showing results for: introvert
Grand final day: when some introverts must leave the house
5 October 2024
No posts about sport, hardly ever, then two in a week. But the NRL football (rugby league) grand final (Penrith Panthers versus Melbourne Storm) is on this long weekend, and since I wrote about the AFL the other day, this seems right. More a personality/psychology post though: a profile of Nathan Cleary, the Panthers halfback, and veritable introvert:
Nathan Cleary could have the time of his life, “just the most enjoyable day” he says, without even thinking about leaving the house. Trackies optional. No need to talk to another human soul. Maybe the dog. Maybe not a word. But probably picking up any one of several footballs that are left lying around the place, because Cleary “just feels normal being able to hold a footy”.
I too have the most enjoyable days, without even thinking about leaving the house. Even if I actually seldom stay at home the whole day. Instead of a football though, I’ll reach for my laptop.
And it turns out Cleary’s girlfriend, Matildas’ star Mary Fowler, is also an introvert. That, as we say in this household, is a match made in heaven.
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introversion, personality, psychology, sport
Introverts and extraverts are at war, and introverts are winning. WTF?
16 August 2024
Marie Le Conte, writing for New Humanist, in a provocatively titled article: the introverts are winning, seems to suggest introverts and extraverts are embroiled in some sort of global conflict.
A quick explainer. People generally fall into one of two personality traits: extraversion or introversion. It’s a scale. You can be close to either end, or in between. In short, extraverts seek stimulation by being around people. They’re often perceived as being outgoing, sociable. Introverts find stimulation internally, in their minds. They’re often absorbed by their thoughts, and as such tend to be reserved.
But you don’t get to choose where on the scale you sit. You can’t just leap from one side to the other, simply because it takes your fancy. You are what you are: introvert or extravert.
But if there’s a battle between the two, I’m clearly reading the wrong news channels, because this is the first of heard of such a struggle. But I wonder if Le Conti knows what it means to be an introvert. It would seem though, introverts, of which I am one, are responsible for all manner of societal ills.
Among these are the growing preference of people to work from home, and conduct many of their social activities by way of social media. Streaming movies (instead of going to a cinema), and performing things like banking and grocery transactions online, are also part of the… problem.
Advances in technology, and make no mistake, that’s what made just about all of these activities possible, are behind this shift in human behaviour. It might make for a great headline to suggest this is all a conspiracy on the part of introverts to achieve world domination, but yeah, whatever.
In the years after [pandemic] restrictions were lifted, many naturally outgoing people — this writer included — have found it that bit harder to get their friends out of the house. Plans somehow require more effort than ever to get made, and are always at risk of getting cancelled at the last minute. A spontaneous pub trip, once a cornerstone of British social life, now takes work to organise.
So, no one want to go the pub anymore? This could only be the fault of introverts. They somehow managed to gain the upper hand during the stay-at-home orders, imposed in many parts of the world, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and are now foisting their will upon everyone else. Le Conte, mercifully however, acknowledges the present cost-of-living pressures facing many people, may be playing a part in keeping them at home.
Quite a big part, I’d say. Let’s take the Australian restaurant industry as an example. In Sydney alone, dozens of well-known dining establishments have sadly been forced to close in recent years, mainly as a result of the rising cost-of-living. Cash strapped diners are staying home. I’ll say it again: these closures were caused, largely, by cost-of-living issues. Not because introverts conquered the world.
People are probably reluctant to spend an evening at the pub, because they’re trying to save money. I highly doubt the same people, who were presumably extraverts before the pandemic, mysteriously underwent a sudden personality change, and became introverts afterwards.
Greater global instability, particularly an increase in acts of terrorism, is also seeing more people choosing to stay at home. This is because some people — and I’m not sure how many — are said to be fearful of going out. It has nothing to do with people who have a certain personality trait. It is because of concern for personal safety.
This reluctance to leave the house however, according to Pascal Bruckner, a French philosopher, is a “triumph of the slippers”. In other words, people are more comfortable donning a pair of slippers, and seldom leaving the house, rather than putting on their shoes and venturing into the world.
The so-called triumph of the slippers however, is, apparently, a major victory for introverts in their “war” against extraverts. Bruckner may be a philosopher, whom I thought were generally learned people, but he seems to have little understanding of introverts.
Who will win the war? Bruckner is proudly fighting on the side of the extroverts, but he isn’t exactly optimistic about what’s to come. As he points out, wannabe hermits have a powerful weapon at their disposal: the internet.
