Frankly I think the author doesn't go far enough. The internet isolated cocoon lifestyle isn't just harmful to individual flourishing for all the correct reasons listed, it's simply self destructive which is only touched on tangentially.
If you take the pandemic digital hermit lifestyle to its logical conclusion you get a place roughly like South Korea which was a few years ahead of the curve. Practically no family formation or not even sex life with a birth rate < 1, widespread social isolation and so on. Introversion is almost a euphemism for what's happening because for a lot of young people it seems like something more akin to complete isolation is the norm with entire stages of proper adult development completely delayed or missing.
This isn't just bad for individuals who obviously don't develop if they don't take risks and leave their comfort zones and live permanent Peter Pan like lives, it's gonna come crashing down when there's nobody left to deliver packages to their homes (Hideo Kojima as a sidenote, weirdly prescient again with Death Stranding essentially anticipating this entire discussion). Just calling it introversion is deeply underselling how much of a problem that is in developed countries.
You, like the author, are confusing introversion with failure to launch. I have yet to see any evidence that the two are correlated.
I know plenty of highly extroverted adults who still live in their mothers' basements, have no dating prospects, and are generally miserable. I know plenty of highly introverts adults who are happily married, have successful careers, and are generally happy.
Indeed, the very post-pandemic changes that the author bemoans have been an enormous boon for those of us in the latter category, allowing greater success and greater happiness for the truly introverted. I can now work from home and spend my limited social energy and limited capacity to deal with noise on the small circle of people who I want to spend my energy on—my wife and kids.
My life and my family's life has dramatically improved as a result of that change, and your condemning me and those like me for participating in a "digital hermit lifestyle" and claiming this is a slippery slope to a world with no sex and no children is laughable at best.
It's not a slippery slope, it's an already occurring statistical reality, which of course doesn't mean it applies to literally every single individual, so it's odd to put so much emphasis on your personal background, it's not like I was attacking you in particular.
But you should note one thing, it's no coincidence that your story involves having a family, social life, and I assume professional work before this became ubiquitous. It is quite a different story to be a young adult trying to build relationships when everyone already lives in a digital bubble. In a sense pulling the ladder up behind you and saying, it's been a huge boon for my family to now live in the comfort of home and online life, which in the past depended on someone being out there in the physical world to begin with. That's a general story of the post pandemic social and workplace changes, they're largely beneficial for people with already developed careers and social networks.
> so it's odd to put so much emphasis on your personal background
Not at all! Mine is but one story of millions. I see no statistical evidence of a correlation between failure to launch and introversion and you have not demonstrated any. And all my anecdotal experience would suggest that there is no correlation.
I'm not disputing that the modern world sucks in some ways and that that suck is particularly felt by (extroverted) young adults, but TFA and your own comment strongly imply that introversion is created by the post-pandemic environment and that's simply not the case.
What we have isn't introverts "winning" causing everyone else to suffer, what we have is a bunch of sad extroverts sucked into addictive digital media who can't figure out how to get out of the cycle. That is a real problem that should be addressed but is not the fault of introverts wanting to live their best lives, nor do I see evidence that young people who are truly introverted are struggling worse than I did.
If you take the pandemic digital hermit lifestyle to its logical conclusion you get a place roughly like South Korea which was a few years ahead of the curve. Practically no family formation or not even sex life with a birth rate < 1, widespread social isolation and so on. Introversion is almost a euphemism for what's happening because for a lot of young people it seems like something more akin to complete isolation is the norm with entire stages of proper adult development completely delayed or missing.
This isn't just bad for individuals who obviously don't develop if they don't take risks and leave their comfort zones and live permanent Peter Pan like lives, it's gonna come crashing down when there's nobody left to deliver packages to their homes (Hideo Kojima as a sidenote, weirdly prescient again with Death Stranding essentially anticipating this entire discussion). Just calling it introversion is deeply underselling how much of a problem that is in developed countries.