Best Of

The introvert vs extrovert situation very much chimes with me. I’m quite an introverted person, but for a while I was a volunteer member of a mental health team in the Dutch town where I lived. The idea was to provide support for people who were just under the radar, not ill enough to need professional help but not doing so great on their own. I’d regularly meet a client in the local community centre, for coffee and cake and a talk.

This was very much concerned with loneliness and people who didn’t get out much. One was an avid player of the MMO game Second Life, one was an ex-truck driver who was now retired, one was a recovering mental health client trying to do mail delivery for the postal service. They were all definitely introverted people.

I wasn’t an active part of the team for very long, I’m not really good enough at small talk to be comfortable doing that work. But it showed me that even very introverted people will show up if you make an appointment for coffee and cake with them. However, lacking extroverted family members in the immediate surroundings who drag you along, it’s hard to find projects like the one I was engaged with.

You could say these things are a public health initiative, because loneliness is as much a predictor for an early death as obesity or smoking.

So if our modern way of living has removed a lot of social interactions, how do we go about putting those back into our lives?

Its a good question, and I think the right question. I don't have a good answer, I'm kind of pessimistic on the whole thing, I think emotional support robots will become more commonplace and allow people to continue the trend of an individually cultivated social and information sphere.

I can spit out a collection of thoughts.

I do like the idea of communal living arrangements with shared common areas and private living areas. I lived in an apartment complex with my brother for a couple years when I was younger that had an active community center. I tried getting involved, went to the weekly movie night and joined a volleyball and basketball league. I had fun with the activities but found I didn't really fit in with the sort of people who did that sort of thing. I'd classify them as extroverts who liked to party. There were 100s of people who lived in the apartments, but maybe a few dozen who showed up to the events. I think in less developed societies there is a greater necessity to be involved with survival and group cohesion, like you said with the example of the well, in this situation it was just for fun.

I also look at my sister's life, she lives on a lake with a lot of her childhood friends and family. Those who don't live there come to visit and during the summer they spend a good portion of most weekends hanging out and socializing. And she makes new friends with others in her new neighborhood. Its mostly all extroverted partyers though. There's an idea that with people moving to cities the relative value of extroversion went up. You have to meet new people and make a positive impression. I have small town relatives with similar situations, their communities with friends and family are much more tight knit. They're in farming communities that are still economically viable so people have stuck around. They attend church, join the volunteer fire dept., go to street dances, get to know their neighbors through everyday business and work interactions, etc. But they grew up with a lot of these people and introverted people are sort of included by default. As an introvert I'm able to go on vacations and do fun things because I have family who do those things and I get invited. If I were on my own I'd have a harder time, its a big part of the reason I started with D&D again, its nice to interact with people over a shared interest.

In many ways the ability for people to move around and find like minded people through the internet to associate with has been a positive, especially for smaller, more marginalized people like LGBT. At the same time it has come at a cost, in much the same way as large anonymized and atomized cities, people stop associating with the community around them, or those who aren't exactly like them. I like the analogy of a cultural tower of Babel, differing cultural groups speak different languages in many ways. Maybe worse, the words they use are often the same but the meaning or value behind them are different leading to all kinds of misunderstandings and conflict.

The best I can think for a solution is some sort of cultural norm around socialization and relationships along the line of the value of diet and exercise. Trying to figure out a structural remedy I'm at a loss. I think the notion of allowing more experiments in living arrangements is maybe the way? Allow people to try things and if there are ideas that work well for people, more will slowly adopt it.