I live in a room. It is called an apartment and my toilet is separated by a door with a lock, but otherwise it is one room. When I am home I am in this one room. I play the piano, make food, play video games, read books, hang up my laundry, watch TV, work from home, draw, have sex, write, cry, laugh, eat in that one room. I consider myself lucky to be able to do all those things at home. To be fair I like my little room. I like my introverted hobbies and I am excited about the technologies that allow so much of the world's information and entertainment to flow into my room. I care deeply about internet and people being able to connect and create identities online. In some ways it is something romantic about it. Maybe even spiritual. The material world and my means in it are limited, ascetic even. The digital world is endless. Continuously in the making by billions of human minds. Everything ever known, available to me in my tiny room.
During Covid I lived in apartment with 3 rooms + a bathroom. I lived with my ex at the time and I felt that the situation was tolerable. We got enough space to be apart and to be together. In my new apartment there's just me and my room. Now I live in a different block. A huge soviet looking concrete monsters. It has balconies on one side and small square windows on the other. A lover who visited me said that in the evening the little square windows are like a hundred small different stages into peoples lives. Hundred little rooms, with hundred little lives.
If I stay single, remain my un-ambitious self and the world outside keeps progressing the way that it does. Then maybe this one room is my best case scenario. My present and my future. At least I am not alone in this condition.
6 months ago video essayist Ben Geller published a "The Future is an Empty Room". That video is much better than this text. Go watch it if you are able. The video presents different sci-fi media in which the future mainly takes place in one room where the character have access to the rest of the world through digital communication, but can't or won't leave the room on regular basis. Like in a spaceship, in a world where earth is a desolate wasteland or when society is ravaged by an epidemic. Of course society couldn't go on if everyone was confined to a room. Someone needs to make food, provide energy and so fort. But it is one of those sci-fi predictions that feels very realistic emotionally, at least for me. The room I have is even stocked up on water, food and batteries in case of an emergency. If a situation comes to pass where I actually can't leave my room. I could survive there alone and completely isolated for at least a couple of days. My room is my safe little bunker-spaceship I travel to the future in. I am not sure if it is comforting or scary. Or if it is scary that I find it comforting.