Starting a company can be lonely, lonely work if you’re not careful.
If you’re in bootstrap mode, with the majority of the work falling on your shoulders, there’s often not a lot of time to spend doing other things. Like, say, socializing. Years ago when I worked from home, I found myself going out for coffee when there was perfectly good (and cheaper) coffee in the kitchen, simply for the social interaction of saying “grande mild in a mug, please” to the barista.
This year I’ve been in an office environment, so I get the change of scenery, but it’s an office with a door that I keep closed so I can focus on my work. My staff are all remote and we communicate by email. The end result is I can go 8-10 hours at a stretch without talking to a single human being. For multiple days in a row. It’s a kind of loneliness that’s easy to miss when you’re staring intently on the screen, but it seeps into the rest of the day.
It used to be much worse – my first office didn’t have any windows. I started in the winter at the height of SAD season. That was really, really dumb.
So what, right? Boo hoo, a bit of loneliness doesn’t really hurt anything more than your feelings, right? I’m not so sure. I was reading the latest Wired feature on the six “fake cosmonauts” who spent 520 days simulating a trip to Mars by living in a mockup of a space capsule with just 775 square feet of space (interestingly, they’ll “land” back on Earth on Saturday.)
Here’s the money quote from a doctor who works in Antarctica, where people are similarly isolated (emphasis added):
“I was busy all the time with mental health issues,” he says. “Over time, isolated people undergo social narrowing. They stop eating in the cafeteria; they just take food back to their rooms. Their IQ goes down 5 to 10 points. They lose all affect. There’s little inflection in their voices. You look into their eyes and you think, their lights are on, but they’re not home.”
And here I thought I was doing well by not falling into the 20 hour workday trap by focusing on being as productive as I can be from 8-6.
Photo by Son of Groucho
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