Living With Roommates
For those of you that know me personally, you should know that I take great care to keep my personal space clean.
On the other hand, I live with four other guys in the same apartment. Five guys in college living together does not result in a clean apartment. When the apartment you live in is large enough to house five people, it also becomes the perfect place for both the pregame and postgame. Sometimes, you wake up in the morning to this unholy sight:
And when you’re the neat freak of the apartment, you can’t stand seeing your living space in that condition. So you can find yourself spending more than a couple of hours cleaning.
We had another party the very next day…
On paper, I should hate living with them. My roommates and I are opposites in many ways. I prefer keeping the environment quiet and calm. My roommates enjoy blasting karaoke throughout the apartment regardless of the day or hour (even at 1am during finals week). I prefer to chill out or study quietly in my room. My roommates like going out to bars, clubs, and raves (weekdays included). I like keeping things extremely clean. My roommates… well, you saw the pictures.1
Surprisingly, deciding to room with the four of them has been my best decision in college. If didn’t room with them, I would be living life exactly how I would want to. The apartment would be squeaky clean with everything organized properly. There would be no huge party with excessive alcohol to clean up after. I’d have a cozy and quiet place to myself and things would have been pretty terrible.
Yes you read that right. Things would have been terrible.
The Comfort Zone Trap
Living with others is inherently stress inducing because you’re living with someone who you might not be compatible with. Because everyone grows up differently and has different perspectives, lifestyle differences are guaranteed. As a roommate, you have to learn to tolerate all their habits that annoy you daily.
Had I lived alone, I would have removed the large source of stress living with others entails. Yet, I probably would have signed myself up for a year of loneliness and general unhappiness. Knowing myself, if I had a nice cozy clean and quiet place, I would just stay in my apartment and keep to myself. I would remove everything that could possibly cause me any stress and discomfort and operate well within the boundaries of my comfort zone. But removing all potentially uncomfortable situations is a recipe for disaster. It limits ones ability and openness to experiencing new things. Without my roommates, I simply would have been a hermit with little to no social life.
Instead, by having roommates, I inevitably found myself in situations I found somewhat discomforting at first. At times, they would blast EDM, a genre of music I found distasteful initially, for hours on end in the living room. Other times, they hosted parties with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Sometimes, they dragged me to go workout with them in the gym. In other words, they simply pushed me out of my comfort zone and got me to try new things.
As a result of getting pushed out of my comfort zone, here’s some stuff I got to do within the year:
- Worked out consistently and got in better shape2
- Went to bars / clubs / parties / raves
- Met a lot of fun people I wouldn’t have otherwise
- Took a trip to the ER on Halloween
While it does suck to have to deal with the unpleasantries that comes from living with others at times, (like having to clean up after parties), deciding to room with others has truly been the biggest blessing in disguise. Experiencing new situations this year has helped me see other perspectives in life. and has significantly improved my social life. Trying new things is hard and uneasy at first, but it has definitely made me happier over this past year.
I still prefer to stay in and study on the weekends rather
than go chill at a bar, club, or ER room, despite my roommates’
terrible influence on me to try new things.
I still consider myself the same computer science nerd that I always was.
It’s just this time, I’m a computer science nerd who has
gotten to experience things I might not have otherwise.