The Introvert's Objection

if political life starts in social spaces, then what should we do for introverts?

There is one group of people who are most upset by what I write. They are not conservatives or reactionaries or even liberals. They are not even fellow lefties looking to cancel me for something.

No, I’m talking about introverts, especially those who strongly identify as such. When I wrote a book about political life in the 21st century, when I suggested what we need to do is create close-knit movements and rebuild third spaces, I did not imagine that I’d face criticism most of all from introverts. But maybe I should have. Maybe political thinkers, maybe all of us actually, should have thought about introversion more.

In this piece, I would like to think carefully and respectfully about it.

Atlantic Surf Clam. Credit: Ashley Delvento, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Let me start with a recap: I write about social atrophy, which is the shrinking, through disuse, of the aspects of the brain that enable social interactions. More broadly, I write about what happens, both to individuals and to society, when people are socially isolated: people become more suspicious of others and withdrawn, and perhaps more conservative and reactionary. They also don’t politically organise well.

I have also described, in some of my videos, the way we might all benefit, even individually, from social interactions more than we think. I have, for example, run through the research on how people tend to underestimate whether they will enjoy social interactions. Most people, when asked whether they will enjoy a conversation with a stranger, say, no! (Introverts only say no more profusely). Most people, introverted or extroverted, end up enjoying the interaction. Research like this suggests that human beings are just not that good at knowing what we’ll think or feel in the future, even the immediate future, including and especially when it comes to social interactions. (This kind of finding comes up a lot in psychology; human beings are just not that good at predicting what they’re going to feel). It’s likely that introverts and extroverts alike underestimate how much they’ll like and benefit from social interactions, and probably would benefit from pushing themselves in this area.

I get a lot of pushback about the need for social interaction. I have received long, somewhat affronted or even angry messages. My friends have told me they feel upset by what I wrote. I have been lectured on professional listserves. It is remarkable, in a way, how much ire these points generate, given that I rarely prescribe a particularly specific course of action for readers, given I do not share individual stories except with explicit permission. I mostly write straightforward social and scientific analysis with a followup critical commentary about the lack of social spaces, the effects of technology and the threat all this poses to political life. Nevertheless, people often take this commentary very, very personally.

When I first started writing about all this, I thought criticism would come from the disability community, or from those rightfully concerned about COVID. Yet I do not get many true objections, nor anger nor even frustration from people who are covid-cautious or have long COVID or who have other disabilities. These folks do write me, of course, but what they write me is far more curious than angry. They have questions, suggestions. They want to know what might be done. They have ideas about ventilations, masks, outside activities, testing, better data. (They are generous to respond this way, really, given that they live in a world that provides so little for them and shows an uncaring and at times eugenic response to the virus, and to the lives of disabled people in general.)

No, the main responses of real anger and suspicion do not come from these corners but (again) from those that identify as introverts.

I was particularly struck by a recent comment on one of my TikTok/Instagram reels, a clip where I describe what social infrastructure is by giving the example of the way children are picked up from school. (I won’t link here, because I don’t want to pick on this person, but it’s easy to find if you want to).

In the clip, I outline the idea of social infrastructure by giving this example: if children are picked up by parents who wait for them sitting alone in a long line of cars, no one socialises. Everyone is just alone in their cars, on their phones. But, I suggest, if the parents have to go stand on the playground as they wait for the kids and talk to each other, they end up meeting and knowing each other. Their kids play together. And meanwhile, the parents end up asking “what do you think of the second grade teacher? And the principle? And doesn’t the gym need repair?” Etc.

In response, in the comments of this video, someone wrote:

“But I don’t want to have to listen to people complain about the second grade teacher or the principal or the gym. I don’t want to make small talk, ever. I’m not more alone than ever, I’m just happier not being held hostage by petty gossip.”¹

This is a particularly emphatic message, but it is really not unusual. I get these messages all the time. People have told me they never want to talk to their neighbors. Some have told me they plan to die alone.²

I think about the people who feel this way literally every day. I read the messages they write me, about how they are much happier alone, about how they feel suspicious of my arguments, about how they worry about any blanket prescriptions of how people should socialise. I think about the person who told me she feels gaslit by the articles about how most people under-predict how much they’ll like socialising.

This group of introverts matters to me even though I often get the feeling they dislike me, even though I know they dislike my argument. Firstly, because they are real people, and secondly, because I suspect their concerns are, while a minority position, one of the reasons that many social movements do worse than they otherwise would.³

So seriously do I take these concerns that I also respond regularly on various platforms. I tell readers:

• There are many possible ways to make it easier to socialise more, and many ways to meaningfully connect with others. It does not follow from this research that there is a blanket single right way or amount of socialising for people. It only follows that it is very likely that everyone needs a bit more social contact than they might feel like having in order to 1) keep themselves cognitively capable and well in comparison to an isolated version of themselves and 2) be involved in what we might broadly call democratic life.

