The introverts are winning
newhumanist.org.uk
newhumanist.org.uk
I think it's good that the status quo got mixed up a bit. The introverts don't have to defend themselves or feel like outsiders quite so much.
This article aligns stay-at-home-ness with "fear," "a fettered life," "hardly worth living" and says "retreating ... is an ultimately selfish choice." I believe that's a bit of a poor take. Plenty of people live rich, productive, fulfilling and engaged lives that don't especially involve a lot of interactions with other people.
This author is clearly someone whose habits were impinged by the changes brought on by the pandemic ("... naturally outgoing people – this writer included – have found it that bit harder to get their friends out of the house."), but is that the end of the world?
It almost feels like the author is eager to get back to what they are comfortable with, at the expense of (by their numbers) 1/3 of other people's lifestyles. It's almost like they are the ones afraid of this change — like they are the selfish ones.
But I don't really go for the whole us-vs-them approach at all. It has been a great (if forced) learning experience. Some people got to discover happiness they didn't know before. Other people felt the loss of something they took for granted. Perhaps we should share these lessons with each other and bring some balance and increased awareness, rather than pointing fingers and taking sides.
No one is entitled to the attention of others and the pandemic helped many of us to notice our time is finite and we should better spend it doing what we like and want. Be it being at home on a couch in slippers or otherwise.
They aren't, but at the same time the world sure is feeling more lonely. Old friends will move on, but I did notive that Meetups never really recovered in my area post pandemic (and they weren't in great shape in 2017-9 to begin with). What does one do when it feels like there's nowhere to make friends?
>helped many of us to notice our time is finite and we should better spend it doing what we like and want.
It's not necessarily volunatry for everyone. Everything's more expensive and not everyone's gotten wages that keep up with inflation. Or they got laid off and are recovering from that. It just so happens the cheapest entertainment these days is in fact in your own house.
I think there is this setup period when parents do things for their kids and the rate of things decay as we get older, more lazy and less enthusiastic.
Covid just made the middle age boring happen earlier, which people blame on their kids normally, for a generation and they didn't recover.
Pubs have raised the price of a normal beer 2x where I live since pre-covid. The pub culture, which was allready weak, is not coming back any time soon.
These days? That is pretty much true since advent of home computers in 80s/90s.
But i think we both agree entertainment got cheaper while outside life more expensive. We can grab internet connected devices for barely $100 and a single entertainment subscription (Netflix, Gamepass, Spotify) is maybe $10/month for an entire catalog. I can't even go out for lunch for $10 unless I do Costco.
The local video store would run a deal over the summers when I was a kid where you paid $30 and got three, two night rentals (new releases excluded) a week for the summer school break. Being able to grab a new game or movie every other day (since you were already there to return the previous one on time) was great.
At the same time, as someone who straddles the line between introversion and extraversion, it does feel like there's a higher activation energy for me now. I want to go out and do things, but it often seems to require more planning and more mental effort. I'm not happy with this change in myself, but there doesn't seem to be a quick way to fix it other than just putting more deliberate effort into being social and less into all the other stuff.
I think the author is projecting her own feelings onto introverts in this piece. I feel the same way as she presumably does. Lockdown changed me in ways I don't like, albeit minor ones, and it's something of a struggle to manually keep doing the social things my old self did automatically.
loosening friendships didn't help. People got busier or maybe they are fine with how the lockdown changed them. It already took some time to arrange even small hangouts, but these days it seems like I barely see my "best" friends if it's not some special occasion like a birthday or very big convention.
Now think of the pandemic lockdown. It could have caused introverts to have lost their social fitness entirely.
Just like physical fitness, some need more/less exercise to stay fit. There will also be different preferences for were that exercise is done (at or outside the office).
introverts need a little push to work the muscles that let you socialize and interact.
extroverts need a little push to work the muscles that let you sit quietly and contemplate.
hopefully society doesn't succumb to one side dominating so half the people get to be lazy while the other half is constantly exercising. ideally everybody get a mix of exercise and rest.
I don't know where I'm going with this except maybe that extroverts simply do not understand introverts. They read about it and think they know our issue, but they don't understand it or don't believe it's a real thing.
Yeah, this seems to underlie a lot of misunderstandings. I was reading on another recent HN thread about people's ability to form mental images[1] and it shows a similar struggle of people with different minds trying to understand each other.
The older I get, the more I get the sense that people can be quite different on the inside, yet live a lot of their lives being unaware or unbelieving of how much mental variety is out there.
Interestingly, her inability to empathise with your perspective despite being people orientated indicates shes probably not the sharpest. Sorry.
You can be introverted and have strong social skills. In fact, if you want to be successful, you will need strong social skills. Development is one of the few areas in which this is not the case, although the people who move up will have the strongest social skills.
Some will view it as playing politics, being manipulative, what have you. But ultimately these aren't personality traits, they're skills.
It's possible to be an extrovert with bad social skills, i.e. you're obnoxious. Or an introvert with fantastic social skills, i.e. you're the next CTO. Some, maybe even most, introverts don't know this. So they don't develop their skills and wonder why they don't succeed.
All to say, the recruiter is 100% right. How CAN you be 40 with such poor social skills? Well, you're an introvert and everyone has told you your whole life that's not for you. So you purposefully ignore those skills.
I saw this once and loved it:
”I used to think I was introverted because I really liked being alone but it turns out I just like being at peace & I am very extroverted when I’m around people who bring me peace.”
So, I’m breaking up with you. It’s not me, it’s you.
My partner (extreme introvert), and myself (somewhat an ambivert) have travelled the world for 6 years as digital nomads and rarely if ever do extroverted things. But introvert is not the same as not leaving the house.
