I lived in Detroit for seven years. I loved many things about the city, especially its restaurants, but I couldn't stand the noise in the neighborhood where I lived. At any time, day or night, the ugly, sick rumble of motorcycles or badly maintained cars would pervade my living space. My sleep would frequently be interrupted by loudly barking dogs. It was unpleasant.
I'm a computer programmer. I like to focus my thoughts. That is much easier to do if I've had a good night's sleep. Or a nice afternoon's sleep, followed by a big meal at Greektown. The over-stuffed feeling would wear off after a few hours, and I could crank out spiffy code all night.
I could get into the semi-meditative, high-productivity state often enough, but, for practical purposes, my environment was always at war against me. I have bad memories of working 16 hour shifts to meet a deadline or to fix a system problem and then going home and sinking into a deep sleep, only to be woken up by the dog next door. (Oh, just in case anyone cares, the Bad Neighbors With a Dog were white people.)
Life in Ann Arbor wasn't much better. There was the usual noise from dogs and cars in all of the lower-density neighborhoods I could afford to live in. In appartment buildings and dormitories, there were loud stereos, slamming doors, people yelling in hallways, etc.
Being by one's self can be good or bad. Consider the two lead male characters in the musical play Oklahoma. The play opens with Curly (the good guy) out by himself on a horse, looking at the cows and the trees and singing "O, what a beautiful morning!" This is in contrast to Jud Fry, who spends his spare time alone in a smoke house looking at dirty pictures.
In any case, I enjoy being by myself. I also enjoy company and conversation, but I can easily spend long periods of time without those things. I like to write essays and computer programs. I like to think. I like to spend lots of time "inside my head," not in the negative sense of dwelling on the quirks of my life and the werid turns it has taken, but in the positive sense of dealing with abstract ideas of a political or mathematical nature.
This is especially true in the morning. I really don't like talking to anyone beyond saying, "Good morning," with an implied "now leave me alone." Our human intelligence probably evolved originally for social purposes. The use of human intelligence for abstract reasoning might be an odd "perversion" of it, which developed into an evolutionary advantage. Whatever. There are many times when I simply do not want to "think socially." I'm happy in my Platonic world, and if human voices wake me out of it, I don't drown, but I do tend to get annoyed.
In general, I've found living by myself to be much more pleasant than living with other people. This might be difficult to explain. Some people seem to have an "intrusive" personality. They seem to dominate the ambience of a place in a negative way. One moment, I'm by myself, content. Then Person X comes in the room and everything changes. Now, Person X might be a good buddy of mine. I might enjoy going out with X to shoot some pool and have a few beers. But I also don't want X around during the "by myself" phases of the day, not during the intellectual mornings, nor while I'm enjoying the pleasant mindlessness of doing housework in the afternoons.
I'll plead "no contest" to charges of hypersensitivity and, of course, my own quirks tend to annoy people I live with. But this does seem to be a basic part of my nature. I have a serious need for "solitude and silence," which Caitlin Flanagan, writing in The Atlantic Monthly describes as "enduring feminine desires." "No heterosexual man can understand this stuff," she writes, "and no woman with a beating heart and an ounce of femininity can resist it." I should probably write to her and offer myself as a counter example, being male and hetero and understanding it completely. (I'll defend my masculinity by claiming to be a Nietzschan anchorite instead of a Martha Stewart fan.)
Although the desires I have expressed are not 100 percent reliable indicators of poofterism, it is still true that most of the people I've lived and worked with did not understand me. That is a common problem; what it adds up to for me is: I've never had really positive, synergetic work and living situations. In the grand scheme of things, it is not an important issue, but my failed struggle to achieve a situation where I could fulfill my potentials of mind, modest as they are, was one of several factors that encouraged me to think extensively about the possibilities of small scale collectivism.
I like the implicit contradiction here: learning to work with a few people and get along with them in order to avoid the problems associated with living closely with people who do not understand you and who do not share your basic needs and values. Some pursue wealth in order to achieve that avoidance; of those who succeed, some do indeed live a rich life of the mind. Wallace Stevens was a successful businessman and also a fine poet. There are many examples and many counter-examples.
If I could send advice back to the '60s, I'd probably say, to anyone who would listen, which wouldn't be my old self, by the way, because, much to my detriment, I really didn't listen to anyone, "Start a business. Set yourself up with an income stream, then live whatever kind of life you want to live. If you want to build a house in the middle of 160 acres, you will be able to do that." I would do my best to instruct the youth of those days in the occult meaning of the famous counsel, "Plastics!"
These days are different. For one thing, the path to success or job security is much less reliable than it was 30 or 40 years ago. I remember the evening in early 1974 when I started working on my first comuter science homework assignment. "Gosh, this is fun," I thought, "and people actually get paid to do this." That was the beginning of my programming career. For a good while, things went well enough. I parlayed my enthusiasm for bit-twiddlin' arcana into an OK life. BUT -- I didn't have to compete with hundreds of thousands of Geeks Like Me swarming into North America from India, China, Arabia, Japan, Russia, Eastern Europe and anywhere else in the world where American Plutocrats could find alien minds capable of XORing one bit with another.
American society in general is less stable than it used to be, due to war, domestic security concerns, corruption in academia, immigration, globalization of businesses, etc. It's a fair question, will society still be working more or less OK five or ten years from now? That leads to the question, do you want your hopes for a secure, decent life to depend entirely on a presumed continuity of the existing social order and its presumed continuing need for your particular intellectual skills?
I'm suggesting that you might be better off going against a few of your basic inclinations. Instead of trying to be the geekiest math/computer geek in town, concentrate on meeting people, learning about them, understanding their personalities, understanding your own personality. Learn to work well with other people. Learn to live happily with other people. Figure out how to meet the kind of people you can happily live and work with over long periods of time. Develop ways of living that can be sustained even if the national and global economies evanesce like a morning mist. In other words: do everything I didn't do! ;)
For many decades, the geek, the outsider, the lone gunperson, the heroic whack job, the hairy prophet, the degenerate oracle, the backstreet Lazarus, the prodigy, the great intellectual, the pissed off architect with a stick of dynamite, the visionary writer of god's obituary, etc., have been held up to youth of a certain temperament as figures to be emulated. If you believe that one of those archetypes is close to your true calling, then, like Crowley sez, "Do what thou wilt," and there isn't much else to say.
But you might, even at a young age, know that you have some real need, having nothing to do with pecking order ego or astonishing your classmates or creating a public self or playing any kind of game, to do something ultra spiffy with all that exceptional wetware you were born with. You might have a serious, masculine need for solitude and silence. If that is the case, I leave you with one word: "Community!"
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