Starting about 10 years ago, I've lost my desire to go out and socialize, and much prefer just hanging out at home. I've attributed this to various factors. Mostly I attribute it to just getting old. (A number of people seem to have the same experience--they lose the desire to go out and party when they reach their late 30s.)
I also attribute it to me finally just embracing my introversion, For years I was young and insecure, and I was ashamed of being an introvert. Now that I'm older and settled into myself, I am not ashamed to be introverted any more. Yes, I'd rather stay home and read a book than go to a party. I've accepted this about myself. I'm not going to try to force myself to be social when I don't feel like it.
I feel like I'm done trying to fit in. I've spend my whole youth trying to fit in, and convince myself that I could (eventually) be one of the cool kids, but now I just want to stay home and read my book.
But, actually, am I actually staying home and reading a book? Or do I spend 10 minutes reading my book, and then spend 2 hours on the Internet? Am I an introvert, or am I really an Internet addict?
I want to envision myself as an intellectual--someone who would prefer to read than party--but is it books that are keeping me occupied at home, or is it the Internet. If I'm honest with myself, it's the latter.
And actually, now that I think about it, when I stopped going out and socializing about 10 years ago, that was also the same time that I was finally living in an apartment that had cable TV and free Internet. (Prior to this, I usually didn't have Internet hooked up in most of the apartments I had been living in. For various reasons--one reason being I didn't trust myself.)
When I was teaching in Vietnam, I was teaching a lot of teenagers, and I was suprised by how many of them were identifying as introverts. But I also noticed that a lot of them were permanently glued to their smart phones, and I was also beginning to suspect that a lot of them were hiding behind the label of "introvert" as a way to justify their various digital addictions. (Gaming addictions, tik-tok addictions, smart phone addictions, etc).
To what degree is it healthy to embrace an introvert lifestyle, and to what degree should we introverts still be pushing ourselves to get out there and socialize?
To what degree is it healthy to embrace an introvert lifestyle, and to what degree should we introverts still be pushing ourselves to get out there and socialize?
And is being an introvert an immutable personality trait that we get from birth, or is the Internet turning more people into introverts who might actually be extroverts.
Anyways, this Tweet appeared in my feed a couple weeks ago, and I can't stop thinking about it, so I'm going to leave it here to bookmark it for myself:
Like everything @jburnmurdoch makes, this chart is amazing.
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) August 8, 2025
The sharp decline in conscientiousness and rise in neuroticism among young people is astonishing.
But also of note: literally every age group has gotten less extroverted in the age of the smartphone pic.twitter.com/C4QrZlRjwM
It's apparently from this article here, which I haven't read because it's behind a paywall.
Like I said, I may come back to this idea in a future post, or I may not, but for now I'm just bookmarking it for myself.
Addendum: Actually looking at the replies to this Tweet, a lot of people seem to be taking issue with the methodology behind these graphs. Perhaps this isn't really accurate, and perhaps I'm wasting my time by linking to it. I don't know.
10 comments:
I believe in the very opposite: the internet and the phone make people much much more extroverted than had they not been existed. After all, they are pieces of technology whose very aim is to enable people to exchange information across the network(s). It's ridiculous to call somebody who managed to talk to 150 random different people online to be more introverted than if they just talked to 30 people in their vicinity. Also, it's fallacious to simply attribute negativity to introversion, and positivity to extroversion - the extroverts are probably punching people on some streets, gossipping crude stuff about women or money or appearance; meanwhile the introverts are probably in the library learning some math methods that could improve some universal technology, and minding their own business. Not to mention, should people call extroverts who got tired of playing sports and stopped talking to people (since their muscles got tired and they have had the same convo all the time) as introverts - all because they no longer want to be active? The distinction doesn't seem to do enough justice to classify people, let alone gauging causes and effects.
In high school I was among the few who didn't have a phone - guess who had no friend to talk to and couldn't recognize faces of classmates? People who have a lot of contacts on Facebook already had lots of acquaintances in real life.
And if anything, the internet made me cooler than it ever made me more introverted. If there wasn't the internet, I wouldn't have had any funny things to have any banter with my friends throughout schools - and I might have become an easier target for bullying.
