The Introverts Are Winning

Must it be a war? Must there be a winner?

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.

> Everyone knew there were introverts and extroverts, homebodies and socialites, but it had never really mattered. The two groups complemented each other and managed to peacefully cohabit.

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.

I agree with the author a little bit but overall I think she's mainly being selfish and ego-centric.

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.

My eyes were tantalizingly close to rolling out of my head throughout reading this, but I had to stop altogether at this point:

> 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.

I burned a bit as I read the article, esp the Bruckner quotes, as it's touching something I've been thinking on more frequently recently. These extroverted persons keep taking issue with introvertedness, as if it's a problem to be solved. They demand us to gain soft skills, to ditch WFH, to engage in small talk. And in a way, these things aren't that bad. Sure we can get out there and be fairly good at it, though it's usually a huge energy suck.

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".

The article confuses extroversion with resilience and living outside.

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.

This, and most writing on introverts/extroverts, go out vs. stay home, office vs home office, etc. leaves me feeling unrepresented and oversimplified. I, and I really assume most people, see the good in both approaches. I am an introvert, in the sense that I need time alone to recharge, but I am also (like almost everyone, I assert) desperately in need of in person social contact. It's tiring, but so are work, and sex, and sports, all also things I need. Is it so hard, in so many areas, to write a n engaging article that people will read that says "hybrid is better than either extreme?". (In terms of clicks, I'm assuming "yes")

I see the author is born in 1991, so they got from ~29 before the pandemic to ~33 now. This is an age where ime such changes are very probable to happen in our generations anyway when the age groups one associates oneself with are around that, pandemic or not. The author probably connected them with the pandemic because maybe there was not continuous time of them happening as it normally would, due to the lockdowns, and it would seem like one just woke up to a new reality after. But some of what the author describes (eg less spontaneity in going out) would probably have happened in some way.

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).

Nothing, that I'm aware of, is stopping extroverts from going out and meeting other people. They just won't run across as many introverts to feel superior to. Introverts can finally get the peace and quiet they desire. Unfortunately, they still have to hear about how they should get out more, smile and "just deal". But, it's a little easier to ignore now.

There are no introverts. The introversion/extroversion trait is normally distributed, so unless you want to draw an arbitrary line somewhere on the spectrum, you're stuck with almost everybody being a mix of traits and most people being somewhere in the middle.

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.

This is absolutely not what I'm seeing. Travel is at an all time high with crazy amount of traffic jams, every weekend. Restaurants are full, parks, museums.. full. It is almost eerie just how everybody is going out and about like there is no tomorrow. I reduced my friend circle willingly, otherwise they would keep nagging me about doing stuff together, but I currently want to spend time on my own projects.

The article is unfortunately disingenuous and cannot be trusted to make an honest argument.

> 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.

He's confused, he thinks he should be always winning because he's better.

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.

This article makes it sound like introversion is a personality disorder and maladaptive for society, which is frankly insulting.

Extroverts have enough advantages in modern society, they don’t need to try to erode ours.

I am more and more comfortable but I as an introvert... am starting to somewhat regret it on certain cases, health wise, getting to know new people, etc.

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.

> 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.

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!

Hacker News is, of course, a scurrilous bastion of introversion.

I just got back from a furry convention. Guess what? There was tons of people. People who mostly know each other online made the expensive and tedious choice to book a room at a hotel and a train/flight and get to Ottawa to go and see people they talk to online ALL the time. There was even the option of a VR experience. We /could've/ just stayed at home. We didn't.

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.

Technology is giving introverts access to a deep, meaningful, beautiful social life. In real life, I can be a fish out of water in my interests, but on X I am a social butterfly with dozens of friends and several very dear friends.

So, what are the salient points in this article? It's on a humanist website, and I kind of like humanists, and, in principle, humans, so I read it carefully.

* 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.

The way this article is written feels very selfish with a distinct lack of empathy for how so called introverts might have felt in a similar position

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

Those same extroverts who rally against introverts are also rallying against the folks who are on the autistic spectrum.

Having austism of varied degree is not a disorder but an innate skillset that extroverts could only wish they could have ... selectively.

I listen to a few podcasts where Marie la Conte is a regular. She's not anti lockdown in a conspiracy way, but she very clearly has unaddressed PTSD from the whole episode. She tries to present it as some kind of reasoned position, but I think she's just afraid to be alone with her thoughts.

I think it is kind of misconception by connecting introvertness vs. extrovertness to preference for remote communication vs IRL communication.

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.

> A spontaneous pub trip, once a cornerstone of British social life, now takes work to organise.

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.

It's not much about tech, it's about a collapsing society where people start to separate in isolated cohorts, sometimes even alone if missing others with similar views around.

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.

I'd say the "rent seeking middle men" are winning. So extroverts are seeing less of each other and misplacing the blame for it.

The author assumes introverts like always staying in their homes. I don't think that is true for all introverts.

We need more third spaces beyond the gym or things based around alcohol. I like the idea of members clubs where people have similar values/interests and you can go there and chat to people. Laptops/phones banned.

The whole introversion vs extroversion thing doesn't capture the essence of how people actually are. People have different levels of energy depending on who they're around. They can feel drained or recharged depending on who they're interacting with

First of all the COVID pandemic is still going on, the idea that it's over is just wishful thinking backed by irresponsible media and governments.

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

So basically diversity is good thus introverts are good but please for the love of extroverts, don't be an introvert.

Introvert/extrovert and the associated pop psychology surrounding these terms has so diluted them they have become essentially meaningless.

"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.

This plays out in natural selection though. Recluse culture has lost the evolutionary lottery and is unlikely to be very prevalent in a couple hundred years (assuming winning means it’s a positive survival trait).

Some of the extroverts get offended when we choose elsewhere

> Everyone knew there were introverts and extroverts

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.

I don't think they are

I work directly with two introverts and I've worked with many over the years. More so than not, what comes along with introversion is passive aggressive behavior (mostly because introverts don't like confrontation).

This makes working on a team extremely frustrating. Coupled with the desire to WFH makes this a non-starter.

Without the societal/technological contributions of the so-called introverts, the extroverts would still be writing paper letters instead of being able to bully each other from the convenience of their mobile phones. These borderline narcissistic people are exhausting...

Lol, no.

Before I start my rant, my position is that the ideal is some days where everyone agrees to attend in person, optionally. I am aware that this also has its downsides. Not looking for comments on that.

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.

Why do introverts think that they should be protected, at all times, from doing something that makes them uncomfortable?

Frankly I think the author doesn't go far enough. The internet isolated cocoon lifestyle isn't just harmful to individual flourishing for all the correct reasons listed, it's simply self destructive which is only touched on tangentially.

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.

> today’s world isn’t especially welcoming, but retreating from it is an ultimately selfish choice

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.

Does it not occur to any of you to question the terms of this engagement? Introvert and extrovert are categories that Jung just made up in 1913, they are not scientific fact! Just because sometimes you want to curl up in the fetal position under a blanket for 3 hours and listen to a podcast doesn’t mean that you’re naturally inclined to an internal world, it means that you derive comfort from being alone like a child in their blanket being read a bed time story.

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?