Embracing social interactions at my new job

This week has been my first week at a job outside of the house for the first time in 13 years. I wanted a job outside of the house because, while working at home was something very cool at first, over time I realized it's just not for me. It's too easy to get sucked into antisocial patterns. And there's something to be said about leaving the house, having to leave the house. When you work at home you wake up in the same place, you go to work in the same place, when you're done with work and you're off work and you relax, it's in the same place.

And I suppose that would be more workable if your job was something creative. Like a painter, or a novelist, or a blogger, even a YouTuber. Because you can deal with some of that change by setting up a room or an area, like a garage or a shed, to create some sort of separation between your areas where you live and the areas where you work. In general, I never had much luck with that. And I think, as well, I underestimated the value of shallow interactions. I know sometimes shallow is used as a negative word, but what I mean here is, when you go to work and you talk to people, quote-unquote, around the water cooler, just shooting the breeze, passing the day, that's a shallow relationship in the sense that you're not deeply involved in each other's lives. You're just kind of chatting and that's kind of like the extent of your relationship.

But there's something wonderful about those, because you just get to interact and you get to talk, but you don't have a deep commitment to every single person. So you can just kind of enjoy the act of socializing. So that's so far been proven to be true. This week, interacting with my new co-workers has been quite enjoyable. And it has actually cleared up a lot of my, I guess the word will be neuroses. And it proves the point that I've been kind of working on for a while in dealing with matters of some sort of mental health, which is being alone alone is not something the brain deals with well. The human brain is social. So you kind of start to go nuts if you spend too much time alone. I guess that's the quickest way to say it. Not to say that I was going nuts, but I'm starting to see symptoms of that.

You know, over time you can develop things like hypochondria. Hypochondria is actually a big one, right? Because you're sitting at home alone working. One of the only things you really have to pay attention to other than work and like, you know, your home environment and maybe whoever you live with is your own body. So all these little minor things that came from being alone. Yeah. They clear up just like that when you start interacting with people on a regular basis. Plus it's just kind of fun to be around people. And I think I never valued that enough in the past. I think sometimes it's easy for people like me who are introverted, who do enjoy spending time alone. It's easy for us to not value social time at all because we think, well, if I enjoy time alone, then maybe I will enjoy more time alone. And then when you have that more, you're like, what if I have more time alone? Certain point you cross the line.

I was feeling for a long time that I crossed that line. I actually intended, when I hit record on this, I intended to talk about something else and this was going to be my preamble, but I think this is, I guess this is important for me to get out too, that I'm noticing changes in my brain from working outside of the house. And one of those changes also is that I happen to work in a job, I work in a warehouse actually. I don't have to use a computer at all during the day. I don't have to use my phone at all during the day, so I don't. I put my phone in my bag in the morning and I don't look at it until it's time to go home and clock out.

And my default network is cooking. The default network, the place that your brain goes when you're not constantly overstimulating it. So I'm doing little meticulous things at the office and I'm interacting with people and I'm just, sometimes there's a little bit of silence. We generally have like the radio going or something. There's always some sort of noise of some sort, but it's not something I'm actively consuming. It's just something that's in the background. Whereas all this time that I've been home alone, I've been actively consuming things. And what I mean by that is picking something and telling myself, I want to pay attention to this. You know, like if I put on an album, I'm not putting it on in the background, I'm putting it on because I'm saying I want to listen to this album. I put on a podcast, it's because I want to listen to this podcast.

But music that's playing in the background that you didn't turn on, that you're not controlling, it's different. It doesn't overstimulate you in the same way. So I think the clarity that comes from your mind being allowed to rest and relax, and then also the positive growth stimulation that comes from interacting with people is having a very interesting effect. I have some ideas about that, but I think this has been long enough, but I just wanted to, I don't know, I just wanted to, it's important to me that even though I'm choosing to work full-time, and some days I come home like today, and I'm just exhausted because I exerted myself physically a lot during the day today. It's important to me to continue to maintain things like this podcast, to remember to come back and still find time to do episodes. And in fact, I'm not even watching TV at night when I come home just so that I can make sure that the things that I do in my free time are things I value. And this is one of those things.