly focus on reading or writing at all.

After I started living alone, all those problems just went away.

Some people might say: aren't you a bit too fussy?

Fine, I admit I'm a little "fussy." But I've always thought it's perfectly normal for a person to have hopes for their own life and to hold it to some standards.

Besides, I meet those standards entirely through my own work and effort.

We often say you should use your own initiative to change the objective world.

**So isn't improving your own living space with your own hands the most fitting, most vivid way to put that into practice?**​

When life goes smoothly, I can also throw myself into work without distractions.

Looking back now, though, the me of two years ago, who had just gotten his first little place of his own, really didn't understand much yet about what "life" means.

That was only a starting point about "space" and "quiet." There's a much bigger picture further on, waiting for me to work out and fill in.