We've done ~50 countries, quietly, patiently and without broadcasting our lives for all to see. We've learned to sail and lived on a sailboat for a while without starting a youtube channel so the world can follow us doing it.
I find the article mostly to be flawed and ridiculous. Calling introverts selfish is obnoxious. This reads like a (fake) column from "Sex and the City".
Carrie: "I found myself wondering if humans would go extinct if they didn't go to bars every night".
This one. If I ever needed to describe myself it would be between an extreme introvert or at least 'a guy in himself'.
But if you would ask the guys in the bars I frequent... I doubt introvert would be the word they say.
Can one make the same argument about introverts? Sincere question, not rhetorical.
Some people don't like dancing — maybe we should force them to dance, regardless? There's a fine line between encouraging/pushing someone to do something or try something for their own good, and letting people live their own lives in their own way.
The way you phrase your question makes me think that you conceive of introversion as a sort of health problem — like being overweight. I'm sure that's true of many people. Just look in this thread for all the overlap that people have between being depressed and being introverted / staying at home / etc. But I do just want to plant the seed in your mind that there can be introverted people who are quite happy and healthy and "living their best life," so to speak, too. They may be dancing, just with nobody looking.
The dancing analogy is a good one but while I can go a month without dancing I cannot go a month without required human interactions that put me in uncomfortable positions.
A peer post suggested that one should therefore force extroverts into uncomfortable situations too. My thought here is that I’m not trying to torture one group but not another. School forced me to be more athletic than I found enjoyable. I don’t believe it was that they were trying to make me feel bad, even though that’s exactly what running does for me. By analogy I would not ask the school athletes to gain extra weight just because I was forced to jog a mile.
I don’t have a dog in this race. I’m not even suggesting that it should be done, just sort of bringing up the thought experiment. I’m an ambivert or whatever it’s called. I could happily spend a year not dealing with people but I can also do it with unusual skill when called to do so.
> By analogy I would not ask the school athletes to gain extra weight just because I was forced to jog a mile.
This is why I don't like your analogy (no offense meant); it approximately correlates extrovert=healthy=strong and introvert=unhealthy=weak. While I don't think athletes should be forced to gain weight, I do imagine it's good for extroverts to have to sit with themselves in quietude a little more than they might otherwise, just like I imagine it's good for introverts to do the opposite. Not in every case of course, but speaking broadly.
So I guess I see it as two equally-valid approaches trying to understand each other better, more than anything.
Maybe what I'm saying is: I agree with you — it's a good idea. But it's opposite is also a good idea, and I wouldn't want it to be one-sided.
Maybe another point of fuzziness is whether "introverted" means "bad at social interactions" or "prefers to avoid social interactions" (and/or "finds social interactions draining"). I tend to see it as the latter, but maybe you mean it as the former?
I'm not talking about literally locking them up in jail, but let's say if your logic holds, we should be able to say COVID did extroverts a lot of good by making them appreciate solitude during the lockdown periods.
Definitely a war. There's no question about that.
I'm not all that familiar with Bruckner; but reading about him seems to make me feel like he's not a contemporary anymore; probably not understanding the complexity here.Not to mention the impossible understanding of per jurisdiction differences.
>here had been waves of terrorist attacks across Europe, and endless headlines about the climate emergency coming for us all.
Which has everything to do with this war.
>I think it's good that the status quo got mixed up a bit. The introverts don't have to defend themselves or feel like outsiders quite so much.
It's not so much what the introverts are doing, it's all about what the extroverts arent allowed to do anymore. Having been prohibited by law. Whereas the introverts have not been attacked YET.
>It almost feels like the author is eager to get back to what they are comfortable with, at the expense of (by their numbers) 1/3 of other people's lifestyles. It's almost like they are the ones afraid of this change — like they are the selfish ones.
Agreed, you can see the narcissism in the article.
>But I don't really go for the whole us-vs-them approach at all.
100% it's us vs them. There's no balance to be struck, the attack has been ongoing for a long time and if you surrender in this fight, it will only be getting much worse. The big difference is that
What a very extroverted perspective. "Everything was fine when the world was structured around an extroverted lifestyle. Then the pandemic hit and everything was miserable for a bit, but what's even worse is that those darn introverts aren't happy resuming their natural place in society!"
The pandemic gave us a taste of what life could be like if the world were structured around our preferred way of existing instead of yours. It turns out we liked it, and now that we've had that taste we're not comfortable resuming the old status quo where we just tag along for the ride in an extroverted world.
It boggles my mind that someone can write an article like this and not realize that what they're saying is they wish a group of people would go back to being an underclass.
Hence "Return to Office", and the failure thereof.
>New Jersey and Texas are states that stand out for spelling out exactly how often employees must work from the office to qualify for tax breaks. Before the pandemic, several New Jersey tax programs required workers to show up at least 80% of the time, and one Texas program set the threshold at 50%.
>Provisions like these were designed to ensure that the jobs boosted local revenue from income, sales and property taxes, and bolstered downtown economies.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...
Buildings have mortgages, surrounding businesses need to be supported, etc... Local economies dipped and some hedge fund portfolios suffered, and RTO was the only way to pump their bags.
This is all conjecture
It really was a middle ground which was quite unbalanced by the pandemic and has pretty much come back to a middle ground now (we do 3 days in office - 2 days off but no one here is stupid enough to get a typical American commute thankfully).
The fact that so many in software are extreme introverts will be a surprise to no one however.
I can tell you that up through high school I watched my fellow introverts get shamed and bullied for being quiet and awkward, but I never saw someone get bullied for being too outgoing.