Who will win the war? A war between introverts — sorry, wannabe hermits — and extraverts? A “war” the introverts are apparently winning because of the internet. I couldn’t make this stuff up, even if I tried. But we all knew the evil internet was going to come into this sooner or later.
Technologies that allow us to do more online — and not just at home — have no doubt been a boon for introverts. We do, after all, like spending some of our time in quiet spaces, away from others. It’s in our nature. But it’s not just introverts who have found value in being able to do all sorts of things online, rather than in person.
Le Conte’s article may be correct in suggesting people have become more withdrawn from others, and are more obsessed with social media. This may not be a good state of affairs. And no doubt, more of us are conducting a greater number of activities online, things that once required going to a place, and interacting with others.
That’s not necessarily bad of itself. But to suggest the present state of the world is the result of some sort of war, being waged by introverts against extraverts, is outright absurd. I’ll leave it at that.
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introversion, personality, psychology
The introvert brain is not the same as an extravert brain
13 February 2023
Neuroscientist and author Friederike Fabritius, writing for CNBC:
One Harvard study found that introverts’ brains work differently, and have thicker gray matter compared to extroverts. In people who are strongly extroverted, gray matter was consistently thinner. Introverts also showed more activity in the frontal lobes, where analysis and rational thought take place. Another study that scanned brains of both introverts and extroverts found that, even in a relaxed state, the introverted brain was more active, with increased blood flow.
I never thought of looking at it this way. The thicker their grey matter, the less a person generally talks. The thinner a person’s grey matter, the more they talk, possibly nonstop. Now there’s a topic of dinner table conversation for you.
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introversion, personality, psychology
Ideas to help introverts and extroverts work together
14 September 2022
Philip Coggan, writing for the Economist’s Bartleby column, with workplace strategies helping introverts and extraverts to more effectively work together, despite their personality differences.
Then there’s this:
The study also found that the children of professionals were more likely to be extrovert. It could simply be that children who grow up in more prosperous homes are less likely to face the kind of stressful events that undermine self-confidence. People with higher self-confidence may apply for more prestigious jobs and may be more likely to believe that their efforts will be rewarded; those with a negative self-image may feel it is not worth trying too hard.
Maybe I’m reading this paragraph in the wrong context, but the suggestion seems to be introverts see themselves negatively, and aren’t so confident. That’s not my understanding of introversion.
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introversion, personality, psychology
Introverts prefer foods that are not so spicy says Kurzgesagt
9 September 2022
Regardless of the subject matter the Kurzgesagt videos are never dull. Their latest takes on the question of why people are lonely, and offers some constructive solutions. One initiative are the newly launched Kurzgesagt Meetups… where likeminded Kurzgesagt followers across the world, who are aged eighteen or over, can arrange gatherings locally.
Extraversion and introversion also features in the discussion, where I learnt introverts are generally not fans of spicy food. I’d not thought about that before. You learn something new everyday.
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introversion, personality, psychology, video
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi: an introvert on steroids?
27 May 2022
Detail from Imaginary Prisons, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Warning, spoilers follow. Return to this article once you’ve finished reading the book.
Imagine you live in a sprawling multi-storied house. The lower levels are flooded by an ocean, while the upper floors are shrouded in mist and clouds. The seemingly endless labyrinth like hallways are adorned with classical style marble statues, and for whatever reason, sea birds have taken to nesting among some of these figures. But it’s not really a house you’re in, it’s more like a complex with the dimensions of a city, and one none too small at that.
This is the world, Piranesi, the titular character in the second novel of British author Susanna Clarke (published by Bloomsbury Publishing, August 2021), finds himself in. Piranesi knows little about how the house came to be, or when he arrived there, although he has vague recollections of living elsewhere before. Come to that, Piranesi knows hardly anything about himself. He’s perhaps aged in his mid-thirties, and if pressed, couldn’t even be sure his name was Piranesi.
Despite these peculiar circumstances, Piranesi otherwise seems content, and goes about his day to day life as if nothing were amiss. But how would you feel were it you in Piranesi’s place? Wouldn’t you wonder how you ended up in this predicament, and whether there was a way leave, and return to the real world? Wouldn’t you miss family and friends, and wonder if they felt the same way? Wouldn’t you crave the company of others at least some of the time?
