One of the things I've learned from living alone is the significance of shared hardship. Moving jobs seemed to necessitate finding a place close by quickly which led to me to a run down apartment that was on the cheaper side for a 1b1b in a not so great neighborhood. As I look back at it now, moving in wasn't horrible, but it sure felt like it when I was in the thick of it. It seemed as though I had made one of the biggest mistakes of my life so far and dealing with all the issues with the apartment on top of transitioning to a new job wasn't easy. As I continued to deal with issues that kept cropping up with the apartment, I remember thinking about how nice it would be if I were to have another person here with me. Not necessarily so that we could fix the problems together but more so to just have someone to express mutual discontentment with. It may sound whiny but being able to let that out is more important than I realized. Having a roommate to say, "Damn. Well this sucks..." to seems to help cope with issues just as much as solving the issues itself. I needed someone to be there to change my attitude towards the hardships that I was facing but was met with the errant buzz of the retro fridge. Although I am fine living alone now, I still feel as though having another person would have more pros than cons.
You'd think the shared experience of going through a pandemic would bring people together. The allegory to a roommate is pretty apt here where in most cases, that should be right, but sometimes the roommates end up spending too much time together and have a worse relationship than when it started. I think this is what happened to the world during the pandemic. There are more topics to be polarized about and to divide people by, which minimizes any shared pain we all feel. It's sad and very indicative of the way the world has been heading for a while.
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