I can tell you that all my life (including in this very comment section) I've had people explicitly tell me that if I just tried harder I'd learn to like social activities because humans are just wired that way, but I never heard anyone say that if a highly social person just tried harder they'd learn to like a quiet weekend at home.
I can tell you that I've only started receiving promotions and recognition at work to the extent that I've been able to feign extroversion, and my more introverted colleagues who aren't as good at faking it don't do as well.
None of that—being bullied and belittled and passed over for not being social enough—has ever felt like a middle ground to me, and there's not a lot that you could say that would persuade me to view it that way. It's easy to think of the status quo as the middle ground when it's comfortably on your side of the line, so I'll need more than your assurances to doubt my own experience.
Obviously you only get promoted when you can promote your work. No one is going to magically guess it exists.
Anyway HN is funny sometimes in its refusal to face that they are the odd ones. I fear that any person who would have a contrarian opinion as pretty much moved on from ever discussing WFH here I the same way it was a complete waste of time to argue with the anti-systemd crowd.
I remain convinced that all the people who say WFH should be an evidence are actually petitioning for their job to offshored in the midterm but that’s me.
There are managers, like me, who will judge your work by your work, not by how loud you are, nor by how much you drank with me at the company party. If you are a developer, I don't need to magically guess about your work, I can see it in your commits, I can review them, I can see how much, how often and how well you contribute.
As a matter of fact, no matter the amount of talk and "promoting" your work, I will still judge you ONLY based on the actual work. Maybe I am slightly biased against "talkers", but I've found out that doers' work often needs no "promotion" and it speaks for itself. As for talkers, well, they are probably still talking. Maybe it's better if they go to a big company, so they can mix up with doers who actually do work.
The less we talk about the work, and more actually doing it, the faster we can do the work, and get on with our lives, wouldn't you agree?
> I remain convinced that all the people who say WFH should be an evidence are actually petitioning for their job to offshored in the midterm but that’s me.
People who think the only differentiating factor between them and a lower paid worker in a different country, is not their work, but their physical presence and self-marketing tend to work for bosses who enjoy seeing their workers as a form of control. I think it's a match made in heaven.
Luckily, there are also people who are confident in the quality of their work without having to "market it", and bosses who judge a person's skill by the results. Which, I hope you agree, is also a match made in heaven.
The full school institution actually do it. Teachers tell students to stop speaking to each others for most courses during the week. Moreover some teachers explicitly talk about the joy of quietly reading books, and directly ask students to do so.
I'm fine with the way school works, especially considering the limited resources they have. Nevertheless, teachers do not often encourage extroverted skills that are useful in group work, oral presentations, etc. Exams seem to favor people that are able to stay hours long alone thinking about abstract concepts.
Every discussion about WFH seems to me as a discussion about how US office culture is garbage and not about WFH.
[1] This denomination is slightly oversimplified to avoid giving a lecture on how social welfare works in Germany.
We now have the ability to get big bucks and pay little rent for good housing, and not be stuck like sardines in traffic, and not having to listen to extroverts' incessant yapping.
Why does it make you mad? We nerds don't have the rights to happiness?
You are choosing to live far. That’s your own choice. No one has a duty to adapt the work environment to suit it.
Nope, wrong. It's not my own choice only. It's the choice of many many people, increasingly more, enough that employers have to reckon with us. Hopefully you don't feel threatened or upset about it, cause it's happening, it's gonna happen more, and no amount of corporate shoe-licking can stop it.
There are plenty of people who are okay to be stuck 3 hours in traffic, or pay an exorbitant rent just for the privilege to be working in a cubicle. Increasingly so, however, many are rethinking this arrangement and refusing to work in an environment that doesn't suit them.
So, I don't know about duty, but employers can go f*ck themselves if they can't provide what I am looking for, and I won't settle for less, both in terms of flexibility, remote options, and salary. And since there's many of us starting to think like that, some employers will start seeing reason, and provide an accommodating work environment. To stay competitive, others will have to follow or settle for sub-par workers and potentially (hopefully soon) go into oblivion.
Employers who can't or won't adapt the work environment to the demands of the workers, will perish, and those who can, will flourish. It's as simple as that.
No really, they don’t.
You are confusing what you want with what’s happening.
Oh, really, they do. And no amount of corporate boot-licking can change that. It's, and always will be, worker power.
> You are confusing what you want with what’s happening.
It's possible that you are confusing a potentially bad situation you are in, with what's happening to the rest of the worker force, many of who are empowered and hold a considerable bargaining power in the market. More and more of us have been getting a 4 day work week without the loss of pay, and the right to work remotely.
I, for example, am happily on a 4 day work week, and haven't been to the office in 3 years, and so are many of my colleagues and many other people in the industry. No amount of corp simping or RTO mandate will bring this back.
Remote work:
- https://business.gov.nl/running-your-business/staff/health-a...
4 day work week:
- https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/07/81percent-of-young-people-sa...
- https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/03/opinions/32-hour-work-wee...
- https://www.npr.org/2024/02/27/1234271434/4-day-workweek-suc...
- https://fortune.com/europe/2023/09/04/scotland-4-day-work-we... - https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/feb/21/four-day-week-...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-we...
I'd rather be locked up in a padded room alone than suffer through the office.
Coworkers are not my friends, and the fake socialization I'm forced to put up with there is exhausting, because I just don't care about them. I have actual friends whom I see a lot more often these days thanks to WFH, and nothing on this planet is going to convince me rotting away in an open air office is better than the alternative.