• This is just the start of this conversation! I am even collecting ways for people to socialise as introverts, for the next book. And we still have so much research to do to understand what forms of social contact are “best”.

• There may well be a small number of people who, especially given the options available to them, could actually be happier largely on their own… BUT the suspicion and paranoia that seem to come with isolation should probably be a worry for those people and all of us, because those kinds of thought patterns cause a great deal of unhappiness.

And yet. After all this, I also tell them the other, sometimes-unlikeable truth. Which is: I have reached significant conclusions about the huge individual benefit, and the social good, of face-to-face and in-person communication. This is especially true when it comes to political organising. Political organising online seems mostly useful for short term campaigns as fundraising, and then its effectiveness wanes. This is especially true when governmental forces catch on and turn the internet against the activists. It seems likely that in-person movements ask more of their members and likely retain them for far longer. (More on this in my book). At the personal level, in-person contact is associated with far better results when it comes to mental health and strong relationships. In-person seems important for the full-brain workout that we need to prevent social atrophy. It makes sense that human beings lose capacities they don’t use (given the nature of neurons) and it makes sense that our social interactions, especially our in-person, more fully embodied ones, strengthen and preserve some very key capacities for us, and there is good research to support this too.

It would be disingenuous to pretend these findings carry no possible normative weight, it would be, well, wrong not include them in the question of how we should organise the world. I cannot see how I would write about the issues I write about without being very concerned about the problem of isolation. And in the “Western” world we are generally more and more isolated, generation by generation.

No matter how careful and thorough and nuanced my responses; as time went on I began to see I had stumbled upon an issue mired with resentment and suspicion, one that may or may not overlap neatly with reality of the question of social atrophy but which is nevertheless deeply bound up in the question of shared societal and political life. All my responses do not, I think, persuade the most suspicious of the introverts, In fact, it rarely even opens up further conversations. And that made me only more convinced the topic was important, and curious about why this is such a tender, even painful topic for so many.

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Of course, many people simply are introverts, in the sense that they find social interactions relatively exhausting rather than energising, and thus like to go away and recoup their energy after only a short while with others. This is, in both the public-health, democratic-health, and philosophical-moral sense, absolutely fine, both in my view and in the view of the (*gestures broadly in social science*) data. This need to recoup energy after social interactions is not necessarily the same thing as experiencing social atrophy, either. Many introverted people doubtless have their own way of regulating social time so that they keep their brains sharp and socially skilled but also recharge. Many clearly contribute to civic life.

But of course, this is not the point. Because in truth, I have come to the conclusion that the issue is not really introversion as such.

Rather, I think this topic generates this response because, to be blunt, many introverts feel they are regularly being “punched down” on by society at large. In other words, many people who are introverted feel that introverts are bullied, scorned, structurally pushed toward a kind of painful conformity, or otherwise looked down on. And at least in many ways, they are right. It is absolutely true that extroversion is valued in our society, from cultural norms to ideas about career success. It starts when kids are encouraged to “say hi to…” and threads its way through high school and the idea of “popular kids” versus nerds, it threads its way through celebrity and influencer culture, it seeps into the way many think about politicians, voting, intelligence, strength.

I also suspect that overlap is hight between people who identify strongly as introverts and other groups that are regularly punched down on. Or, to be more blunt about it: I suspect those who respond this way may be disproportionately neurodiverse, queer, and perhaps also in other marginalised groups, from race to disability. Certainly from what I can tell many of those who write me are neurodivergent (like me), perhaps queer (like me) or even (this idea is almost old-fashioned these days in the age of labels) simply “weird.”

No wonder that many of these people have found they are happier on their own a lot of the time. They’ve been bullied, excluded, and looked down on.

And truly I get it, not only intellectually, but viscerally, in many ways. Again, I am neurodivergent (diagnosed since age 8!). I am queer. I am, in ways that go beyond either of those things, pretty fucking weird.⁴ I am also, if mostly historically, regularly bullied. When I was 9 years old, I was bullied so much I hid in a stairwell during recess at lunch for a year. I was not a popular kid then or really at any point in formal education; I was, however (in a way that portended my future sociological self) an obsessive observer of those who were popular, because I wanted to understand how all that worked.

When I got to college, something changed for me in a way that it does not for many people. No longer barred from going to late-night parties or sleepovers with boys by my cautious and protective parents, no longer separated from existing friends by the car-bound culture of the suburbs, I learned that I could build many, many new friendships through intention and time and awkward, sometimes-painful effort, and I found that in a world of flakes, such efforts paid off. I became “extroverted”, slowly, over years, almost as if by choice, although I think discerning meaningful choice in this area is very difficult, especially when it comes to the past, and especially when it comes to ourselves. I built a very social life, replete with google calendars booked to the brim and networking and reminders to check in on people. It “paid off” for me, not just in that my career requires it, but in that my heart desires it, even though some days I do not feel like it, which it turns out is another and less important thing.