Maybe people just make an issue with the internet and the phone because they are so versatile, and integrated into everything these days - and people hate staring at the screen all day. Kinda like having a teleport machine that could get you to every single place on Earth.
I for one embrace my introversion, for the simple reason that otherwise I would be seen as something worse. Had bad memories due to trying hard to fit in, or be extra active, more than I want to count. If I could redo my life, I would just ignore those who try to tell me to be more sociable, and go on to live my life naturally.
As I read over what you've written, I'm beginning to be reminded of something that I have to constantly keep reminding myself--not everyone is the same way as me. For me personally, I have used the Internet to communicate with a lot of people--this blog being the prime example. But I have done it in a very introverted way--writing at my screen where I do not actually see people face to face. So I think this blog has (perhaps) increased my introversion, even though it's broadened the number of people I am in communication with. So for me I think the net result has been more introverted tendencies. But then, maybe for you it's different? You also make some good points about how introversion is not always a negative trait.
Maybe, maybe not really. At the very least even if some technology or media don't help making people more outward inclined, I still don't see how can they even make people more withdrawn (than they already are).
Maybe people sometimes do really have a choice to socialize more, but decided to stick to some of those toys instead - still, I think this is just trivial, if you truly wanted to socialize you would just do it rather than having self-doubts (many anime I watch keep giving me past traumas and cringe, but I don't ask myself whether to quit or postpone the hobby).
The internet gives people many choices of what to do with it - say to either just observe people exchange conversations, or to engage with them. That's just like in real like, a student can just sit through their class of 30 and barely has a single socializing conversation with any of them - yet nobody would exactly blame the classroom for making that student more withdrawn.
Ultimately I think this is the sort of trait that you either have it in you or you just don't. And the people around you have more influence on how introverted or extroverted you are, than any of the piece of media or technology, or so I love to believe.
I live in a culture that loves to bend its own people to have insularistic tendencies. You just can't be any more extroverted in a culture that has the parents hell-bent on telling their children to stay home all the time (so if I don't use the computer I would just watch Harry Potter DVD movies the 7th time), while complaining about how reserved and computer-addicted their children are. Having friends is subsidiary and you are a good child for heeding your mom not to visit their houses - but suddenly not socializing with random extended family members you can hardly remember the faces is something to be frown upon. They are very smiley, yes, but they only talk about themselves, and when they don't talk about themselves they are trying to abuse or take advantage of you the younger member. Now combine that with the personality of my average typical countryman, who either loves to get angry and scream any chance they got, or make condescending laughing face. In such an environment you pretty much have 2 choices: of being their favorite pleaser, or you just socialize with nobody. Or to put in another way: you either are an introvert, or you just have no authenticity.
It's just impossible to be an extrovert among people that you are not interested in, or are not a good fit with. It's really human-centric.
My own experience would be this:
I was extremely introverted as a child and teenager. In late high school and in college, I made a real effort to get out there and be more social. To a certain extent, I feel like I trained myself to overcome my introverted tendancies by forcing myself to try to talk to people, try to get myself invited to parties, and try to talk to girls. Even though I will always be an introvert, I feel like I was able to socializing myself a lot during this period, and I feel like introverts can develop social skills through practice.
At the time, I did it for the reasons most people do it--that I was young and I badly wanted to be included in stuff.
The Internet did not exist in those days--or at least, the Internet as we know it today did not exist. I wonder if the Internet had existed back then, if I would have been tempted to just find my community online instead of in real-life. And if that would have resulted in my never developing any real-life social skills.
In the US, we have what is called "incel" communities, and I wonder if a lot of these people are people who could have become increasingly introverted and anti-social because of the Internet.
And I do appreciate what you're saying--that the Internet is making us more communicative, not less. But I still feel like it's a different subset. It doesn't teach you the same social skills as real life--how to talk to flirt with a girl at a party, or how to socialize with a group of guys at a bar, etc.
But of course, I'm talking about American culture. You're describing Vietnamese teenagers being stuck at home, and unable to get out. And in that respect, yes, absolutely, being online is more communicative than watching Harry Potter.
Yeah, I do see what you are trying to say. It's not like people would be able to learn the social skills through interactions online just as well as they do in real life. I would still say the internet does teach people some stuff like: how to present ideas attractively, how to talk on-topic, how to navigate group dynamics, etc.
