Somewhat introvert (INTJ), 40, Hamburg, Germany.
During all this time I had a fairly stable circle of friends and acquaintances (about 40 people, which is about the number of guests on our wedding reception). Some informal get togethers from during my flat sharing years developed into a monthly custom which always gathers 5 to 25 guests (somewhat random participation; some always some seldom, some on and off).
The key insight of this Discussion for me is Viliam_Burs comment (http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/j3q/happiness_and_productivity_living_alone_living/a2fe ) that there should be an outcome-oriented community. I do not really have that. I recently realized that I am missing a community that is challenging. The job is not really such a community for me (it is too small and not exactly challenging). LW is nice but an online community can go only so far. I wondered whether an LW meetup (which I might organize) could provide that. Would you recommend that?
Or are meetups more of the first type? Is that an interesting side question? How do LW Meetups factor in the feelings vs. outcome dimension?
I would guess that most meetups are of the community-oriented type, and I think this is good -- otherwise busy people would completely stop attending the meetups.
But there is an opportunity to explicitly create an outcome-oriented subgroup at the meetup. Ask people how many of them are willing to invest at least X hours (beware the planning fallacy) between now and the following meetup to participate on a group project. Then take these people aside and select a project that could be done with the available energy (again, beware the planning fallacy). Preco...
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.