That: "Coworkers are not my friends, and the fake socialization I'm forced to put up with there is exhausting" doesn’t exist where I live.
I just don't care about my colleagues in a friendship context. I only interact with them because I have to professionally, but from my last 4 companies I haven't made a single lasting friendship. Because, again, I have a lot of actual friends who I'd much rather see than the random people from my office.
When Google and Facebook were getting headlines for their gourmet cafeterias and fancy game rooms and encouraging their employees to work and socialize at the office, I remember saying “I’d rather drink piss beer at a dive with my real friends than a fancy cocktail at work.
Extroverts wish they could go back to socializing and excelling at work in person, and introverts wish they can stay at home at the expense of extroverts. One or the other loses in the workplace.
This is why articles like this rarely come out and say "I need the introverts to come back to social events to meet my needs", they always try to frame it as about productivity or (as very condescendingly demonstrated here) about the mental health of the introverts themselves.
I think the balance we need to get to has to be one where extroverts are meeting each other's needs by working in teams that choose to be in person and hanging out with each other socially rather than moping online about how everything is so much less fun. You don't need to drag us along for the ride to have a good time.
What I agree with: We have built ourselves a society where it is far too easy to fall into a secluded lifestyle. That's not a problem for everyone but it does supercharge depression and anxiety. Both of these lead to you thinking that being left alone is good for you when actually looking at any research about them is not the case in the absolute majority of cases. Both get worse with lower amount of social contact and extrusion structure in your life. In the past the pressure to go outside and have some structure was much higher and thus depression and anxiety probably had more of a grave period where people around you had a chance of realizing you were getting worse and you had a chance of still pulling yourself out of it enough to get help early. Today the behavior of someone who is just really happy alone and somebody who is spiralling into depression becomes ever harder for me to tell apart.
The rest of the article to me just reads like "but I'm an extrovert and I liked it better the way it was before". Yeah, sorry not sorry? If your friends take more effort to get them to do a pub tour these days maybe they just weren't as much into pub tours as you are? Yes, the pandemic changed our society from catering mainly to extroverts to one that now makes it much easier to be not cut off entirely while taking time for yourself as an introvert. If you don't want your introvert friends to be able to have that, you're the problem in that picture.
I got the strong impression that the author wasn't always as much of an extrovert as they believe. Tons of people go out all the time and it sounds like they need to get new friends after outgrowing the old ones.
This should be one of the the prime problem of every government. It's a hard thing to solve, but is the root cause of a lot of other, more better recognised societal issues.
> We should run our errands in person and queue at the Post Office and eat in restaurants because it is good to remember that sometimes we have to wait around, or go to several shops because the first one didn’t have what we needed. Resilience is one of the most important traits a person can and should develop, and it works like a muscle. Glide effortlessly through life and, when something bad does happen, because it always will, you won’t know how to react.
Waiting around is pointless. The most resilient people find ways to avoid it and have actual hobbies and lives to live. This entire article just sounds like weird propaganda promoting a very confused perspective.
Removing everything you don't like from life is not good for you. Having everything you want is not good for you.
I don't understand this prevailing perspective in highly individualistic societies that pain is good. If you can achieve the same result without the pain why is that so bad? When does it become progress?
If I can be healthy just by taking a pill a day as opposed to dying, what's the harm? Lives are saved and that's... bad... somehow?
If I can get my nick nacks without going to the store what's the harm?
Sometimes things are too good to be true. But most of the time, things really are just good. They are just better. You do just progress forward. That's why I can write you this comment instead of writing a letter and waiting weeks for a response. Why did we give that up? Isn't waiting painful, and therefore good? I don't think so.
No, that's great! Despite what some of the comments claim, I'm not saying "suffering FTW!". I'm saying that working towards goals is literally in our DNA, and getting everything you want won't make you happy.
Your letter example is a good one. On the one hand, it's incredible that I can communicate with many people at once across the world from my desk. The benefits are obvious. What's not so obvious are the benefits of having to write letters in the old days:
When you have to spend so much effort in communication, it's worth much more to you. You take more time, think about what you're saying more, and most importantly; feel much higher rewards. Low effort, low returns.
But actively seeking or allowing things that make you feel genuinely bad? That's a bit messed up, TBH.
... and telling others to do so? Well :-/
Here I thought you were supposed to enjoy the food.
But, on the other hand... what about them? Should this always be a one-sided affair? How about some of the more extroverted taking a genuine stab at doing the kind of thing introverts tend to excel at, such as technical skills, engaging in topics in a deep way, and working alone? Without looking up any statistics I think I'm pretty correct when I say the vast majority of innovative effort has been performed by introverts, and mostly in their alone-time. Then extroverts cone along, take the results and market it, mostly for their own gain. So it's a threat when the status quo looks like it's changing, and rules need to be invented and enforced to prevent the works from falling apart. I feel like it's pushing me toward this - potentially radical - conclusion that society and the economy itself is designed to enslave the truly productive forces of introverts in service of extroverts who for the most part can really only do "make work".
Hermits, who live alone, in the wild, are some of the most introverted yet resilient people alive.
The article also confuses living on a couch with introversion.
Who is less of a couch potato, the introvert mountain biking by themselves, or those dudes pictured sitting at a pub?
I am a huge proponent of pushing yourself outside your comfort zone, but this article does a poor job of articulating what and why.
It seems to me that if one is in such a position, they may need to find new friends whose lifestyle align more with theirs instead of being condescending that they know what people should do better than them, or seeing the world through binaries that do not exist (introversion-extroversion is a normally distributed trait, not bimodal).
