The mope factor

For me, a big part of creating a coworking space is about Dodging The Mope. I have a really, really nice home office but sometimes I go to a coffee shop just to remind myself I’m not alone.

And sometimes I realize I’ve let a little too much time go by without getting out of the house. Something will happen to remind me that being alone all the time can make me a little kooky.

For example, I can be a little absentminded. OK, I can be very absentminded. One day I lost my laptop. In my home. I looked and I looked and I looked and I couldn’t find it so finally I just decided to stop looking. I knew I hadn’t left the house. I figured it was probably right in front of me and I just wasn’t seeing it. I knew it would turn up.

I got back to work on another computer.

Eventually, I came downstairs to get something to eat. There it was. In the fridge.

Another day I couldn’t find my keys. Again, I got frustrated with myself. I scoured the house with no luck. I started retracing my steps and was appalled to realize that I hadn’t left the house in 3 days. I hadn’t even been to the store. At least when I was a smoker I was running out to get cigarettes.

Not leaving the house is seriously not good for me. I have dogs now, which ensures that I get out of the house at least once most days, and with a couple of friendly border collies I’m pretty much guaranteed some human interaction. We all need that.

I moved here from Madison. Up there, I had a circle of friends. There was always something to do and someone to call. When I moved here I thought I’d have commuity here, too, that it would just happen. But I didn’t just happen. It kind of freaked me out. I hated it. It was hard to have community because I worked a night shift so I was awake when most people were sleeping and asleep when most people were awake. It was just awful.

Then I got laid off and decided to start my own company. At that point, I had a lot of friends but I still didn’t have a group to hang out with in the off hours.

It took me a long time but I now have community again. Oddly enough, I think figuring out how to rebuild community came from when I went on a trip around the world by myself. That might sound lonely, but it wasn’t. I wasn’t. If I had been traveling with someone else, we would’ve talked mostly to each other. This way, I had to meet other people. I needed conversation. I forced myself to meet people. And people came to me, too. Because they also needed community.

I’m not trying to say that LaunchPad Coworking is the equivalent of a EurailPass. And you probably won’t be in vacation mode when you’re here working. But there is that tendency, when you’re working in isolation all the time, to get to that mopey place I was in when I first moved to Austin and I was missing my old friends. I couldn’t figure out where to go to find people like me. Now I’m building that place.

You can’t keep your laptop in the fridge here, but at least if you lose your keys there will be people around to help you find them.