Thinking about a conversation I was having with an acquaintance years ago. He was a friend of a friend and we were talking about food. I forget the exact phrasing but I brought up loving avocados. He said “what’s that?” I was a bit surprised and explained. He responded “OH thats crazy I thought that was one of those made up words”. The statement was like a flashbang I had to contemplate for a few minutes. PERSONAL STORIES ONLY, DO NOT INCLUDE A STATEMENT FROM A CELEBRITY OR POLITICIAN.
Look at how the extroverts lost their minds during covid lockdown.
Yeah, the lockdown was enlightening. I lived alone through the entire two year shutdown. I still saw coworkers (because I was working for the government and forced to come into the office) but that was the entire extent of my in-person socialization. And I was perfectly content with that. I’d hop on Discord with some friends after work, and would socialize all night long. On the weekends, if I was playing a single player game, I could easily go two and a half days (Friday evening into Monday morning) without saying a single word.
But extroverts lost their goddamned minds. Half of them were power-walking in the overcrowded local park, even though they had never visited the park before. They just wanted an excuse to leave the house. The other half were ripping their houses down to the studs and completely rebuilding the interiors… Because they never spent any time at home until that point, and suddenly small annoyances about their living areas built up to major complaints. Half of them were rallying against masks, just because conservatives were promising a return to normalcy.
I’m sorry, but comparing yourself to actually physically isolated people while you were seeing people in person at work is wild. Humans are social creatures! I too loved the privacy and peace that came with covid, but if you saw people live and in person at work, you have no idea what it was like to actually quarantine at home with only screen people for companionship. It messes with your head.
What happened with the lockdowns and immediately after made believe being an extrovert is the result of failing to fully develop a working theory of mind.
I’m an introvert but even I struggled with quarantine. Everyone needs at least some degree of human interaction.
It didn’t help that I was already pretty isolated before the pandemic, so most of my human interaction was from the checkout counter in stores, cafe baristas, or wait staff at a restaurant. I kinda depended on those little micro-interactions to get my social fix. And I didn’t have friends to hang out with on the porch or meet at an outdoor spot. I didn’t have an online chat group to rely on either.
People who have those things really take them for granted. Like, yeah, I get it, introverts don’t need to be surrounded by people all the time, in fact that would be torture. I’m that way too. But I can’t be completely alone all the time either, I wind up too depressed to even feed myself.
Getting a cat has literally saved my life, given me a reason to live, helped me stop talking to myself like a madman (literally insane ramblings), helped me find my way to some semblance of a reality that’s anchored in more than just one point within my own perception, some degree of consensus reality even if the only other being sharing that consensus is a cat.
It’s not perfect, my cat can’t stand in for every social/psychological need for human interaction. But she can stand in for some of those needs, and for now it’s enough.
rant:
It has to be enough, because I don’t have any other option. I can’t just choose to be accepted by society. That’s a lie told by the “self-help” grift community. We are not the masters of our own circumstances, everyone depends on others for their degree of social acceptance or lack thereof.
That’s why it’s so toxic to tell young people “don’t be cool, you’ll regret it later in life.” No, you’ll regret not being cool when nobody likes you and you can’t find a job because most positions are filled by personal relationships and networking, not by fairly considering qualified applicants. What defines “being cool” is what matters. Different people have different ideas of “cool.” It’s not about “don’t be cool” it’s about teaching what’s cool and what isn’t.
Growing up, I internalized that “don’t give in to peer pressure” thing a little too much. I made it a point to never conform to any social norms, and I thought that made me better for everyone else. It was a badge of honor that no one liked me. Until I became an adult and it dawned on me that it’s impossible to get anywhere in life if literally no one likes you.
Some amount of peer pressure is a good thing. It’s what maintains social cohesion. It’s what makes people internalize a common set of values (and yes, everyone has personal values, even if yours are different from others’ or the mainstream, you do still have values, and if you share them with others within a subculture then they are socially enforced, just like any other). Peer pressure teaches people “right from wrong,” and “acceptable from unacceptable” behavior. Without it, everyone would be deviant and ego-centric.
So the problem isn’t “don’t give in to peer pressure,” it’s teaching “what peer pressure to follow, and what to reject.”
I’m on my soap box because part of the reason I’m such a maladjusted adult is because as a kid I was sheltered and isolated from a “sinful world,” and never learned the social norms that most people do, that come so naturally to most people that by the time they reach adulthood they don’t even think about them. I’m just expected to know certain things, certain social scripts and faux pas, and if I don’t or it’s not so intuitive that it’s just my default subconscious reaction, then people view that as “immature” or “deviant” or “deliberate misbehavior,” when the fact is I’m doing the best I can, I tried for decades to learn how to be normal, but no matter what I do or how many times I analyze patterns or try to emulate the behavior I see, it’s never enough, it’s never quite right, there’s always something wrong with it because there’s always another layer or detail or nuance that I don’t understand. I can literally never make up for those formative years of social development that I missed growing up, because the adults in my life were trying to “protect” me from the outside world…
It does seem like a lot of the world is still paying for that though. (“the world is a little safer if you wear a mask” -> votes far right to protect their freedom)