Framing these kinds of big social upheavals in terms of flimsy personality science is a bad move. If you want to argue that we're moving towards some kind of dystopian hyper-isolated society, you can just say that. If we were to imagine that society, it would pacify everybody by a mix of providing false social stimuli via increasingly shallow social media to fulfill extroverted needs and other kinds of stimuli to fulfill introverted needs. What a strange society that would be.
The 2-3 years were really hard for most of us and entire societies are trying to get back to where we were before.
I blame the death of video games and media during and post Covid. The games and movie and TV industries are shells of their former selves, and are actively in decline right now. Why should I stay home to replay games from the 2010s (since nothing in 2024 is worth playing) when I can simply be part of the problem by going to the national parks or hot springs every weekend?
Plus, we all know that most people who are on the fence tend to regret introverted activities since they are “nerdy” and the opposite of glamorous. Going out to a national park is a chad move, staying home and doing introverted stuff literally keeps you a virgin (and this bears out in sociological data)
> In late 2023, campaign group More In Common polled British people on their attitudes towards pandemic life ... a third of 25 to 40-year-olds backed closing nightclubs again, 29 per cent were keen to bring back “the rule of six” and 28 per cent would have been comfortable with “only allowing people to leave their homes for essential shopping, 60 minutes of exercise, or work”.
They're mixing two polls and making it sound like these people CURRENTLY support these measures. Those numbers were from a poll taken BEFORE any COVID restrictions had been put in place at all (i.e. what SAFETY measures should we enact to slow the pandemic?): https://www.moreincommon.org.uk/media/31kfnjxi/mic-covid-res...
It took a lot of digging for me to find it, and I can see why they didn't want to link to it. And just in case one wants to give the authors the benefit of the doubt, they finish off with this flourish: "This was more than a year after the last legal restrictions were lifted in the UK, in line with global health policy."
So yeah, a baldfaced lie.
> Still, French philosopher Pascal Bruckner argues, “life means excess and profligacy or it ceases to be life."
Uhh... WTF??? That's precisely the mentality that has led to the ecological disaster we're entering today!
> Who will win the war?
WHAT war??? Who's fighting a war over this?
> As Bruckner puts it, “a new anthropological type is emerging: the shrivelled, hyperconnected being who no longer needs others or the outside world. All of today’s technologies encourage incarceration under the guise of openness.”
Jeez... Is this guy high?
I've stopped reading at this point.
I've found out that extrovert crowd is often also the crowd who will say things like:
- I am sure we'll figure it out later
- Well, this might be problematic in the future, but will give us such big gains in the short term (by which time they already happily moved their show to another company, leaving the quiet ones to deal with what they left behind)
- Great job, team, we managed to fix the problem/disaster/oil spill (who caused it in the first place).
- I am healthy, I can take the risk of not having a mask (and not thinking of the immunocompromised and the old)
We should, imo, treat people like that not only with unease that one reserves for charlatans, mystics and mime performers. We should actively show them that their loud, rude, obnoxious and overbearing ways deserve a bit of our scorn as well. Let's stop not only following loud fools, but even listening to them. They crave our attention, let's stop giving it to them.
> Still, French philosopher Pascal Bruckner argues, “life means excess and profligacy or it ceases to be life."
The same way cancer cells are life. They excess and proliferate.
And sometimes he does, for example he can talk himself into a promotion while I silently do all the work.
But I always win in the end, because he needs me more than I need him.
Extroverts have enough advantages in modern society, they don’t need to try to erode ours.
With the pardon of the joke [This is what extroverts actually believe]
While sure, too much introversion is pathological, I think a lot of people in that category just doesn't go into mindless yapping
That said, this author just seems like somebody who's social skills aren't keeping up with their social ambitions. Anybody who can't find people to socialise with the way they want to needs to look at themselves to find the problem, not everybody else.
I feel like if you're a 40+ year old adult with a life already made you definitely love remote work, learning new technologies being unable to be shamed at opening a youtube video next to your coworker is also nice, but I do miss the ability to meet new people naturally.
Like in The Lobster, where it's explained that the importance of sharing your life is to have somebody on hand to perform the Heimlich maneuver?
I really don't like the author's argument. We should force ourselves to do things in person because it's uncomfortable?
Life is already uncomfortable enough! The world is melting down, societies are unhappy and restless, economies are failing, the climate is worsening, people are hateful and full of extremist thought. Life is hard enough.
Let me do as much as I can from home (which I rent, btw, because owning a home is an impossible dream for many), the single respite I have from the painful world!
Real nerds don't need blinds, the occasional full moon notwithstanding.
I don't think there's a retreat from "friction" as the author puts it. I think the author is conflating their ideal activities as the only ones worth measuring. I think the thing that the pandemic actually changed was people's attitudes about letting other people dictate what they have to do.
I had to Google this. According to Merriam Webster people "identify with" animals. What does that even mean to identify with an animal?
Also with capital initial. An enthusiast for anthropomorphic animal characters, esp. a person who dresses up in costume as such a character or uses one as an avatar in a computer-generated environment. For some enthusiasts, this interest has a sexual dimension.
That seems a bit clearer though I can't vouch for its accuracy.
* Habits change. This insight is the bulk of the article. Restaurants are mentioned three times, but restaurants are a relic of class divisions from around 1900, where a patron is pampered by servants, while leaking money in all directions. So their continued existence is surprising, and maintained by habits, and the pandemic was a shakedown for habits.
* Something about resilience. Should I mention preppers? They tend to be introverts, I think, and they're all about resilience, so that confuses matters. But the general idea here is that soft pudgy cybernauts would be bewildered in an emergency that could not be dealt with by ordering deliveries. Could they go out and, like, ask for help, or patiently hunt for food in a crisis? I think the answer is actually mostly yes, and those who were conspicuously helpless would be helped, and this is really a non-issue. Go out for a pointless walk as non-specific training against divers emergencies is not great advice.
