If you haven’t nailed down your housing for next year by this point, your options are becoming more limited as you read this. Which is fine. Don’t panic. Keep reading.

Collaborating with friends can be a pain in the buns and can be the first step toward drowning your friendships in tension and passive aggressiveness. Or maybe you’re holding out on your older sibling who’s thinking of living in Chambana to room with you. It’s a great plan, seeing as how you were able to get your homework done every day living with them in high school.

Or maybe you hate all your friends. Or they hate you. Or you don’t have any. Whatever. All I know is that after neglecting my housing needs for two entire semesters, I found an apartment on Fourth and Chalmers streets with water, electricity and Internet included and a nine-month lease.

If the notion of finding a perfect place to live that accommodates you and your friends’ obsessive-compulsive desires seems a tad daunting, feel free to leave them all hanging and find an apartment by yourself. Consider the benefits.

Your apartment becomes a study cave

Instead of a social hub, there’s very little to do at your apartment beside study and make food — come on, you couldn’t be reading for class right now?

So make some ramen and crack open your textbooks because no one is there to call you a nerd. Don’t even pack a TV because your friends have cable at their apartment and any sports you want to watch stream illegally on the Internet anyway.

Go crazy AND avoid judgment!

Plastered on the walls of my little apartment are Post-it Notes with little motivational phrases, story ideas, memorable quotes and other random musings. Anything interesting, I pin up on my massive pinboard (note: that’s a physical pinboard, not Pinterest).

Want to wear nothing but underwear for an entire Saturday? Great! Want to wear less? Go for it. You’re all by yourself. There’s no one there to judge you.

You don’t feel THAT lonely

No matter what you do in the year 2013, it’s damn near impossible to feel lonely or isolated if you have the Internet. You can be on Facebook whenever you want. You can Skype without annoying your roommate. You can talk to people on the phone like how they used to do in the ’00s.

If you find it that hard to make a connection with someone through any of the various forms of telecommunication, you can get off your bum and go out. 

Living alone actually makes me go out more and be more productive when I’m not going out.

Did I mention no roommates?

OK, I totally mentioned no roommates, but what comes with that: no obnoxious snoring, no coming home drunk at 2:30 a.m. the night before your midterm, no arguing over who takes out trash, does dishes, cleans or supplies the bathrooms, no boyfriend/girlfriend problems, no obnoxious Skyping or any of the general stuff that makes you wish your roommate would temporarily disappear.

If you don’t notice this now, you definitely will when you hear all your friends complaining about things you simply don’t have to worry about. This is because you’ll live alone. You’ll be independent.

Stressed about finding the perfect place to live with the perfect roommates? Screw it; live alone.

Eliot is a junior in Media and can be reached at [email protected].