i am an introvert.

One of my best friends is an introvert. He has taught me a lot about the nature of this personality type. One on one, of course!

Introvert, mixed with a good dose of (actively suppressed) shyness.

My name is Eric and I'm an introvert.

As an introvert also, one way that I've tried to explain it to some of my friends and acquaintances who are extroverts is to say that I'd draw a distinction between anti-social and asocial. Certainly some introverts can be anti-social -- they generally dislike social situations, usually because they feel uncomfortable in them.

In contrast, I'd say that my definition of asocial is someone who is essentially neutral on social situations; they feel no compulsion to go seek out social interaction, but they aren't necessarily opposed to it when it does happen.

I have been asocial as long as I can remember. I was always perfectly happy doing my own thing by myself when I was a kid. Only child, living in the country, no neighbors in walking distance. In grade school, I had lots of friends and was fairly "popular", but I didn't feel any specific need to hang out with other kids all the time; I'd still run off and do my own thing. Around grade 7-8, I was still the same me, but I started to notice that the things I was and had been interested in weren't popular or acceptable anymore.

That didn't initially bother me, until the cliques and pressure cooker that is High School kicked in. The standard High School struggles pushed me way further into the realms of being anti-social. I basically decided that 95% of people were scum, and that figuring out who the 5% of people who weren't scum wasn't worth the effort.

I think that a chunk of that gets better in the senior year of High School, and then the difference between HS and going to college is night and day. I could have been comfortable returning to socializing right away in college, but I was still pretty shell-shocked. I still had a pretty grim outlook on humanity, which is a shame because I now realize that I should/could have been quicker to adjust my attitude.

By now, I'm still fully asocial in that I feel essentially no need to seek out social interaction, but I do enjoy meeting and getting to know new people and find that there are very few people that I dislike -- almost the exact opposite of my old 95%/5% evaluation. I'll never be the type that wants to go out and hob-nob with friends or random people every day, but I certainly wouldn't describe myself as anti-social anymore.

so I take it you're an introvert?....>> ^budzos:

>> ^longde:
I don't know. This is the point of view of an extrovert, one of a gregarious nature. This thought conveys a value of sharing.>> ^budzos:
"If you have a great moment in life and you can't share it with anyone, it may as well have never happened."
This point of view is sad to me.


I know what it's trying to express. But it's doing so by categorizing private experiences, or private expression , as worthless. It's like saying there is no point in dancing to music if nobody is watching. Sometimes dancing is for the dancer.
For those with a "rich internal life", some of the greatest moments are those kept to oneself, or experienced alone.

I think its like Tyson says, inspire the youth with the possibility of exploring the cosmos and show them what science can do for humanity and perhaps we'll be more capable of solving the problems of our own planet.

I also think there is a more philosophical side here. We are explorers, it really defines us. Pushing the frontiers and understanding the context of our existence makes us wiser, wisdom we desperately need. Its almost as humanity has become introvert, we consume ourselves and never stop looking inwards... maybe I am being too abstract but thats how I see it.

I remember the prof in my Psych 101 class at college asking the class to raise hands if they would be severely, moderately, mildly affected, or unaffected by spending an entire 24-hour day without seeing, talking to, or otherwise interacting with any other human being. I'm an introvert, I grew up on a farm about a mile away from the nearest neighbors, and am an only child -- so I actually experienced that scenario not entirely infrequently. It never really bothered me at all, so I raised my hand for "unaffected" -- but I was almost the only person to do so.

Anyway, I would be interested in seeing how someone that is highly introverted does on these same tests -- particularly the one where they mentioned that the guy's low score may have been due to his extroverted nature. I feel like I could handle the lack of human interaction just fine, but the utter lack of sensory input in general might be a completely different story.

@NetRunner It would be over simplistic for me to say what "the real problem" is, I was pointing out "a" problem I see with certain mindsets. But surely, the people you mention do exist, and to that I mean people who want a certain degree of leeway in those they help. A person who spends a good deal of his time taking care of his body may find it slightly repulsive to pay for the care of someone whom has not taken care of himself, and perhaps rightly so. The shoe exists on the other foot as well, I am not blind to those who very little personal action was taken but very much social/economic/political benefit was reaped. Often have I toyed around with different ways of managing property rights and such to eliminate or make more difficult the position of the freeloading, powerful man.