* Something about surprises (stimulation), and serendipity. This is a fair point but it's expensive, at least in terms of time, and the payoffs aren't so great. In return for losing an hour of coding, you might see a squirrel. I endorse this in moderation. Of course here I'm ignoring the main thrust which is about human interaction: as well as the squirrel, you might speak to an old lady (they constantly prowl the streets, waiting for scraps of conversation). And that's true, and adds variety, I suppose. There's a point in the article where this whole thesis of a massive crisis of shut-ins is watered down to advice to merely go out once in a while. In that light, the situation looks like less of a big deal. People still leave the house, a lot. It's only a change of emphasis, not, I think, a real problem.
Huh? Restaurants have been around since ancient times, in societies across the globe. Here's a Wikipedia link for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restaurant#History
Modern-format restaurants have been around since the late 1700s, but there's plenty of records of people eating in food-serving establishments in ancient Greek and Roman societies. I'm sure other, even more ancient societies had similar things, which are now lost to history.
I may be off by plus or minus three decades. Maybe 1930.
I'm sorry, I just don't understand the point you're trying to make here.
Thing like this feel especially disingenuous
> Living a real, physical life outside the home is good because humans need friction. Convenience is alluring but it is dangerous, because getting used to it means forgetting that being alive isn’t meant to always be easy. We should run our errands in person and queue at the Post Office and eat in restaurants because it is good to remember that sometimes we have to wait around, or go to several shops because the first one didn’t have what we needed.
These are things I was able and am able to do without have to go to the office five days a week
Having austism of varied degree is not a disorder but an innate skillset that extroverts could only wish they could have ... selectively.
This tendency from ASD folks to try to see it as not debilitating seems really bizarre. The reality is that America deeply internalized the John Hughes film, and that folks with ASD will forever be the unwarranted punching bags of society. I want a cure and I wanted it yesterday.
That's not to say that racial minorities are seen in a better light by society, or less unfairly maligned. It's just that they have average qualities, like the minorities. So "black charisma" is something that's always being artificially diminished.
However, there were the athletes and the public figures. We're used to seeing great men, and it was obvious there was a scheme under way to keep people down. The "great men" (but not women) shine through; it's just like that other great thing we're used to seeing. Women are left out due to discrimination.
Things are a little different for people with disabilities. If you're white, you have the weight of society behind you, but you're still in a bad spot relative to the rest. The brand is so bad you have to just not talk about it and "try to fit in".
The incredibly frustrating part is bitter artists that really think I'm doing something TO them, because I'm miserable and see no way out. What are you going to say? You have the money and power.
Lots of people that don't work in industry, don't seem to understand this is a load of bullshit. You're almost never actually doing the thing itself. I'll compare someone mastering records to an engineer, even many session players, but a ton of artists/DJs aren't doing menial work to achieve someone else's vision.
They're not comparable to the salary worker. I want to see salary jobs in arts treated roughly like the rest, as well as options for people to see out their vision, with less immediate rewards.
I digress, but hobbies, interests, and social networks don't work the same for me. So "quitting my job" would be akin to their agreeing to live alone on a dessert island.
I am quite introvert, IRL talk is exhausting for me, but online chat or writing e-mails is even more so. If i wanted to discuss nontrivial things with work colleagues, i prefer to do it IRL in office than using online chat.
My friend is very extrovert, spends plenty of time socializing IRL and chatting online or writing e-mails. But for work communication, he definitely prefers WFH with online chat.
I’m not an alcoholic, so, please, do not offer me meeting in pub or bar.
> Still, according to French philosopher Pascal Bruckner,…
Who?
> Living a real, physical life outside the home is good because humans need friction.
The writer should add “in my humble opinion”.
> Small business owners need customers to browse in their shops
Google, Apple, Facebook, Etsy, OnlyFans, you named it, give small business owners great opportunities to reach all the world instead of a local village.
IMHO, it’s a local pub limits person worldview, not the Net.
Tech itself allow for much more interaction, it's a neutral tool alone, of course as a neutral knife you can use it to cut a steak or your neighbor throat but what's happening are civil polarization NOT due to technology but to mere social collapse.
All my friends/family consider me an extrovert, my colleagues are sure i'm an introvert. I like both.
Even without the very real risk of contracting a dangerous disease that can cause long-term health problems, it's fine to prefer a slower, less frenetic phase of civilization. Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth, we won history, we just have to relax, take care of each other, and live happily ever after. "Where shall we have lunch?", eh?
“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?” ― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
I'm very familiar with COVID having had it it at least 4 times, and also long COVID - two instances about 6 months each
There is no disagreement from me that post viral symptoms need more attention but I don't think it's necessary to downgrade the meaning of pandemic.
> "I think if we can get well below 10,000, I think that would be a level that I think would be acceptable to us to get back to a degree of normality," Fauci said. "But again, I have to warn the listeners, these are not definitive statements — these are just estimates."
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/16/dr-fauci-says-us-covid-cases...
Stay safe out there.
"Introverted" != "shutin" and it definitely doesn't mean people who are averse to socialization, which is often how it is presented and dripping throughout articles like this.
I am introverted and quite enjoy socialization. The fact that people see this as a contradiction is why articles like this get written.
As for the rest of it:
> In any case, in 2024 it is possible to eat delicious food you didn’t make yourself, watch movies that have recently come out in the cinema, buy all manner of clothes, tools and fripperies, do the food shopping, speak to friends and family and earn a wage – all without ever leaving the house. Why should we, then? What’s in it for us?
