I have experienced three ways of living: 1) with my mother, 2) alone, 3) with my girlfriend. It is difficult to evaluate the impact of the first two options, because that also happens to be a difference between my school years and work years.

During the school years when I lived with my mother, I was most productive. The school gave me a fixed schedule when I had to leave my home (which made all other activities outside of my home less trivially inconvenient, which in my case matters a lot). I didn't have a good relationship with my mother, and that fact encouraged me to spend even more time outside. So despite being introverted, I met many interesting people and did a few interesting things. (For example I was a coordinator of Amnesty International in Slovakia, or an amateur editor of a science-fiction magazine.) From inside, I was always funny and laughing outside of my home, and silent and depressed at home; people who knew me in one of these modes would probably not recognize me in the other one.

When I ended school, I strongly focused on making money and relatively soon bought my own home. I lost most of my social networks. Living in my own home worked like magic for my self-esteem and inner peace. No one there to criticize me every day and make fun of everything I consider valuable. My personality became stable, calm... and rather lazy and probably a bit boring, I have to admit. Gradually I started spending more time alone at home, on internet. I missed the contact with cool people, but I wasn't strategic enough to find a solution. So to have some interesting interaction and communicate with cool people, I spent even more time at the internet, etc. Luckily, a very good friend of mine lived just a few streets away from me. We spent a lot of time talking and playing computer games together.

Now my girlfriend is living with me, significantly improving my life. She provides me social contact on those days when I only go to work and back home. She invites me to some social activities, I invite her, and then we have interesting things to discuss. She also reads LW; and generally, she is smart. In addition of all other benefits of having a girlfriend, it is so good to have a smart and rational person near to interact with on a daily basis. It feels like living in a saner world.

In general I consider myself introverted, because I don't mind doing an interesting project alone for hours (though it is difficult to resist the templation of going online instead), and I feel comfortable in smaller groups talking about meaningful topics, and uncomfortable trying to have a small talk in a large group. This is partially a consequence of lack of some social skills, and the fact that I consider many people painfully boring. With more interesting people around me, I am sure I would spend more time socially and feel less exhausted by it; but my social activity would probably still be less than average.

For decades I dream about having a tribe of people like me here. I know a few individuals that would pass my filter. With better social skills and better strategy, I could find some more. Not sure if they have a desire for such tribe, and whether they would accept each other, though. (One negative piece of evidence is that LW exists, I have translated over a hundred articles to my language and posted them on facebook, we had a few LW meetups here... so, if there were many people thinking like me, they would already come running.) There are some similar tribes which I should explore; I am doing it, just extremely slowly. I believe that a small group of x-rational people acting together could visibly improve the environment around them. I would like to have both a nice tribe to belong to and satisfy my social needs and do some local optimization. At this moment, I can only have the two things separately (support some goood cause with my work or money, and hang around with irrational people).