I'm 90% extrovert, live in São Paulo, am 27.
My experience of living with my father from 15-25 has been interesting for many reasons: Learning to accept that different people have different thresholds of tolerance for noise, dirt, social interaction, how active you are in the morning etc... More than anything dinner time was a time to share the perks and perils of our day, like many tribal societies do. We lead very different lives (philosopher and EA versus engineer at a big company).
Currently I live alone and my girlfriend comes over frequently. I don't like living alone. Probably I should hate living alone, but the human mind is not that good at attaching the right emotions to the right consequences, as anyone in the EA movement, or anyone who ever ate unhealthy sweets can tell. Living alone puts the entire burden of responsibility on what I do with my time on me. All the thresholds are my thresholds. The house is exactly as I tolerate it to be (modulo when my GF comes), The daily happenings are exactly what I allow to penetrate my attention. Sounds like great for productivity right? but it isn't. The LW study hall helps when the problem is just feeling lonely. But nothing helps when the problem is needing outside random input from someone whose ideas you care about.
Thus I envy people who live with friends. I envy them only less than people who work with what they love with friends. They have someone to talk to about the things they are excited without having to use the web or go out to meet a friend to do it. (in a big city, meeting someone could remove 1 hour from your day due to traffic). I've also heard people saying that the best heuristic is to live with friends who are not your very best friends, since cohabiting causes friction between close friends.
What I want to get people to discuss here is obvious given the title. What has been their experience regarding who and specially how many people they live with, and how that impacted their motivation and happiness.
I don't want to peruse papers on happiness and productivity, because I'm particularly interested in anecdotal tales coming from a Lesswrong sample.
Three pieces of information seem relevant, so if that is okay with whoever comments, I'd ask people to tell us if they consider themselves introverts (recharge batteries by being alone) extroverts, or both. As well as their age and hometown.
The reason I want to have a fuller understanding of this is that I've slowly come to have a strong belief that the main problem with people I know who are suffering, or failing to achieve their goals, is living with fewer tribal affiliates than they "need". And that belief could very well be false or biased.
I'm equally interested in what people think in general about their friends' living situation: "Most of my friends who live with friends experience such and such emotion, but the ones who live with family experience such and such problems with motivation"
as I am in personal experiences.
Following a suggestion about creating topics like this before, I'll put my own case in the comments.