This was the case LONG before the pandemic.
> Living a real, physical life outside the home is good because humans need friction. Convenience is alluring but it is dangerous, because getting used to it means forgetting that being alive isn’t meant to always be easy. We should run our errands in person and queue at the Post Office and eat in restaurants because it is good to remember that sometimes we have to wait around, or go to several shops because the first one didn’t have what we needed. Resilience is one of the most important traits a person can and should develop, and it works like a muscle. Glide effortlessly through life and, when something bad does happen, because it always will, you won’t know how to react.
Oh please. Not everyone has a car, not everyone is able bodied, not everyone has the luxury of not working 3 jobs to make ends meet AND take care of the kids. Don't blame people for taking time saving measures in a society that demands more time than we possess.
Except there are no such things. Intro/Extro are used in the ocean of questionable personality science to describe character traits. Even within some of the "worst" culprits of it, character traits are never considered to be set in stone. Contrary to what you may now think, I'm actually a fan of personality tests like DISC for professional teams. For their actual purpose, however, which is as tools which lets team members talk about their strengths and challenges in a much more open and focused way than simply sitting them down and talking about how to do team work. Especially with introvert/extrovert the whole thing becomes a little silly though, a lot of people will be more introverted one week and then more extroverted another, depending on a multitude factors in their lives. To be fair to the author, she does seem to mostly use it as a way of getting their point across, I just don't like it when people think you can ever describe people as either introverts or extroverts because it's frankly just plain bullshit.
Anyway, when I read the authors complaint about it getting harder to get friends out of their homes I looked up the author's age, and she's 33. Guess what happens in your early thirties? It gets harder to get your friends together, not because they've become introverted but because adult life takes a lot of energy and effort. The last to get children in a social circle are going to feel this the hard way. I'd argue that there are also facts like cost, which the author doesn't go into. I like going to the cinema, but where I live it'll quickly end up being $120 for a ticket and popcorn + soda. Back in 2018 it was maybe $50 and basically nothing of the experience has changed. It's not that I can't afford it, it's more a question of me being a scrooge.
One thing we have done in my friend circle is to get together "at home" more. We'll meet up to cook dinner and play board games while the children play. We still schedule Dungeon and Dragons but the frequency is like 4-8 times a year where it may have been every week before. It also has to happen during the day because evenings aren't a good time to be out with small children in the house. I have a season pass to a themepark where I go with one my friends and our eldest children, we don't actually do a lot of rides we just hang out while the children have fun. Basically post 30 social events will often need to become things where you can bring children or be out from 10-16. Which is very different from your late 20ies, but not necessarily less social.
This makes working on a team extremely frustrating. Coupled with the desire to WFH makes this a non-starter.
Here's my experience as someone who has had both, and much prefers 100% work from home:
I used to loathe going to work in the morning. Sometimes I sleep 11pm, 12am, and having to wake up 7:30am at the latest to groom myself, get dressed, make breakfast, so that around 8-8:30am I can hop on to a crowded, unreliable, unhygienic Subway train worrying about making it to work on time, every week day is not a good life experience.
After I started WFH due to the pandemic, I realized work in person was not more productive. I remember when I first started working in an office, how many distractions there were. So much chatting. Working on crappy equipment, not suited to my needs.
The (open) office was noisy, if I really needed to focus, that only happened after the shift to laptops and when there was an empty area in the office I could fuck off to, usually the cafe area. Listening to music? Only on headphones, and people might judge you for that (it was a 50+ year old company). Or interrupt you, forcing you to take headphones off.
Taking a break? People might think you're lazy or disengaged. My coworker once proposed a nap room (like Google), and the CEO was visibly irritated. I had another co-worker, who saw me reformatting and commenting my code accuse me of slacking off.
My manager chastised me for studying Neural Networks on work time (I had no other work to do). Perhaps most egregious of all, in this 50+ year old company, it was considered unsporting to leave at 6pm. I also got called out by that same boss for doing that consistently: "don't you feel sorry for your teammates who are working late?", or "the director walked in here at 7pm and saw the department empty... 'nice to see you guys have solved all the company's problems', he said (ironically)".
Long live work from home.
If you take the pandemic digital hermit lifestyle to its logical conclusion you get a place roughly like South Korea which was a few years ahead of the curve. Practically no family formation or not even sex life with a birth rate < 1, widespread social isolation and so on. Introversion is almost a euphemism for what's happening because for a lot of young people it seems like something more akin to complete isolation is the norm with entire stages of proper adult development completely delayed or missing.
This isn't just bad for individuals who obviously don't develop if they don't take risks and leave their comfort zones and live permanent Peter Pan like lives, it's gonna come crashing down when there's nobody left to deliver packages to their homes (Hideo Kojima as a sidenote, weirdly prescient again with Death Stranding essentially anticipating this entire discussion). Just calling it introversion is deeply underselling how much of a problem that is in developed countries.
I know plenty of highly extroverted adults who still live in their mothers' basements, have no dating prospects, and are generally miserable. I know plenty of highly introverts adults who are happily married, have successful careers, and are generally happy.
Indeed, the very post-pandemic changes that the author bemoans have been an enormous boon for those of us in the latter category, allowing greater success and greater happiness for the truly introverted. I can now work from home and spend my limited social energy and limited capacity to deal with noise on the small circle of people who I want to spend my energy on—my wife and kids.
My life and my family's life has dramatically improved as a result of that change, and your condemning me and those like me for participating in a "digital hermit lifestyle" and claiming this is a slippery slope to a world with no sex and no children is laughable at best.