But Piranesi doesn’t appear to be the least bit perturbed. Why though? Does he have some sort of problem? Does he loathe all people, and is thankful for the sanctuary the house offers, a place devoid of humans? Or is he perhaps an introvert, who’s found his happy place? Yet Piranesi isn’t completely alone in the house. Once or twice a week, he goes to a certain area of the complex, where he briefly meets a middle-aged man, whom Piranesi refers to as The Other.
If Piranesi knows little about himself, he knows even less about The Other. He has no idea who this gentleman really is — although he believes him to be some sort of academic — nor does he know where The Other resides in the house. The Other meanwhile frequently questions Piranesi, and even sets him tasks, some relatively arduous. One such request required Piranesi to walk to a distant point in the house, on a journey lasting two days return.
To make a comparison, and better understand the scale of the house, I looked up the walking time and distance from Sydney’s CBD to the western suburb of Penrith on Google, and was advised the trek is approximately fifty-six kilometres in length, and the non-stop walk would take almost twelve hours.
Of course the question of exactly what sort of place Piranesi finds himself in came up repeatedly as I read the novel, particularly as he never encountered anyone else — at least not at first — in the sprawling complex. While plenty of Clarke’s readers (myself included) have ideas as to the nature of the house, and what it really is, I found myself wondering how Piranesi could remain oblivious to his acute isolation, and not miss the company of other people.
After all, surely not even the most extreme of introverts would continuously crave the deep solitude of the apparently empty house. But there were indications Piranesi was lonely. He regarded the sea birds nesting in the statues in some of the hallways as friends, and would often have conversations — albeit one-sided — with them. But when it becomes obvious another person is lurking, out of sight, in the house, Piranesi is keen to find out who they are.
In trying to understand Piranesi’s apparently people averse personality, I would describe him as an introvert. But no ordinary — if there is such a thing — introvert. To live alone for years in a vast complex, spending perhaps an hour at most, once a week, with one other person could not be anyone’s ideal. While it can argued something else is going on, that he is unaware of, Piranesi’s outright acceptance of his plight remains compelling. Piranesi is certainly an introvert, but he’s more, he’s an introvert on steroids.
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fiction, introversion, novels, psychology, Susanna Clarke
Lockdown, an introvert’s paradise, now sadly missed
28 March 2022
Almost two-thirds of readers surveyed by London based magazine The Face reported missing pandemic imposed lockdowns, with many reporting “significant improvements in day-to-day-life.”
You might be surprised to learn that an overwhelming majority of respondents reported that, yeah, actually, they did miss lockdown life – 66.9 per cent of them, to be exact. For all the sadness and boredom born out of the pandemic, many of you experienced significant improvements in day-to-day-life.
As an introvert who enjoyed lockdowns, I couldn’t go passed this thought:
“[Lockdown] was an introvert’s paradise. I miss it immensely,” says 23-year-old Sarah, who also described the most challenging thing about the pandemic was “it ending”.
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introversion, personality, psychology
Loneliness is an affliction of epidemic proportions, a visual essay by Alvin Chang
28 September 2023
Twenty-four hours in an invisible epidemic is an especially poignant edition of visual essay magazine, The Pudding, produced by New York City based journalist Alvin Chang.
The epidemic in question is not Covid-19, though the lockdowns triggered by the pandemic have aggravated another malady: loneliness.
The pandemic exacerbated social isolation, and we’re still not back to pre-pandemic levels. Being alone isn’t necessarily the same as being lonely. But according to a meta-analysis of studies, more people have reported feeling lonely every year since 1976. In short, there really is a loneliness epidemic.
This is case study, Chang looks at the profiles of seventy-two fictitious persons, one of whom is probably similar to you. But look at the profiles of the people who differ from you. Some people are truly living in isolation, and their only interactions — for want of a better word — with others in the course of a day may only be a visit to the supermarket.
I know a number of these people will be introverts, and possibly not so bothered by social isolation, but think of those who are not. This cannot be easy on them.
For another perspective see The Loneliness Project, and also Why You Are Lonely and How to Make Friends, which offers some solutions, by Kurzgesagt.
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introversion, personality, psychology
A return to blogging RSS and blogrolls for content discovery
6 December 2022
While I’m not one hundred percent sure we’re entering the end-days of social media, some recent talk of a resurgence in blogging, and a return to using RSS for content discovery, is encouraging. It’s kind of the web I know the best. But like anyone else, I can be found on the socials, Twitter and Mastodon, among them. I should add I’m an introvert, so my socials are relatively quiet. And no, the irony of that last sentence is not lost on me.
