Lessons Learned Living Alone

The following are some things I have learned after spending the last 8 months living completely alone for the first time, whilst balancing a full time job, hobbies, and whatever else life throws at you.

Disclaimer: I want to start by saying that the previous sentence is a huge overstatement of the facts made purely for sensationalism 😅. I’m not completely alone, I’m living with my lovely fiancée. And it’s not really my first time living alone either. Let’s dive in.

Figuring Things Out

The first time I actually headed out of my parents home was all the way back in 2019, the day I started university. But in that time I wasn’t truly independent, because I still went to my parents house every weekend to handle stuff like laundry, I had a monthly allowance from them, and if I ever needed something they were just a call away.

This setup taught me a lot and lasted for the better part of 4 years, stopped only by a semester of COVID spent at home in complete lockdown. During this time, I went from being a spoiled brat played video games all day because “school was too easy to study”, to actually resembling a fully functional human being.

The first thing I remember learning was to cook. I was by no means good at it, but I loved it and started enjoying preparing all my meals exactly how I wanted them, and felt the liberating freedom of never having to eat boiled fish again (hooray free will!).

Another thing I learned was to manage my money. I am extremely fortunate to have parents that could afford giving me a monthly allowance that covered my rent, utilities, tuition fees, groceries, and left me with a bit of leeway for everything else. I tried using the remaining money wisely, but as every university student knows, that doesn’t always go to plan.

Most of it was spent on going to restaurants with friends, my gym membership, and the train travels I used to meet my girlfriend, which was studying at an entirely different district at the time. I treated it like my salary, and if it ever went to 0, which it got close to a few times, I would force myself to live with what I had instead of asking my parents for more.

As I’m writing this, I’m remembering one such time where it nearly went to zero, in which I had approximately 6€ to last me the whole week. Lucky for me, I kept a great deal of food in stock at the time and I managed to survive just fine.

Finally, it taught me how to manage my time. For the first 4 months of university I probably didn’t even know what a schedule was, and I thought a productive afternoon was arriving home at 13, cooking and cleaning until 15, playing League of Legends until around 19:30, having dinner, and then watching a show or calling my girlfriend. I’m still shocked at how I didn’t become the number 1 student of my class that semester, but such is life.

When my frontal lobe fully developed¹, I started to grasp that studying was going to be an inevitable necessity and decided to add some structure to my life. COVID really helped with this because at my parents house there really wasn’t that much to do, so I had some time to research the best ways to manage my time.

This whole productivity thing ended up becoming a small hobby of mine, and every semester I improved upon the last, until I felt like I really did have everything I needed to be a successful student (not saying that I did, though I didn’t fare as terribly as first semester me would have thought).

Finally Entering Adult Life

Fast forward a few years and in July 2024 I graduate university, went back to my parents house, and in October I land my first job, a fully remote software engineering position at a German company. This was both a great achievement and a big test. Great achievement because at just 23 I already hade a dream job with a great salary and what many would consider a “perfect life”, but a great test as well because with all this freedom, it would be incredibly easy to fall into bad habits and become a slop, just like in the first days at university, but with the risk of getting fired.

Driven by fear of being jobless and the experience I gained from uni, I managed just fine while living with my parents. I had few responsibilities regarding the house itself, only really having to take care of my bedroom, and meals were mostly taken care of for me, so I couldn’t really ask for more.

I would wake up rather early, watch some YouTube, work until around 16:30 and then head to the gym. By then I would just lounge around, eat dinner, and then head to bed to do it all over again. Life was simple, and life was good. So of course I had to change it.

Fast-forward a few months and me and my (at the time) girlfriend² had the brilliant idea of moving out, and finally start our life together in complete independence. No more going to our parents home on weekends, no more meals done for us. This was it, the moment we truly started living alone. And let’s just say that things quickly started getting rough.

First, the act of finding a house was by itself nightmarish, as the Portuguese marketplace is severely overvalued and houses are either incredibly expensive, or look like modern cells. When we finally found one, we then had to do what I consider the most adult thing I ever did: contracting utilities.

One by one things started to slowly become “ours”. The furniture was “recycled” from my first ever house, which was in the process of being sold. Then, we got our electricity contract. Then, the water. A week and a bit after moving, we had internet (yes, I was using my mobile hotspot to work from home up to this moment). And finally, after a first failed inspection and some drama, gas.

After the initial chaos, we started realizing one very, very important thing about living alone: The free time you have is not as free as you think. Sure, you can just wake up at 8, have breakfast, clock in for work at 9 and clock out at 18, get home and watch TV, order takeout, and go to bed. This is doable, for sure, and its awesome. But is it really sustainable?

