Social Energy

Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote this post about my finite amount of social energy. At the time, I had (once again) moved from mostly being a programmer into full-time management. As I expressed then, my regular work day demanded that I "talk to anyone about anything at any time."

By the time I got home at the end of the day, I was spent. As a proud and acknowledged introvert, I would grab dinner and immediately hide in my room for an hour or two, just to be alone. Once I had recharged my batteries, I would appear once again to catch up with my family or to hang out with friends.

In my life, I have a limited amount of "people time" in any given day. If I spend it all at work then I'm much less likely to want to hang out with people outside of work that same day. Extroverts get energy from being with people, whilst introverts generally find that it requires some effort and it gradualy tires them out. Not to say that extroverts hate being by themselves or that introverts don't like to be in groups, that's not true at all. It's just that one type of person gets pumped while the other type finds it deflating, and the opposite is true when these two types of people spent time by themselves.

Anyway, I wanted to follow up on that old post with an update. In December, I left my job as a director at AV-BASE Systems and I started to work from home while trying to help found a new company. Wow, has that change ever had a drastic effect on my social life.

I now work in my bedroom for most of the day. The only regular interaction I have with anyone is with my dad once in a while as we discuss his rant of the day and my many percolating thoughts. As a direct result, I find that I have a burning desire to hang out with people in the evenings.

Some weeks, I schedule six or seven days with people in a row, which is quite the phenomenon for me. I know that type of planning is just par for the course for some people but I don't remember doing that intentionally ever before in my life. I have gotten more involved in planning Young Adult activities, I've gone to concerts and plays, I've visited a class at Fanshawe, I've helped JP campaign for president of student council at Fanshawe, I've hosted poker parties and I have started to develop an entirely new circle of friends.

And to add strange to odd, I now find it frustrating when well-laid plans to hang out with certain friends fall through. When I was busy as a manager, I would actually welcome social cancellations. And now, even though most times these cancellations are for good reasons, I find that I am rather disappointed. In a single week recently, I had five friends cancel on plans that we had and, uncharacteristically, that actually bothered me quite a bit on an emotional level.

Life is funny sometimes. My long-term goals are actually to get back into management at some point 'cause I love to help people develop and succeed. These days, I think that I like management even more than I like programming, which is a small revelation for me. I look forward to doing that again in the future but for now, I'll just enjoy all of this extra time with my friends.