I first acquired the disassociated domain name, disassociated.com.au, in 1997. disassociated.com, meanwhile, came along in early 2003. But not before someone else, who’d bought the name, tried to sell it to me in the early 2000’s. But way back in the day, a person’s own website was always regarded the central pivot of their online presence. Pages on the early socials, Friendster, MySpace, and later Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, were always seen as “outposts”.
As a web person you had presences there, because everyone else did, but they were not core to your overall online presence. And for good reason. The socials might have been public web-spaces, but they were privately owned. Fall foul of their terms of service, and you stood have your account suspended, or worse, permanently shut down. Sometimes without recourse, because you were in the realm of someone else who was setting the rules.
But no problem, you still had your largely untouchable core online presence, your website, at your own domain, which was self-hosted somewhere. Until we didn’t. The socials became too easy to use. They were free, and no hosting charges needed to be paid. Having a self-hosted website required some degree — no matter how little — of technical competence. Twitter and Instagram offered unlimited server capacity, ease of use, and, through their sprawling memberships, a multitude of potential followers. No more drawn out wrangling with SEO to find eyes to see your stuff, an audience was already present. You simply (sort of) had to make yourself known to them.
But before SEO and the socials came along, audience building was a little trickier. Website owners and bloggers were required to put in a lot more groundwork. In the late 1990’s I was writing blog posts before blogging was a thing. Back then we called these blogs online journals. To make ourselves known to other people then, we might write an online journal post about them, while linking to their website at the same time. Another option was through guestbook comments.
Guestbooks were one of the earliest methods of interacting with a website owner, and were hugely popular in the late 1990’s. There were akin to the comments section of a blog post, although the discussion was confined to a single page on a website, where the guestbook was situated. Another tried and true way of making yourself known to other website owners was by way of a links page. Above is the links page that featured on disassociated in late 1999. I know a lot of those links are gone now, but later on I might click links and see who is still around.
I guess you could say website link pages evolved into the blogrolls that once adorned the main pages, usually a side bar (which I stopped using about ten years ago) of a blog, when blogs per se arrived. The search engines however bought about the demise of the old school blogroll, from around 2007 or 2008. They were concerned many of the inclusions to what were the favourite websites of the blogger, were paid placements. In those earlier days, the search engines were also opposed to the practice of linking to so-called “bad neighbourhoods.”
Bad neighbourhoods were seen as websites having little, or no relevance, to the subject matter of the blog that linked out to them. For instance, it was seen as bad practice for a blog focussed on film production to link to a blog focussed on baking cupcakes. That could only be downright suspicious, couldn’t it? Too bad if the cupcake blogger was the significant other of the film production blogger, interlinking was simply unacceptable, and might earn you a slap down from a search engine.
Hopefully those days are behind us. The web is too vast and diverse a place for anyone to stay in their own lane. But blogrolls have been making a comeback. Not so much on individual blogs, but in the form of a number of aggregator websites, which are focused on content discovery, and the work of outstanding writers and bloggers. Chief among them are feedle, Blogroll, ooh.directory, and FeedLand, which is a feeds repository.
As I wrote on Twitter recently, “search engines are great for finding resources on topics of interest but scrolling through lists of blogs and randomly spotting something compelling is plain fun”. I for one am hopeful of a blogging renaissance, and other ways of discovering content, far from the shadows of the social media giants.
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Little Tornadoes, screenplay co-written by Christos Tsiolkas
6 April 2022
Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkas, author of Seven and a Half, teamed up with Melbourne based filmmaker Aaron Wilson to write the screenplay for Little Tornadoes, trailer, which premiered at last year’s Melbourne International Film Festival:
Introverted* Leo is a steelworker at his small town’s local plant. After his wife abandons him without explanation, leaving him to care for their two young children, he is bereft – barely able to cook a decent meal or keep the household running. So when a recently-arrived Italian colleague suggests that his sister, Maria, act as surrogate homemaker, Leo reluctantly accepts. But can one woman’s warm, nurturing presence fill the void left by another, and can Leo yield to the winds of change?
Little Tornadoes is set in 1971, and was filmed in Tocumwal, in New South Wales, where Wilson grew up. In a voiceover in the trailer, one of the characters utters the words “so long ago, it was a different country.” I’m not sure of the context of her words, but here the film somehow feels more like it was set in 1921 rather than 1971. Little Tornadoes arrives in Australian cinemas on Thursday 12 May 2022.
*Leo’s either an introvert, or he’s reserved. You cannot be introverted, just like you cannot be called blonded if you have blond hair, right? Pedantic I know…
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