The Introverts Are Winning New Humanist
The introverts are winning | New Humanist #
Excerpt #
Technology is enabling us to retreat from the outside world. But we should resist the urge – for ourselves and for each other
Technology is enabling us to retreat from the outside world. But we should resist the urge – for ourselves and for each other
Patrons outside a busy pub in the Yorkshire Dales. Credit: Alamy
There have always been and will always be splits within society. For the most part, they make our lives richer. How dull would it be to live in a world where everyone agreed on everything and shared the same personality traits! Diversity is good. It makes it interesting to be alive.
That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to navigate. The pandemic came and went and it shone a light on a split most people probably hadn’t thought about all that much before then. Everyone knew there were introverts and extroverts, homebodies and socialites, but it had never really mattered. The two groups complemented each other and managed to peacefully cohabit.
This ended both when the world went into lockdown and when it came out of it. Suddenly those seemingly mundane differences began to define us. Some people thrived while stuck at home and others fell into pits of despair. When restrictions eased, some people leapt out of their houses as quickly as they could, and others secretly wished it could have lasted a bit longer.
Perhaps most interestingly, those differences did not fade with time, as the population got vaccinated and meeting up became safer. Most, but not all of us, rejoiced. In late 2023, campaign group More In Common polled British people on their attitudes towards pandemic life. According to their polling, just under a third of people aged between 18 and 40 reported feeling happier in lockdown than they did in normal times. This might help to explain why a third of 25 to 40-year-olds backed closing nightclubs again, 29 per cent were keen to bring back “the rule of six” and 28 per cent would have been comfortable with “only allowing people to leave their homes for essential shopping, 60 minutes of exercise, or work”.
This was more than a year after the last legal restrictions were lifted in the UK, in line with global health policy. (The World Health Organisation declared an end to the “global health emergency” in May 2023.) There are many reasons for people to be in favour of continued restrictions, some of them altruistic, but personal experience must surely play a large part.
While these findings seem shocking, perhaps they weren’t wholly surprising. In the years after restrictions were lifted, many naturally outgoing people – this writer included – have found it that bit harder to get their friends out of the house. Plans somehow require more effort than ever to get made, and are always at risk of getting cancelled at the last minute. A spontaneous pub trip, once a cornerstone of British social life, now takes work to organise.
One culprit could be changing work habits. Back in 2019, only 12 per cent of workers had, according to the Annual Population Survey, worked from home for at least one day in the past week. In 2023, that figure had risen to 44 per cent. Meanwhile, the cost-of-living crisis means that fewer people can afford to buy endless rounds in pubs or choose to spontaneously pour themselves into a restaurant for dinner.
Still, according to French philosopher Pascal Bruckner, there are bigger problems afoot, and society is changing for both good and bad. The pandemic may have been a global catalyst, he argues, but the world had already started feeling less safe outside the home. There had been waves of terrorist attacks across Europe, and endless headlines about the climate emergency coming for us all. Our lives feel more dangerous than they once did, he says, and we have collectively decided to deal with it by hiding out in our living rooms, safe and cosy in our cocoons. He calls it “the triumph of the slippers” and, in a book of the same name, seeks to explain why we should resist those calls to shut ourselves in.
“The pandemic was a moment of simultaneous crystallisation and acceleration, one that consecrated a historical movement that long predated it: the triumph of fear and the paradoxical enjoyment of a fettered life,” Bruckner writes. Still, he argues, “life means excess and profligacy or it ceases to be life. But the pandemic gave a strategic advantage to the forces of stunting. Our future hinges on the tension between those two camps.”
Who will win the war? Bruckner is proudly fighting on the side of the extroverts, but he isn’t exactly optimistic about what’s to come. As he points out, wannabe hermits have a powerful weapon at their disposal: the internet.
Until a few decades ago, deciding to live the life of a recluse was a choice you had to make consciously, and there were consequences you could not avoid. Sure, you had the joy of staying home and living a mostly predictable existence, with few unpleasant surprises, but there were drawbacks.
You could not work from your couch, or speak face-to-face with people living elsewhere, or gain any real insights into whatever was happening outside your front door, aside from watching the news on television. It was a choice that had weight, and that you couldn’t make almost by mistake, or without thinking. The 21st century is different. As Bruckner puts it, “a new anthropological type is emerging: the shrivelled, hyperconnected being who no longer needs others or the outside world. All of today’s technologies encourage incarceration under the guise of openness.”
It is quite coarse language, but he isn’t entirely wrong. As Deloitte found in a study last year, 50 per cent of millennials and Gen Zers view online experiences as meaningful substitutes for in-person interactions, and 48 per cent of them say that they engage with others on social media more than in the real world. Were these attitudes informed by the fact that hanging out online is cheaper than seeing people outside, or is the choice partly or entirely a personal preference? It is impossible to tell, as Britain hasn’t thrived economically for some time, so correlation and causation cannot be satisfyingly disentangled from one another.
In any case, in 2024 it is possible to eat delicious food you didn’t make yourself, watch movies that have recently come out in the cinema, buy all manner of clothes, tools and fripperies, do the food shopping, speak to friends and family and earn a wage – all without ever leaving the house. Why should we, then? What’s in it for us?
There are a number of ways to answer those questions, not all of which will appeal to everyone, but it is worth setting them out. Living a real, physical life outside the home is good because humans need friction. Convenience is alluring but it is dangerous, because getting used to it means forgetting that being alive isn’t meant to always be easy. We should run our errands in person and queue at the Post Office and eat in restaurants because it is good to remember that sometimes we have to wait around, or go to several shops because the first one didn’t have what we needed. Resilience is one of the most important traits a person can and should develop, and it works like a muscle. Glide effortlessly through life and, when something bad does happen, because it always will, you won’t know how to react.
On a similar note, forcing ourselves to go out even when we’d rather stay on the couch can remind us that good, surprising things usually tend to take place when we least expect them. You may bump into an old acquaintance while out buying a pair of shoes or a carton of milk, or see someone you’d forgotten even existed. You may get to pet a very cute dog, or have a nice laugh with an old lady who struck up a conversation with you, or help someone else who got knocked off their bike and feel good about it, or, or, or – the possibilities are endless. That’s the entire point.
The outside is where the unknowable can and will take place, and that’s what makes it so wonderful. A life without any serendipity is hardly worth living and yes, chance is precious enough that it is worth its cost.
These are the most popular reasons why people ought to resist the siren calls of the blanket and the slippers. This next one is arguably the most important, but the hardest to make a case for. We should all make an effort to leave the house more often not solely because it may benefit us, but because the world needs us to. Small business owners need customers to browse in their shops. Little local restaurants brighten every neighbourhood, but the competition of delivery apps is making many unsustainable.
We like knowing that life is out there waiting for us, just in case we do decide to venture out, but it won’t remain there for much longer if everyone relies on everyone else to do the sometimes tedious everyday living. This doesn’t mean that even the most introverted among us ought to be rounded up and forced to go to their local pub three times a week. Instead, everyone should attempt to leave their comfort zone once in a while.
Bruckner was right to point out that today’s world isn’t especially welcoming, but retreating from it is an ultimately selfish choice, as it ensures that things are unlikely to ever get better. Future generations will then shun each other even more, and things will get even worse. In order to function, a society needs its inhabitants to reach out to one another. If they collectively choose to retreat, it will stop existing.
The only way out of the spiral is to remember that no man is an island, and we all eventually left the womb for a reason. Slippers may be comfortable but will you, on your deathbed, really wish you’d spent more time in them?
This article is from New Humanist’s summer 2024 issue. Subscribe now.