But you should note one thing, it's no coincidence that your story involves having a family, social life, and I assume professional work before this became ubiquitous. It is quite a different story to be a young adult trying to build relationships when everyone already lives in a digital bubble. In a sense pulling the ladder up behind you and saying, it's been a huge boon for my family to now live in the comfort of home and online life, which in the past depended on someone being out there in the physical world to begin with. That's a general story of the post pandemic social and workplace changes, they're largely beneficial for people with already developed careers and social networks.
Not at all! Mine is but one story of millions. I see no statistical evidence of a correlation between failure to launch and introversion and you have not demonstrated any. And all my anecdotal experience would suggest that there is no correlation.
I'm not disputing that the modern world sucks in some ways and that that suck is particularly felt by (extroverted) young adults, but TFA and your own comment strongly imply that introversion is created by the post-pandemic environment and that's simply not the case.
What we have isn't introverts "winning" causing everyone else to suffer, what we have is a bunch of sad extroverts sucked into addictive digital media who can't figure out how to get out of the cycle. That is a real problem that should be addressed but is not the fault of introverts wanting to live their best lives, nor do I see evidence that young people who are truly introverted are struggling worse than I did.
A thousand times this.
The crowd here are not going to like hearing the things highlighted in this article, but hive-mind-consensus doesn't make something any less true.
Wondering how people have the audacity to try to talk to you in public when you _clearly have your headphones on!_ (just one of the things I've heard here) is not okay. Not for society, and not for you as an individual.
Just because society normalises this attitude, it doesn't make it right. We've also normalised buying things that last a couple of years, and not owning media we pay for. The frog boils slowly.
Fully agreed—society normalizing something doesn't make it right.
By TFA's numbers, 1/3 of UK adults were happier during the pandemic than before. That's a lot of people who were unhappy with the extrovert-centric norms that were dominant pre-pandemic. Those people went along with it because they hadn't ever realized there was something better. Now they have realized it and they're not giving up their effort to change the norms to better accommodate them. As you say, society normalizing something doesn't make it right, and when we're faced with an unjust society it's time to change it.
Your comment makes it sound like the introverts are suddenly in charge and dictating what is normal. That's not the case at all. The 1/3 just finally found a voice to express our opinions at all, and the 2/3 who used to run the world unopposed are unhappy about that.
Correct. Likewise, being a contrarian does not make an untruth any more true. If someone has headphones on, it's a clear signal they don't want to talk to you. What is the problem with respecting that person?
In that, extroverts are like little children: pay attention to me, pay attention to me, I have something so important to tell you that can't wait, and I don't care what you are doing at the moment, attention needs to be on ME. NOW
I'd say, let's normalize scolding people who ignore obvious social cues and bother you uninvited. How about that?
So you're saying it's okay for people to walk in when you're going to the bathroom and bother you? Or that it's okay for people to wake you up when they want to talk to you?
Even if the arbitrary division is bullshit, still Jung had a more compelling concept of the “introvert” than any of you: it was someone who was so deeply in touch with their inner world that they contacted horrors of their inner psyche, someone who was able to steel themselves and reconcile with the unknown in the deepest part of their unconscious: and since the unconscious was collective, therefore also the unconscious of the world and society. There is a movement both inward and outward. What people today call “introversion” is just another name for infantalization, of being fearful of exactly what Jung would’ve tried to drive us to experience. All this while the climate ticks up every day; how can I be convinced this is not just a retreat to safety in uncertain times?
This is the nonsense that TFA spouts, but it's still nonsense.
What people call "introversion" today is the reality that some people legitimately leave most social interactions more exhausted than they started, that they therefore have to budget their social interactions for the things that matter most to them, and that until recently they have had to do that quietly by themselves because the majority of the population doesn't believe that people like that really existed.
The pandemic started to change that, and people who have always had to live like that have now realized that they're not alone and don't need to just pretend they don't have a real need to budget social energy.
It doesn't matter to me if we call it introversion or use a new word to get away from the pseudo-science and confusion about definitions, but people like me exist and we're not going away just because you and those like you don't understand us.
“Some”? How about all! Of course being outside, physically interacting with others is exhausting: of all the social interactions which one can have, the most exhausting and at the same time the most ecstatic is sex, and that often puts people to sleep!
There is a push and pull, everybody wants to be left alone sometimes. To strictly delineate between introverts and non-introverts (since you’ve seemingly thrown out the other dichotomy as “pseudoscience”) just invents an identity around a behavior that is actually shared amongst everybody: and then calling yourself special for doing it. That is the most infantalizing part: identifying with a social imaginary, thinking of yourself as part of some greater whole! What an irony that its a whole of people who think they want to be alone all the time! Go ahead, try to be truly “by yourself.” Stop reading Hacker News, stop going grocery shopping, stop leaving your house: move to a cabin in the middle of the woods—see how long you make it.
You are always already social, almost everything you do involves social interaction, you would not have been brought on this earth without your family or whatever social arrangement raised you. What you’re really doing is, as the article said, isolating yourself from the dangerous part of sociality: meeting new people, talking to someone who is standing in front of you, throwing off your insecurities and not worrying about what others think.
I say, if introvert is arbritrary, then we’ll start calling it infantalism. Since you said it doesn’t matter! At least that word is closer to the truth.
This reveals right away that you don't really struggle with this issue and just wouldn't get it.
Precisely the opposite. I used to be an "introvert." Turns out I just like to be alone sometimes. Do you really think there are people in the world who don't like to be by themselves? "Extrovert," that's just as much of a myth.