Permanence in Change

As regular readers know, I’m not good about being stuck in one place, or in one job, for too long. In the eleven years since I started D4D, I’ve moved house no less than eight times – and had more jobs than that, by quite a margin.  (Not too surprising, being an IT contractor, but all the same)

At the moment I’m quite happy with the little house I’m renting. People are forever telling me that renting is Bad, that it’s dead money, all I’m doing is paying my landlord’s mortgage, I’ve got nothing to show for it, etc. etc. ad nauseam. But for me, renting works. I’m happy with it, and that’s really all that matters.

I like change. I like new workplaces, new living locations, etc. – but even more than that, I like having the ability to change. I don’t have to do it (although if everything is stable for too long it starts to scratch in the back of my brain, and I know something needs to be different) but I like being able to do so.  Being locked into something – or even the feeling of being locked in – makes me feel kind of claustrophobic, pressured, weighed down.

With renting, I know that if I want, I can move anywhere else, and just find somewhere to live. I don’t have to worry about selling the house, going through all the legal processes, waiting for chains of people to sell and move. I can give my notice, find somewhere near, and move on. If I got the offer of a dream job that’s not manageable from where I am now, I could easily move.  Equally, if something goes wrong, I can call the landlord, and it’s their problem for fixing it. I don’t need to source workmen, get estimates, take time off work, etc.  I’m happy with that situation.

In my head, ‘dead money’ is the interest on a mortgage. I look at the loan illustrations, the “If you borrow £200,000, the total amount repaid will be just over £370,000” (and yes, BW,I did check – £200,000 90% mortgage over 25 years, monthly payment of £1,238.94 =£371,682 ). I see that extra £170,000 of interest as dead money, cash that’s gone to a bank instead of wherever I want to have spent it.  Yes, a house could be “an investment”, if I come out after [x] years having made it more valuable and so on. But there’s no guarantees of that, and for whatever reason, my brain just doesn’t work on those timescales.

In the current workplace, everyone else has worked for the same company for at least five years. That just brings me out in shudders, I can’t deny it. The idea of being in one place, one company, listening to the same people for five years? Jesus.

It’s coming up to time to renew my tenancy on the current house – and the odds are that I’m going to take another 12-month tenancy on it. If I get through that without needing to move, I think it’ll be one of the longest-term places I’ve stayed. I’ve already been there 18 months (well, 18 months at the start of November) so another extension will put it at two-and-a-half years.

Of course, in that time I’ve changed jobs/contracts a few times, which is probably how come I’ll be happy in one house for longer than usual. So long as there’s change within life, I can live with it being in one bit or t’other (or even both). It’s just stability and stagnation that freaks me out for whatever reason.

I don’t know why my brain works in this way, I don’t know why I prefer change to stability. All I know is that it’s how I work.

Lone vs. Lonely

The other day I was talking to a friend about relationships and the like, and part of the conversation was about being single versus being in a relationship. The follow-on question was “But aren’t you lonely?”

For me, I’m actually quite happy being single, and getting on with things. I know some people need to be with someone, and some are even shit-scared of being on their own – I currently work with a couple of people like that, in utterly crap relationships but won’t split up because it’s still ‘better than being single’, which drives me berserk – but I’m simply not one of them.

Sometimes I feel I’m actually better at being single than I am at being in a relationship. In general I’m too independent for my own good, but sometimes in relationships I’m also too easy-going, happier to go with doing what the other person wants than necessarily what I want to do. The stupid thing is that I know I’m doing it, and sometimes it annoys me that I’m not doing my own stuff – but it annoys me even more that I’m getting annoyed about it. Which isn’t particularly sane, smart or healthy.

I also know people who don’t like going out and doing things on their own, primarily because of how they think other people will perceive them. As regular readers (what few there are) of D4D™ know, I don’t give much of a stuff about what other people think of me. I’m absolutely happy to go off to the cinema on my own, to go out to places, even to take a holiday on my own. (Although I’m spectacularly bad at holidays anyway, and really should change that aspect of myself more than most others!)  Probably the only thing I’m less good about when single is going out for meals, or drinking. Even those aren’t truly about other people’s perceptions of me, but more that if I go out for food, I like that to be a shared experience, a meal enjoyed rather than for fuel.  And drinking on my own is just a slope I don’t want to get onto.

All told, I’m content being single and living my own life.  A lot of it is solo, but I never really feel lonely. I know I have good friends across the country, and that – for me – is what matters. I don’t need (or want) to be in their pockets/lives all the time, and I find that makes the times when we are together all the more valuable.  Additionally, I have a wide range of contacts and friends through Facebook and Twitter, and I tend to stay in contact through those mediums (media?) on a regular basis anyway. I perceive those conversations and contacts as being the same as (or at least similar to) a phone conversation, an email, or even a face-to-face chat, so a lot of the time I don’t even feel like I am alone. (And in truth I’m not alone, because of those friends and conversations. We’re just not physically close, but in every other aspect of friendship and contact, we are)

As per the title, I feel/find that I’m more Lone than Lonely, and that’s fine with me.