What Is It Worth To Us To Live Alone

The most recent episode of Anna Sale’s podcast “Death, Sex, and Money,” which is a house favorite around here, focuses on people living alone and liking it — mostly. The benefits are real: getting to bake at all hours, to wear nothing but underwear, to blast music only you like. The financial burden is real, too. As one interviewee says, “Living alone near Boulder is really expensive. But it is worth every penny.”

Anna explains:

Living by yourself does mean having no one to split your bills with. But it isn’t something that only rich people are doing. Last year, people who lived alone had a median income of about 28 thousand dollars.

It’s not just the rich or even the comfortably middle-class who are flying solo, in other words. It’s normals who are prioritizing their alone time, regardless of the cost.

The phenomenon isn’t a particularly American one, either. A couple of years ago, the Guardian wrote about the global rise in people living by themselves:

the number of people living alone globally is skyrocketing, rising from about 153 million in 1996 to 277 million in 2011 — an increase of around 80% in 15 years. In the UK, 34% of households have one person living in them and in the US it’s 27%.

Contemporary solo dwellers in the US are primarily women: about 18 million, compared with 14 million men. The majority, more than 16 million, are middle-aged adults between the ages of 35 and 64. The elderly account for about 11 million of the total. Young adults between 18 and 34 number more than 5 million, compared with 500,000 in 1950, making them the fastest-growing segment of the solo-dwelling population. Unlike their predecessors, people who live alone today cluster together in metropolitan areas.

Sweden has more solo dwellers than anywhere else in the world, with 47% of households having one resident; followed by Norway at 40%. In Scandinavian countries their welfare states protect most citizens from the more difficult aspects of living alone. In Japan, where social life has historically been organised around the family, about 30% of all households have a single dweller, and the rate is far higher in urban areas. The Netherlands and Germany share a greater proportion of one-person households than the UK. And the nations with the fastest growth in one-person households? China, India and Brazil.

The more dubious New York Times adds its two cents in an article from the same year called “The Freedom, and Perils, of Living Alone.”

a stealth P.R. campaign seems to be taking place, as though living alone were a political candidate trying to burnish its image. … the single-occupant home can be a breeding ground for eccentricities. Think of Claire Danes’s C.I.A. employee in “Homeland,” who turns her Georgetown one-bedroom into a control bunker for an ad hoc spying operation. Or Kramer on “Seinfeld,” washing vegetables in the shower or deciding, on a whim, to ditch his furniture in favor of ‘levels.’

Do you think there’s a still a stigma to doing your own thing, housing-wise? How much have you paid/sacrificed to not return to the land of roommates, or how much would you, if you could?

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