But more important than that: the internet does give people the inclinations that would make them more extroverted than they usually are. That's what I want to say. People who live all their lives among angry and hateful people suddenly realized not everybody out there is gonna scream at them for what they say. Giving a representation may turned out to be much more fun than they typically think of. Sometimes people are forced to see online stuff that push them out of their insular comfort zones. Some people on the other side of the ocean are acting in a quirky way in public, so they may find that no reason why they shouldn't act like a weirdo as well. These are the sorts of stuff that you don't usually come across without the internet.
I do remember when the term "incel" had an upsurge and started getting hurled around on the niche site I used to frequent (some even got called even though they were just spouting the age-old dictum of the community "2D women are better than 3D women"). Anyway, I think the "incels" are just some bunch of online netizens who got vocal enough people finally paid attention to them. Some dudes acting anti-social and hateful, the internet just happens to publicize and keep records of those behaviors, not that those guys don't already exist in plethora numbers. I see all the time people love acting all concerned about some social trends or anything, even though they wouldn't be if they have seen or experienced those stuff in the first place to begin with. Always easy to think of somebody as a nice and obedient kid when you never bother to have a mutual conversation with them, or easy to think society has declined when you never interacted with people outside of your group.
And while I'm still on the topic: I happen to believe people are not much different then and now, on some fundamental level at least.
It's always easy to say people are getting more and more introverted at any given time - well people get born everyday, how can there not be more introverts? The reverse opposite I suspect is just as true, people are getting more and more extroverted. Unless you live in a country whose birthrate is declining, but even so the effect is still the same.
The internet also brought about another change: centralized source of information. Now with widespread access to the internet, of course people just have much fewer interests in talking to other people in real life, if what they wanna get from socializing are already online in some forms - even for dating perhaps Character AI can offer a bit of an alternative. Tangentially, respect for elder people made sense back then, since they were the only mobile source of knowledge before libraries were even a thing. Anyway I guess the internet does truly lessen the needs of socializing with real life people. Not that it's any unsettling or changes how people already are. It's not much more unhealthy just because some people decided to shift some of their social lives to the internet space - you can't just expect people to keep doing on the streets the same things they have already done online. It's like getting unsettled by people no longer wanna travel by foot and have to use buses constantly.
Amazingly, nobody ever praised how healthy it is of the internet's contribution for relieving such socializing needs, those that may never have any outlet for people who are stuck with nasty people in real life.
The idealized extroverts have never been really that many, and they almost never do as many jobs that are vital to civilization. Collaboration skills are still extremely important however, and leaders or managers still need to be sociable animals, but their skills and tendencies don't really overlap with those a sport player or womanizer has. You don't exactly call Bill Gates as extroverted as a rugby player who runs, screams, fights, and sleeps around with women - but Bill Gates' social skills are higher level than them, and result in creating much more values to the world. Those that scream the loudest could be just as insecure as those that tend to sob; overly confident and charismatic people way too typically mean they are either sociopathic (I'm looking at you Tom Cruise), or too full of themselves to be considerate (you don't usually hear that extroverts need to learn social skills, but they really do as well).
Most people have always just wanted to socialize in-group. And plenty of people still love scolding and shunning anti-social behaviors, despite doing those worse themselves - people's love to tell others to improve for their own sake just never ends.
Even online communities demand you to know how to behave anyway, dynamics just like real life.
Humans at the core shall always stay the same no matter how many technologies and advancements there would be. Among those traits is the love to mystify sophisticated machines and the tendency to scapegoat or get alarmist (scaremonger) on these stuff, even though they are just magnets and wires and switches, stuff that have been mastered for decades.
I think people should only talk of societal decline when their society has lost the ability to collaborate in high level jobs, for this current context of socializing. Other than that, students in some town flunking tests is just the same old tune: you can't just expect a town consists of different families to always simply churn out studious students consistently.
Last comment as a note on an embarrassing typo:
>Giving a representation may turned out to be much more fun than they typically think of.
>representation
I meant "presentation". This is to say people may be inclined to find doing oral presentation of Powerpoint slides to be more exciting and doable than they usually think of. Of course having inclinations and actually doing them are two different things.
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