C’mon, @intercst . Remember how you were surprised after your surgery that so many people were offering to help you?
I’m an introvert, too, and so is DH. We had no problem with Covid restrictions. (Though I do know everyone in the neighborhood from walking with my dog.)
Despite that, I was willing to reach out for the help I needed after my surgery. You have to admit that building social connections can be good for your survival even if you don’t want to hang out with people like an extrovert.
You aren’t married so that goes double for you. You don’t have a ready-to-help companion living with you.
Don’t get a Darwin Award because you are too curmudgeonly to admit you might need help sometimes. You don’t need to be a “social animal” to touch base with neighbors from time to time. You don’t need them to provide “external validation” (i.e. tell you how smart you are). Better to smile and ask them about themselves. It’s not always about you.
As others have mentioned, I felt like I had trained my whole life for the Covid restrictions.
During COVID I told people (via chat screens mostly) “This is a dream-come-true. I’ve been waiting 50 years for the Government to tell people to stay at least 6 feet away from me.”
You have to admit that building social connections can be good for your survival even if you don’t want to hang out with people like an extrovert.
See the problem with that is, it takes a lot of time and effort in an ongoing way, just to keep the relationships up so that, someday in the far off future, when you might need some help, you have someone to call. It’s a tough cost/benefit ratio to make work. And then of course when that day comes they might not be there for you anyway.
Yes, some people live in isolation and enjoy it. I would guess that is less than 5% of the bell shaped distribution. For most of us some social interaction is a plus.
I am an introvert, even in a crowd, I can be happy with me and myself. What I realized lately, is your interaction with others is not a validation, rather a basic need for being a human. You don’t have to be very personable to every stranger, but you need a small set of folks, whether it is friends or family or a combination of them. The nature has that build into our DNA’s.
While marriage is a social contract, but the need for marriage, goes beyond procreation.
I saw another thread about ‘rich’, initially I wrote below and decided not to post. Anyways here you go…
For someone to feel rich and happiness, you need more than money, you need family, friends, kids, at some age grandkids, a standing in society, it could be a very small circle of 5 friends, etc.
Not at all, while you are breathing, your eyes are seeing something, you are listening to a music, and singing along, your hands are driving. Have you ever thought you are doing 5 different things simultaneously… and if you are someone like this, between words your brain can go somewhere and come back… We are build for this…
I consider myself to be an introvert. What that means to me is that social interaction takes energy. At some point, I need to get alone to recharge.
Extroverts seem to get energy from social interaction. Their time alone takes energy, so after a while alone, they need to find people to be with.
IMHO, that’s all that means. I’m not in the tail ends of the intro/extro-version bell curve. I’m close to the middle, but clearly on the introvert side. I like being with people, but not too many at once. I have a small circle of close friends (mainly family) that don’t take as much energy to be with, and a wider circle of acquaintances that take noticeably more energy to be with.
In short, I need and want some socializing, but not too much. Others further out on the introvert scale may need or want less socializing than I do. And that’s just fine.
Me too. I enjoy some social interaction. But it can be tedious and time consuming. Works in limited amounts. But often I have better things to do with my time.
Since this is October, how about a haunted house for introverts? People keep popping out and try to make small talk. The final room is a networking event where everyone asks for your info at once.
And, on the other hand, there is the Haunted Library for Extroverts: The terror is total silence. No one will make eye contact, and you can’t find anyone to talk to about your weekend.
