Does it not occur to any of you to question the terms of this engagement? Introvert and extrovert are categories that Jung just made up in 1913, they are not scientific fact! Just because sometimes you want to curl up in the fetal position under a blanket for 3 hours and listen to a podcast doesn’t mean that you’re naturally inclined to an internal world, it means that you derive comfort from being alone like a child in their blanket being read a bed time story.
Even if the arbitrary division is bullshit, still Jung had a more compelling concept of the “introvert” than any of you: it was someone who was so deeply in touch with their inner world that they contacted horrors of their inner psyche, someone who was able to steel themselves and reconcile with the unknown in the deepest part of their unconscious: and since the unconscious was collective, therefore also the unconscious of the world and society. There is a movement both inward and outward. What people today call “introversion” is just another name for infantalization, of being fearful of exactly what Jung would’ve tried to drive us to experience. All this while the climate ticks up every day; how can I be convinced this is not just a retreat to safety in uncertain times?
> What people today call “introversion” is just another name for infantalization, of being fearful of exactly what Jung would’ve tried to drive us to experience.
This is the nonsense that TFA spouts, but it's still nonsense.
What people call "introversion" today is the reality that some people legitimately leave most social interactions more exhausted than they started, that they therefore have to budget their social interactions for the things that matter most to them, and that until recently they have had to do that quietly by themselves because the majority of the population doesn't believe that people like that really existed.
The pandemic started to change that, and people who have always had to live like that have now realized that they're not alone and don't need to just pretend they don't have a real need to budget social energy.
It doesn't matter to me if we call it introversion or use a new word to get away from the pseudo-science and confusion about definitions, but people like me exist and we're not going away just because you and those like you don't understand us.
> What people call "introversion" today is the reality that some people legitimately leave most social interactions more exhausted than they started
“Some”? How about all! Of course being outside, physically interacting with others is exhausting: of all the social interactions which one can have, the most exhausting and at the same time the most ecstatic is sex, and that often puts people to sleep!
There is a push and pull, everybody wants to be left alone sometimes. To strictly delineate between introverts and non-introverts (since you’ve seemingly thrown out the other dichotomy as “pseudoscience”) just invents an identity around a behavior that is actually shared amongst everybody: and then calling yourself special for doing it. That is the most infantalizing part: identifying with a social imaginary, thinking of yourself as part of some greater whole! What an irony that its a whole of people who think they want to be alone all the time! Go ahead, try to be truly “by yourself.” Stop reading Hacker News, stop going grocery shopping, stop leaving your house: move to a cabin in the middle of the woods—see how long you make it.
You are always already social, almost everything you do involves social interaction, you would not have been brought on this earth without your family or whatever social arrangement raised you. What you’re really doing is, as the article said, isolating yourself from the dangerous part of sociality: meeting new people, talking to someone who is standing in front of you, throwing off your insecurities and not worrying about what others think.
I say, if introvert is arbritrary, then we’ll start calling it infantalism. Since you said it doesn’t matter! At least that word is closer to the truth.
>This reveals right away that you don't really struggle with this issue and just wouldn't get it.
Precisely the opposite. I used to be an "introvert." Turns out I just like to be alone sometimes. Do you really think there are people in the world who don't like to be by themselves? "Extrovert," that's just as much of a myth.
Your argument is that it's more of a spectrum than black and white, and yes, that's surely how things are in real life. You are just much further along the extrovert end of the spectrum than you realize and now believe you get what it's like at the other end, but you just don't.
Spectrum is an oversimplification. Its not a spectrum, its modal. In the same way as space and time are the orders of experience for objects, consciousness has a bimodal constitution in the introvert/extrovert framework, such that extroversion constituitively requires introversion, and vica versa. Its a kind of metaphysics, its the conditions of possibility for experience, not something that can be experienced in and of itself. That’s like saying you can experience time: show me time! Its just a formal term in order to have critical reflections on experience: it is not contained in experience itself! (Except by writing about it).
Even if the arbitrary division is bullshit, still Jung had a more compelling concept of the “introvert” than any of you: it was someone who was so deeply in touch with their inner world that they contacted horrors of their inner psyche, someone who was able to steel themselves and reconcile with the unknown in the deepest part of their unconscious: and since the unconscious was collective, therefore also the unconscious of the world and society. There is a movement both inward and outward. What people today call “introversion” is just another name for infantalization, of being fearful of exactly what Jung would’ve tried to drive us to experience. All this while the climate ticks up every day; how can I be convinced this is not just a retreat to safety in uncertain times?