Rethinking the Extroversion Ideal
On embracing your inner introvert and finding restorative niches in your daily life
It used to be that character was the highest ideal a person could aspire to.
Actions spoke louder than words.
Being quiet, disciplined, and honorable was seen as good and strong.
But as the late historian Warren Susman remarked, this all changed at the beginning of the 20th century, as America underwent a shift from a “Culture of Character” to a “Culture of Personality,” with salesmen and orators taking the spotlight. Suddenly the new values that counted most were to be bold and entertaining — public image over private behavior.
As people interacted more and more with strangers in anonymous cities and big businesses, rather than with local people they had known all their lives, notions such as a good first impression and “selling yourself” became crucial.
Over time, this became so deeply embedded in our society that not being an extroverted salesman type was seen as a sign of weakness and a lack of social skills.
College admissions officers and employers judged potential candidates on extroversion, and as a result created a leading class of extroverts — or at least people who could pretend, both to themselves and others, to be extroverts.
In a discussion, we often find that the most talkative, assertive, or confident person’s suggestion gets chosen. Harvard Business School professor Quinn Mills openly admits this issue in his student body when he says that
“the risk with our students is that they’re very good at getting their way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going the right way.”
We tend to follow those who initiate action, not those who lead through quiet contemplation and actually have a plan.
While initially the focus on personality over character was purely to outsell and out-compete others, we are now constantly told that being more extroverted makes us genuinely better people. A vast amount of self-help literature and gurus promise to make us better people specifically by helping us suppress our introverted tendencies and instead unleash the bold extrovert in us, the more confident, direct, and outgoing the better.
And we might not have reached peak extroversion yet.
It is telling that, according to a 2018 study, 17% of 11 to 16-year-olds in the UK named “Social Media Influencer” as their dream career, closely followed by “YouTuber” with 14%. The transition from character to personality is perhaps nowhere more evident than on these social media platforms. Many influencers on Instagram and the like leave you wondering if there is even any character left behind all that personality.
But despite the heavy focus of Western (and particularly American) culture on extroversion in recent years, the full extroversion-introversion spectrum is broad, and people naturally lie all over it.
Even someone who considers themselves mostly extroverted still has some introvert qualities and preferences.
But whether introversion makes up only part of our personality or almost the entirety of it, we are largely encouraged to hide it and present our most extroverted selves all the time. As a result, many introverts hide their real selves, both from society but also from themselves, pretending to be extroverts.
While introverts can be very successful at playing extroverts, keeping up the charade is draining. Switching personalities and passing as a pseudo-extrovert can not only cost you energy, but it also adds a lot of stress and anxiety.
The key here is to get as much rest in your true personality as possible, strategically building solo time off into your routine. Making sure you have enough of these “restorative niches,” as Susan Cain calls it in her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, allows you to perform in your less-favored persona when it matters.
We should follow the advice of pianist Glenn Gould who
“always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now, what X represents I don’t really know, it might be two and seven-eights or seven and two-eights, but it’s a substantial ratio.”
To effectively perform as an extrovert when necessary, we need to find our personal number X of rest hours to let our introvert-self recover.
But more than just learning how to perform as extroverts without depleting our mental strength, we should start re-embracing introversion as an equally valuable trait.
Rather than labeling them as “loners,” we should once again think of introverts as deep thinkers and caring empaths.
While this is a large generalization, the East has generally been better at preserving the introvert ideal. As Cain points out, the West tends to praise boldness and verbal skill, while the East puts more emphasis on quiet, humility and sensitivity, with an attitude of
“Talk is for communicating need-to-know information; quiet and introspection are signs of deep thought and higher truth.”
Or as the late essayist Anaïs Nin put it,
“[Western] culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.”
It is time to once again embark on an inner journey to find our center.
A good starting point is to become aware of your own introverted and extroverted tendencies. When and where do you find yourself drained by social interactions and crave a bit of solitude and quiet reflection time?
Once you have this self-awareness, you can make sure to strategically build restorative niches into your daily life at the times you most need them, and spend as much time in your true personality as possible.
Personally, I came to the realization of just how much most work meetings are draining me and made some significant changes to my life as a result. Ever since then my introvert-self, but also my extrovert-self, have been much happier and my overall energy levels, as well as the quality of my life and work, have soared.
I hope that by re-thinking the extroversion ideal and taking pride in your introvert-self — whether it’s only a small part of your personality or the majority of it — you will see a similar transition in yourself.
This article started its life in an early draft of my bestselling book Time Off: A Practical Guide to Building Your Rest Ethic and Finding Success Without the Stress, as part of the chapter on solitude. While it didn’t make it through the final editing process, I hope you enjoyed it in this standalone form. And if you liked this piece, I’m sure you would love the book.