191–200 of 473 posts
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If you have a family already what’s the payoff though. I never get any great feelings from social visits, I just do it to be an upstanding member of society and so my daughter has friends.
It might be nice to have a social safety net when you age and your children leave you.
One thing to me is fairly obvious: people who are introverts can be social, but only for limited amounts of time. For example, I like talking a lot, but I can only do it for limited amounts of time. Maybe only a few hours a week. If I'm pushed past that point, I just don't want to chat any more. It's like I'm full of food, but with socialization. After that I find socialization immensely distasteful and irritating. T…
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The whole concept of *verts is an early 20th century psychological concept from an era which produced practices and ideas which are now mostly antiquated. It has become pop psychology and never had much meaning.
The field of personality psychology continues to believe it has meaning: extraversion is a factor in the five-factor model.
You do not need to be an extrovert at work to get ahead. Full stop.
Does it help in some ways? Sure, but you can be equally successful as an introvert as long as you are able to communicate clearly when needs demand it. Plenty of excellent engineers speak to almost no one, but write excellently.
I've been in this industry for decades, I'm extremely introverted (autistic), I make 750k+ a year and run large projects. I never once "went extroverted at work".
I regularly say yes to work dinners and such that I don’t personally want to attend. That sort of thing is far outside my comfort zone, and that’s exactly why I do it. It’s good exercise to pretend to be outgoing and chatty for an evening. Like any other skill, you get better at it with practice! And the author here is so right: almost everyone else at these things besides the salespeople are probably also introverts…
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> "Drain" for an introvert can mean anything from starting a muscle tension clock that will eventually cause a headache to a straight-up panic attack that could take hours/days to recover from. Unless you are being hyperbolic with your usage of the word "panic attack", having one during social events is not "being an introvert," it's a medical condition. I am an introvert and have also had unrelated panic attacks. Pa…
Absolutely bizarre that you're being downvoted. Having panic attacks is not a normal reaction to any normal human situation, gp absolutely should look for medical and psychological help.
It's a disability, but I sorta reject the framing that I'm "not normal". Mostly because it feels a bit more culturally loaded? I can't articulate it effectively, but like, what I experience may actually be extremely normal ... for folks with autism. So, maybe "not neurotypical", maybe?
One thing to me is fairly obvious: people who are introverts can be social, but only for limited amounts of time. For example, I like talking a lot, but I can only do it for limited amounts of time. Maybe only a few hours a week. If I'm pushed past that point, I just don't want to chat any more. It's like I'm full of food, but with socialization. After that I find socialization immensely distasteful and irritating. T…
It’s quite treacherous to identify yourself with labels: introvert, extrovert, conscientious, conservative, liberal, empathetic, neurodivergent, etc. The act of putting a name on some traits that you have can seem liberating: I finally know what I am, and why I’m different from others, and that’s fine. On the flipside, once you commit to a label, you lock yourself inside it, and instead of describing, it begins shapi…
I'm autistic, I discovered this partway through my adult life. Labelling it has done incredible things to build support infrastructure. I have more energy and less stress now.
I'm queer, I discovered this as a young adult. It's connected me with whole communities. And most importantly, it's helped me discover and embrace the concept of a found family.
I'm a leftist. (Not a liberal, I don't vote Democrat). This label has helped me find opportunities to engage in mutual aid I genuinely find more rewarding than any charity work I've done.
Every time I add a label, I discover wonderful communities who help me explore myself, help me figure out what it means to be that label, and whether it's one I want to keep or shed.
There's nothing wrong with building an identity. You have to have introspection and periodically evaluate it, but labels are fine.
This feels like the author has made the assumption that since they are an introvert, all introverts are like them. However, I think that introversion, like most things is a continuum, not binary. Take the characterization of introverts in the article: "They would rather sit in front of the computer than go out during the yearly college social fest." For me it isn't just a matter of "I'd rather be in front of a comput…
> And the idea of approaching and talking to someone I don't know fills me with terror. I think this is social anxiety and not to be confused with introversion.
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> Most of us are descended from people who lived in small communities and rarely interacted with people who lived outside of them. It's only in the last 200 years (an instant on evolutionary timescales) that the majority of humanity ended up in a position where we have to constantly deal with more than ~30 people on a regular basis. I would be surprised if this is true. Ancient civilizations were complex. When Pompei…
> When Pompeii erupted the population was around 10k just there. And Rome (the city) had a population of 1 million or more, but that doesn't change the fact that demographers estimate at most a 10–20% urbanization rate in the Roman empire—meaning at least 80% of the population lived outside of cities in rural areas. And that's Rome, which had a notably high urbanization rate compared to periods before or after, not m…