But I do not think that this is the only right way of doing things. I am not even convinced it is the only right way of doing things for me. Structuring oneself into the social via careful strategy is just one way of handling the reality of social life and all its pressures in our scary world, where people are the best thing about this world but where people can also hurt, shun, wound and harm us the most. Being an introvert (which could mean so many things) is another, acceptable way to deal with the risk and difficulty and exhaustion that comes with handling other human beings.

Regardless of which one chooses, though, one will have to risk the reality that other people can be shitty, cruel, and also often loud, boring, and annoying. And regardless of which social strategy one chooses, one can lose a part of oneself without the pattern and even discipline of social contact. Both these things remain true.

We can hold both the need for being alone and the need for being together. We can do it without punching down on introverts or other groups. The problem is not introversion itself, but rather how to accommodate it.

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To think well about this, I want to give as much time and respect as I can to what I term the “introvert’s objection.” And to do this, first and foremost, I think one has to see the objection as a righteous demand for autonomy, an insistence on choosing for oneself.

When I was a kid (yes, that same bullied kid that hid in the stairwell!) I loved books oh so much. Forced into an “after-school” programme until my parents were free to pick me up, all I really wanted to do was read. But the programme insisted on other things, like “outside time” and “art” that was really ironing plastic beads. Oh how I hated it, just as I have hated so many workplace mandatory forms of “fun.” Indeed, I have designed my partnership and home life today the way I did partially in order to ensure that, should we have a child, they can choose to go home after school rather than have even their downtime forcibly structured a certain way.

So I get it in this regard. I really, really do.

For many people, how much social interaction they have is one of the most real and profound areas of control in their adult lives, a rebuke to a world that offers very little autonomy in the positive sense, a rebuke to a world which controls children especially in terms of their social lives, and which creates many social situations, even for adults, that are (frankly) unbearable. We already have to make small talk with strangers for work. We already have to work for others most of the day. We already are stuck on often terrible public transport. We already have family obligations that may not be nice.

I can hardly fault many people for concluding that being introverted in such a world is a sign of nothing less than independent thinking and a bit of sanity.

And, yet. I write about social atrophy. I want people to do this big extra work of building a world where they connect with others. And so, I end up telling people what they do not want to hear, and what I don’t even always relish having to say.

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The hard truth is that in organising, in politics writ large and small, the hard work that society needs is rarely done by the people that should do it. The work of remaking the world for the better is not distributed fairly, cannot be for precisely the reason things are broken in the first place. In theory, white people should have been the people to do the main work of unravelling racial oppression. Men should have led the feminist movement. This is not what happened. It is basically never what happens.

Ideally, of course, social change that requires bringing people together should be done by people who really like meetings and chitchat and socialising. But realistically, while I’m happy to take the lead with my big extrovert energy, we probably need everyone for everyone movement, especially in this time-crunched ecological crisis with fascist flavouring. In fact, I suspect this is why the responses I get from people with disabilities are so thoughtful and thorough. They may not want to go out and socialise, (though they sometimes do!). But regardless of their preferences around socialising, they are very conscious that a world with greater right-wing tendencies will not be a good world for them. So they are up for the difficulties and trade-offs of political life, even when they face those trade-offs extra heavily and unfairly.

In contrast, it seems to me, those truly averse to social life sometimes miss that their choices have political costs at all. I return again and again to the comment on my video:

“But I don’t want to have to listen to people complain about the second grade teacher or the principal or the gym. I don’t want to make small talk, ever. I’m not more alone than ever, I’m happier not being held hostage by petty gossip.”

If I were to write this person back, I would say: but the question of the qualities of the teacher and the principle, the question of the safety of the building, that is a political question! At a small scale obviously, but it is not really chitchat. It is, weirdly, I know, the starting point of democratic life. There are simply a lot of important parts of being a member of something or citizen that involve what looks like small talk, yet isn’t really.

I probably won’t write that person back, though, because I do not think it would help, and might further their sense of being forced or picked on. However, another person wrote a repsonse:

“That’s nice. Your isolation from random interactions with people you don’t like that much directly leads to fascist takeover. Small talk is a small price to pay to not be put into a gulag by tech bros”

It is not exactly the way I might phrase a response…but I don’t entirely disagree. A more gentle way of putting it though, for all of us, is this: it’s important that we build a world where introverted people, defending their own autonomy, protecting their mental health, can nevertheless experience enough reasons and bearable opportunities to engage in the social world, especially when it comes to the political issues that affect them. I don’t want to be doing the work of organising or activism without them.