After a while, the house gets dirty, so you have to spend some time cleaning it. Then you notice all your clothes smell like sweat and despair, so you have to wash them, dry them, iron them, and fold them. One day, you look at your bank account balance and notice that ordering takeout has cost you half your salary in just 2 weeks! You start cooking, but that means going to buy groceries, preparing the meals, cleaning the dishes and the kitchen, and making sure the stuff you have in the fridge isn’t rotting (something always is). Oh, and you don’t want to waste away at your life by just laying in the couch, so you also need to workout or at least move a bit in order to not grow obese. Oh, and…

You get the point. Things pile up, and they pile up quickly³. And I’m not even including the things you “get” to do like visiting your family, going to the movies, playing video games and whatnot. Living this life for about 3 months is quite manageable, but at some point things start to get hard, fatigue builds up and you start feeling drained from the endless amount of stuff you have to do on repeat without end until the day you die. And as it creeps into everyone, it also crept into me.

By around August, after things settling down from the first month and a half of chaos, we decided it was time for a change. We would have to fight back for our time, and make it intentionally ours. The first thing we did was regarding food.

Having to cook for an hour a day and then store leftovers and whatnot was sucking away our precious after-work hours, so we decided to give meal prepping a try. Every Sunday, we would cook all our meals for the week and then just reheat them as needed. The first month of trying this out were horrible. It was peak summer, so there were almost 30º at night, and we were in a kitchen with an oven and 3 burners on for about 3 hours. Yeah, not the most pleasant experience.

As the temperature dropped so did our tension, and we slowly picked up a rhythm. The first time was nearly 4 hours, but after a while, we were getting done in a little over 2 hours and without much hassle, and the free hours in the evening were amazing. Recently, we simplified our meals even more so it only takes us about 90 minutes on the weekend. Epic gains, I would add.

Then came clothes. Batching too many things onto the weekend is not really feasible (there are only so many hours to a Sunday), so this is done more iteratively. We workout a lot, so almost everyday there are clothes being washed. In the Winter, drying them was nightmarish, even with a dehumidifier things took often more than a full day to dry off. With the weather starting to improve now, we can happily offload this task a bit more to the sun. As for the rest, we iron them and fold them while watching TV. Yeah, peak efficiency.

Cleaning is a bit of a work in progress. I admittedly am terrible at it, but I’m lucky to have my fiancée pick up a lot of slack in here. We try to do the hardest stuff while the other is also working, so I will be prepping the meals while she cleans the bathroom, or I vacuum while she is putting a load in the washer. I also make use of working from home keep things tidy where I can, even though leaving the flow state can get quite challenging at times.

The final and probably most noticeable thing we did was a little mindset shift that gave us the feeling of control back (something you definitely lose when being overwhelmed with chores). We noticed that in the after-work hours we were mostly just lounging around like zombies, trying to decompress from the stresses of the day and preparing ourselves from the next. There was really no energy to do productive stuff during the week at this point.

Our solution was to start waking up earlier. We both get up at 6:30 to do our own stuff. I go running, and she takes her time to get ready, do her hair, and prepare a healthy breakfast, a ritual she has come to love. This ensures that our most precious energy is spent on us and our interests, instead of making work our first priority. After clocking off, we try to go to the gym (not always a successful undertaking), and then eat and pretend we are bound to the sofa. These are no-guilt hours, and it makes a world of difference.

Cracking the Adulting Code

Even with all this micro-optimizing, there are still hard days where even stuff like showering feels like a chore, but I have come to accept that this is simply a tradeoff of living with intention. When you try to do it all, eventually something is bound to suffer. And that’s ok. Going light for a day or two and ordering some takeout, waking up a bit later and entering “bare essentials” mode works wonders from time to time. Just don’t let it become the norm.

I have said often to my friends that I have a lot more free time as an adult than when I was a student, and I still think that is true. In university, I would have to study/work on projects for a lot longer than what work lasts. Even my weekends were spent mostly studying. Now, I know that when the clocks strikes 17:00, I can mostly just be done with the day.

The only difference is that I choose to spend that free time trying to maintain a good house, a good body, and a good mind, which to some people feels like additional work. And sometimes, it does to me as well. But that is a choice I would make again and again without thinking twice. The freedom of living alone and living life exactly how you want it is probably the most liberating thing I have come to experience. Really, you should try it one day. Just be sure that it won’t always be easy. As with life in general, most things rarely are.

Sic Parvis Magna

— Motto of Sir Francis Drake

Footnotes

1. Suffering a tiny improvement is a more truthful statement, as I’m not sure if even today it is fully developed ↩

2. Re-reading this makes it seem like we broke up, but actually she just got upgraded to the fiancée package ↩

3. And I didn’t even include having kids, because for the lunatics that decide having them, this seems like the most relaxing week of the year ↩