Introversion is not a super power: How misanthropy masquerades as 'The Introvert Hangover'
David Berry: It is not that sometimes we all get tired of being around
people; it is that I am a delicate soap bubble who may burst if
someone’s gaze lingers on me too long
I
never really knew what a hangover was until I hit 30. Now, sure, I
remember languishing while “soooooo hungovvveeerrrrrrr” as a younger
man, grunting and whining my way through damn near most of a morning
until the sacred elixir of greasy spoon eggs and corner store Gatorade
returned me to the point where an early afternoon beer seemed like a
capital idea. At a certain point, though, hangovers became apocalyptic,
weekend-defining affairs, the sort of thing where freebasing Tylenol and
30 minutes on the floor of a hot shower were necessary just to have the
strength to press “Resume Watching” on every third show of a Netflix
binge.
But even a lazy, self-pitying wreck like me doesn’t know the destructive power of the true king of hangovers: the introvert hangover.
According to writer and self-professed introvert Shawna Courter, of
online site Introvert, Dear, it is a hellacious affair: “Your ears might
ring, your eyes start to blur, and you feel like you’re going to
hyperventilate … your mind feels like it kind of shuts down, building
barriers around itself as if you had been driving on a wide open road,
and now you’re suddenly driving in a narrow tunnel. All you want is to
be at home, alone, where it’s quiet.” Presumably this is made even worse
by the fact that calling to order a pizza would basically be like
waterboarding yourself with human interaction. in subsequent posts on the phenomenon,
by one whole study that wasn’t actually at all related to this idea,
but implied that people who identified as introverts tend to be more
easily overstimulated than people who do not — is the latest
manifestation of a certain subsection of society’s obsession with the
fact they need alone time on occasion.
Introversion,
such as it is a thing, has been with us since Carl Jung, which should
be a flaming red flag for anyone who suspects you may need marginally
more than all the feels to have a decent understanding of the world. It
is, as any half-assed personality test – like for instance the “partner site”
that is linked to in Courter’s post – will fuzzily explain, the
opposite of extraversion. It essentially means that you derive your
energy from solitude and inward reflection, as opposed to interacting
with other people. Its primary use has been as a category in those same
personality tests.
You
know, the ones that psychologists are always telling us not to use for
hiring because they are spotty and tend to measure momentary mood more
than underlying attitudes, and because they are subject to manipulation
by personal bias and the Barnum effect, that quirk of human
understanding that lets us find deep personal meaning in hopelessly
vague descriptions. You know, astrology for people who “love” “science.”
It
has recently found more prominence thanks in large part to the 2012
book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,
by Susan Cain. In its simplest and most useful form, Quiet was a strong
argument for not overlooking people or things just because they were not
forcing themselves on you. We live in a society that prizes the ability
to be gregarious, forceful, socially adept and brimming with the
confidence to inspire others. At its worst, this kind of thing rewards
those who know how to sell a personal brand, who have no inclination to
introspection, who are simply able to perform on command. It was
practically warning us that we were heading down the road to a Trump
presidency three years before we thought it possible.
As
a person who is reasonably reserved and remarkably covetous of long
stretches of solitude, this was all well and good. It did not take
terribly long, though, for a plea for understanding to morph into a smug
movement that essentially sets up introverts as delicate geniuses beset
on all sides by boorish, idiotic extroverts getting by on superficial
charm. Cain herself kicked this off when she declared that introversion
would be “the next great diversity issue of our time” at
a Harvard keynote address, which sort of shows you some of the downside
of drawing most of your strength from self-reflection.
If Cain
was just trying to lend her hobby horse an air of unearned importance,
though, most of the people who have followed have stuck simply to
lending themselves an air of unearned importance. In the same way that
horoscopes tend to emphasize that you are, say, “strong-willed” and not
“a stubborn prick,” introverts have taken to considering their inherent
traits as gifts that allow them to transcend the plane of mere mortals.
Take,
for example, a post taken at random from Cain’s own website, which has
developed into a clearinghouse for smug introvert satisfaction. “Six illustrations that show what it’s like in an introvert’s head”
points out that “it’s more complicated for introverts to process
interactions and events,” they are “content and energized when reading a
book, thinking deeply or diving into their rich inner world of ideas”
they “process EVERYTHING (their emphasis) in their surroundings” and
“have an active dialogue with themselves … with many thoughts in their
minds.”
Ignoring, for a moment, that one of the basic definitions
of human consciousness is having an internal life — “I think, therefore
(something something I forget)” — it has also created a definition of
introversion that essentially boils down to “I am not only very
sensitive to the world, I think about it a lot, unlike you, you
outgoing, pea-brained, stimulus-response, drooling, ignorant troll.”
This is not just turning vague realizations about the human condition
into personality traits, it is elevating them to, in the immortal words
of Rob Zombie, something more human than human. While the rest of you
are rutting around in the mud trying to eat and screw, I will be over
here, CONSIDERING POETRY. You heathens.
On
top of that, we now have the hangover, which not only assumes this
inherent advantage but goes so far as to suggest that even interacting in subsequent posts on the phenomenon,
by one whole study that wasn’t actually at all related to this idea,
but implied that people who identified as introverts tend to be more
easily overstimulated than people who do not — is the latest
manifestation of a certain subsection of society’s obsession with the
fact they need alone time on occasion.
As
someone who also prefers my own thoughts to most forms of social
interaction – you know, a person – I can understand the sentiment.
Still, for a group that is so intent on solitude, introverts sure are
ones with a tremendous focus on just how different they are to others
(to say nothing of enumerating those differences in the most
condescending way possible). Perhaps if they spent a little more time on
honest self-reflection, they might see this for what it really is:
misanthropy.
Granted, that doesn’t give you any superpowers, but
is at least an eminently defensible position in a world where every
personality type is trying to get one over on every other.
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