I don't deny the need of government, nor would I suggest its eradication. My objection was more in line with "how" people are solving the problem of a non-functional government. Forgive me, but having been to several protests now, I find them moronic. It plays out like children jumping on a bed in a stew of anger. Some of Cobert's recent shows on OWS, and before it, the Tea Party stuff made me laugh to tears as I so greatly identified with is complaints. The overall event of a rally is a dogmatic, simplistic, and mostly naive portrayal of the problems, and to rant about even more dogmatic, arbitrary and simplistic solutions. To be forthright, I am an introvert. Large groups of people will, in time, always annoy me, and as such, I admit that perhaps there is something different about a rally that I don't understand. Some kind of comradery in spouting babbling cheers, sitting a public place for no real objective, and making a ruckus. It would seem that most of a rally is about being seen, and I would rather not be. Instead, I would rather be unseen, but actually affecting. It seems more beneficial as a rally only can indirectly change something, where as any other course of direct action has a real effect. For instance, if I were mad about jobs, the last thing I would do is OWS, I would instead seek to create a job fair.

And that was my main point, rallying seems to be the battle cry for those whom want solutions to be created by someone else. Why waste your time and money supporting a rally instead of the cause itself? I used to not have this world view. But, I hold now that spending your energies directly addressing the problem is more beneficial, in large, than trying to bring "awareness" to it. Perhaps I am wrong, though, and some level of awareness is needed just to enact the more hidden, direct changes, hard to say.

The reason I mentioned any of this was because of the position Mr. Moore took up on Obama. He talked about how it was young people that got him elected, that he didn't do the job he was elected to do exactly the way he laid it out, so they became disenfranchised. That was my main concern, and it would seem that those who fall victim to this are the same that think rallying will do anything other than have a rally. As a libertarian minded person, the last thing I am looking to do is give people less of a voice, my aim is almost always entirely the opposite. My objection was that outsourcing your voice to something that is only going to indirectly help you might not be the best course of action. Mad about wall street, fine, but do you still have a 401k? Often times, we are, esoterically, part of the problem and it is that kind of conversation you won't find at a rally. We are always in the right, and we were always wronged by some evil third party...a great children's story, but more often than not, not exactly true.

Sorry for the long rant. More poor command of the egrish usually means I babble on.

@spoco2 - actually, there's been over 3,456 blisteringly awesome wedding proposals in the last month alone, but the happy couples share your introverted, navel-gazing world view.

Seems pretty genuine. Sadly, only in Europe methinks. America is waaaaaaay to introvert, immature and generally prudish to allow something like this in the mainstream.

I'm partial to a variety that they didn't mention:

Some event or agent eliminates 99-99.999999% of all the human life on the planet, but you're one of the random survivors. Could be a nuclear war and you were in a blast / fallout gap, a disease or virus that you are randomly immune to, etc.

Would be cooler if the majority of buildings, infrastructure, etc. were still standing and operational (at least short-term) after the event, so the disease/virus scenario supports that better. Walk in to a Ferrari/whatever showroom, drive away in an unattended vehicle of your choice, go somewhere semi-tropical for winter, and eat canned food remaining on store shelves.

I spent countless hours imagining myself in that sort of scenario when I was younger. I've always been an introvert, but there were a lot of times back then when I figured I'd be better off without the vast majority of other human beings around to bother me. I have a somewhat more positive view of humanity at large now, but if an apocalypse was necessary and I could elect the variety I'd still go for that one.

Dave is a famous INTJ, which if you didn't know is just about the most introverted and cerebral of the jungian personality types. Although she's charming, bubbly, and you just want to eat her up, if you watch Dave real closely you can see he is irritated by the constant repetition of "KIDDING!" INTJ's don't like having to hear information twice.. it's a total misuse of their mental resources to process your message more than once. Of course the fact he's interviewing someone for TV means he has to override his own personality quite a bit. I think Dave's introversion is what makes him such a genius comic and intriguing figure.

Here's my gateway theory:

Playing violent video games all day leads to being really good at video games, which leads to you getting a job playing video games, which leads you to smoking marijuana.

I also have another theory, but it involves being a beautiful female in an industry of mostly introverted males.

After watching the clip I had to watch the whole documentary and it is the second I've seen on the subject. While I understand the need for extremely introverted and handicapped people to release their sexual frustration. I believe this sex doll buying behavior as mostly wrong. Any extended delusion that does not end at some point is wrong. Books, movies, games all end at some point and we return to reality (most of us). Even when we sexually fantasize and play with ourselves we know its not real. But when middle aged men start talking about the inanimate doll's personality and facial expressions (in the documentary), this is disturbing on an entirely new level. I don't think this will ever become a social norm, nor should it be.