And, to “zoom out”, it is curious to me that political theorists have not previously worried about the sociability of the human subject more, and the question of introversion in particular. For politics is, it seems to me, largely a sociable activity. In a world full of natural inequalities, the inequality of desired social contact has gone largely unexamined, from what I can find (feel free to correct me!). Theorists have thought (problematically!) about the daft and the intelligent, they have considered the differences between men and women, rich and poor. Even deliberative democratic theorists have taken more or less no notice, with a few weird references here and there in recent years to related categories like “agreeableness” that are not that related.

To return to the immediate, practical point, though: if we want to make the social-political world more accessible for introverts, we could try all kinds of things. I am always interested in what the introverts who *do* want to discuss things in depth tell me about what they’d like. They want less of the super-loud music (me too); they want chances to comment on things asynchronously, they want the ability to help in a way where they can listen but not always join in, they want to not have to always have eye contact, they want to bond with people over shared interests. This is doable, at least in many cases. A learning designer by training and professional background, I remain committed to the idea that we can find ways to make everything, even face to face and in person contact, more accessible. And we should, not just in formal political settings but in all the informal spaces where politics actually happens too, like the playground.

We can design for this. But also, realistically, we can only do this imperfectly. There will be trade-off, compromises. And, as is so often the case, the burden will often fall unfairly. I have never really seen a social issue or a social movement where that wasn’t the case, so I won’t elide that difficult truth.

But here is what I am committed to. In some corporate and democratic theories, in some anti-democratic theories too, there is the question of “voice vs. exit”. The idea, broadly speaking, is that in a context where people are unhappy with how things work for them, they can either protest with their voice (raising complaints, trying to negotiate change) or they can exit. Once you see this set of trade-offs, you often cannot unsee it, in a variety of contexts. It is present in romantic relationships, in the family, in jobs, and of course, in social movements. Some introverts of course use their voice when they are not accommodated. But many, I suspect, simply exit, either in a literal way or by quiet-quitting a number of situations and movements. If one is to design a social movement where the introverts can be there too, perhaps the number one thing to do is design a world where introverts who do not always want to engage in the usual forms of “voice” can find another way of exercising “voice” rather than simply turning to an “exit.” This is a much harder problem than it looks, and that, I suspect (alongside the reality of social atrophy and its attendant paranoia and suspicion), is why I get so many unhappy and even angry messages from introverts.⁵

I can see why many who are, or view themselves, as introverts do not want to have to be involved in political life. But, call me a democratic romantic, I do not want the introverts to exit. I do not want the socially-atrophied to exit. In truth I am simply not much in favour of exit, because right now we only have one planet, and also because we learn best with the full truth and spectrum of human experience in front of us. For this reason, I ponder the introvert’s objection, and every day I think about more and better ways to respond to it.

1. This is a light paraphrase as again I want to consider this person’s point, not attack them directly.

2. A smaller number tell me they want to be alone specifically because their neighbours are white and they cannot trust them, which is another kind of problem that I cannot address in this post, but interesting to note.

3. I care a lot, and in fact, I often respond to folks like these, even though one cannot possibly respond to as many messages as I get, because (as pretentious as this sounds) I consider myself a public intellectual in the sense that I do intellectual work not for other academics but for the public, I want to both learn from them and think with them and sometimes, even when it isn’t exactly a winning proposition in terms of likability, tell them what I really think.

I try hard in my responses not to seem judgmental, and more than this, to truly not be judgmental. No, I reassure people, I do not wish to cast shame upon those who, for whatever set of reasons, are or choose to be socially withdrawn. Of course there is no one right way to have a social life; neurodivergent people (who appear to communicate better with one another than with others) should simply find their own preferred means, and introverted people the same. COVID is still happening, and it causes brain damage too, all at the same time that a lack of face to face contact causes social atrophy. Also, social atrophy can actually likely happen to anyone, and does not align neatly with extroversion or introversion. I try to get all these points across. But once something is very personal, it is also hard to see all its many aspects. It is this way even for me.

4. Weird in that I wet myself till age nine. Weird enough to give up huge amounts of income each year to quit my career track and write, weird enough to insist on communal living for the rest of my life, weird enough to functionally marry several partners, weird enough to write about social atrophy for a living when it earns me no ‘points’ even with my own readership.

5. I see the swipes and claws and boredom and anxiety attached to these messages sometimes. Occasionally I find my own triggers pushed, for I have them, because I have been hurt by people who only turn away when things get hard. Introverts may feel punched down on, but “extroverts” can be hurt by social interactions too, in more subtle ways perhaps.

But this is not a matter of personal grievances. I leave that chatter to the rest of TikTok. The question here is how we can get past enough of our grievances and inhibitions to stop fascism and climate change, even when it is annoying, scary, and simply inconvenient.