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Notes -
You can‘t really live your life in expectation, it‘s exhausting. Think of all the men who make themselves presentable, go out, and carry an „emergency condom“, that never gets used. Those hours grooming, and cleaning up their rooms, have terrible ROI. I also weep for the nofappers, who forgo hundreds of orgasms in the hope of maybe one. That math cannot compute.
It‘s one thing to make an effort when you know someone‘s coming; it‘s another to do it for the remote chance that someone might be coming – purely for the sake of the panopticon, for the unseen seer, the social conscience. You don‘t want to be one of those people who could never take a sabbatical because they‘re afraid of a hypothetical HR guy asking them what this hole in the CV was. And what's the point of being alone if you can't let a sock rest on the floor once in a while?
That said, when I spend a few months barely talking to anyone, I talk to myself more often. That‘s perfectly fine of course, balance is maintained. The problem is, I start doing it in the presence of others who are currently talking to me. While they tell me their day or vacation, I mutter to myself about something else, because I have lost my tolerance for social boredom. Which isn‘t fine; considered by fellow humans as neither friendly nor sane behaviour. But maybe they're being social-normative, and I'm actually giving them valuable feedback on their skill as a raconteur.
Your comment is a reasonable reply to what I wrote, but my intention was not to suggest that cleaning one's house (a whole house, in the case I was referring to) is to be done necessarily for the sake of would-be callers, but because of personal pride. Like, have a little self-respect. But I'm often intolerably judgmental to my friends, who very kindly tolerate what must seem like my routinely condescending views.
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