Awakening the hermit gene

By the second day of a conference I attended recently I was flat-out exhausted.

I figured it was because of the overindulging in food and drink on the first night of the conference. My butt was definitely dragging the next day, and I figured I was just out of shape when it came to overindulging in food and drink.

My wife Jane, however, insisted I was exhausted from being with people again. She surmised that I was out of shape when it came to interpersonal interaction and that dealing with so many people tuckered me out.

She's correct that I don't get out much ... retirement and working from home will do that to you.

There are days when, if not for talking to Jane in the morning before she leaves for work and in the evening when she comes home, I don't speak a word to anyone.

This is a far cry from the way it used to be when I'd go to an office and have meetings, and make and take telephone calls, and engage in my favorite practice of managing while walking around.

Now when I go to work it's down the hall in the house and when I walk around it's an empty nest.

Frankly, I don't mind it much.

Jane calls it the hermit gene. She believes that buried in each of us is the desire to be alone and be left alone. I don't miss the stress that sometimes came from the office-related interactions.

I communicate a lot from my home office but the words are almost exclusively written, not spoken. There are the web sites -- Boomer Angst, Eats@Home and Examiner.com -- to feed with words.

But there are also the social networks at Facebook, DIGG, LinkedIn and AARP and the various Google Groups to keep up with. We talk a lot to each other; we just don't say anything out loud to each other.

Social networks are often the talk of the day, not only for professional shut-ins such as myself but for people who work at jobs and who have plenty of people to speak to on a day to day basis. Between Facebook and MySpace, two of the most popular social network sites, there are about 200 million users.

We share comments, photos, and videos. We share stuff we've read online with each other. We have common interests in family or schools or work or mutual friends. We share a lot or we share a little. We share the important and we share the mundane. And it's all done without speaking a word.

So maybe I'm a little out of practice when it comes to social gatherings where the interaction is up close and personal, when it involves body language and spoken language. But since I'm interacting on the social networks and don't think I've gone totally hermit ... at least not yet.