Being an introvert is not a superpower.
How misanthropy masquerades as ‘ The Introvert Hangover’.
Inever really knew what a hangover was until I hit 30. Now, sure, I remember languishing while “soooooo hungovvveeerrrrrrr” as a younger man, grunting and whining my way through damn near most of a morning until the sacred elixir of greasy-spoon eggs and cornerstore Gatorade returned me to the point where an earlyafternoon beer seemed like a capital idea. At a certain point, though, hangovers became apocalyptic, weekend-defining affairs, the sort of thing where freebasing Tylenol and 30 minutes on the floor of a hot shower were necessary just to have the strength to press “Resume Watching” on every third show of a Netflix binge.
But even a lazy, self-pitying wreck like me doesn’t know the destructive power of the true king of hangovers: the introvert hangover. According to writer and self- professed introvert Shawna Courter, of online site Introvert, Dear, it is a hellacious affair: “Your ears might ring, your eyes start to blur, and you feel like you’re going to hyperventilate … your mind feels like it kind of shuts down, building barriers around itself as if you had been driving on a wide open road, and now you’re suddenly driving in a narrow tunnel. All you want is to be at home, alone, where it’s quiet.” Presumably this is made even worse by the fact that calling to order a pizza would basically be like waterboarding yourself with human interaction.
All this, not from the evils of drinking low-grade poison for a full eight-hour shift, but from the horror of spending more time around other people than you are fully comfortable with. Yes, the introvert hangover — backed up, in subsequent posts on the phenomenon, by one whole study that wasn’t actually at all related to this idea, but implied that people who identified as introverts tend to be more easily overstimulated than people who do not — is the latest manifestation of a certain subsection of society’s obsession with the fact they need alone time on occasion.
Introversion, such as it is a thing, has been with us since Carl Jung, which should be a flaming red flag for anyone who suspects you may need marginally more than all the feels to have a decent understanding of the world. It is, as any half-assed personality test will fuzzily explain, the opposite of extroversion. It essentially means that you derive your energy from solitude and inward reflection, as opposed to interacting with other people. Its primary use has been as a category in those same personality tests.
You know, the ones that psychologists are always telling us not to use for hiring because they are spotty and tend to measure momentary mood more than underlying attitudes, and because they are subject to manipulation by personal bias and the Barnum effect, that quirk of human understanding that lets us find deep personal meaning in hopelessly vague descriptions. You know, astrology for people who “love” “science.”
It has recently found more prominence thanks in large part to the 2012 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain. In its simplest and most useful form, Quiet was a strong argument for not overlooking people or things just because they were not forcing themselves on you. We live in a society that prizes the ability to be gregarious, forceful, socially adept and brimming with the confidence to inspire others. At its worst, this kind of thing rewards those who know how to sell a personal brand, who have no inclination to introspection, who are simply able to perform on command. It was practically warning us that we were heading down the road to a Trump presidency three years before we thought it possible.
It did not take terribly long, though, for a plea for understanding to morph into a smug movement that essentially sets up introverts as delicate geniuses beset on all sides by boorish, idiotic extroverts getting by on superficial charm. Cain, herself, kicked this off when she declared that introversion would be “the next great diversity issue of our time” at a Harvard keynote address, which sort of shows you some of the downside of drawing most of your strength from self-reflection.
If Cain was just trying to lend her hobby horse an air of unearned importance, though, most of the people who have followed have stuck simply to lending themselves an air of unearned importance. In the same way that horoscopes tend to emphasize that you are, say, “strongwilled” and not “a stubborn prick,” introverts have taken to considering their inherent traits as gifts that allow them to transcend the plane of mere mortals.
Take, for example, a post taken at random from Cain’s own website, which has developed into a clearing house for smug introvert satisfaction. “Six illustrations that show what it’s like in an introvert’s head” points out that “it’s more complicated for introverts to process interactions and events,” they are “content and energized when reading a book, thinking deeply or diving into their rich inner world of ideas” they “process EVERYTHING (their emphasis) in their surroundings” and “have an active dialogue with themselves … with many thoughts in their minds.”
Ignoring, for a moment, that one of the basic definitions of human consciousness is having an internal life — “I think, therefore (something something I forget)” — it has also created a definition of introversion that essentially boils down to “I am not only very sensitive to the world, I think about it a lot, unlike you, you outgoing, pea- brained, stimulus-response, drooling, ignorant troll.” This is not just turning vague realizations about the human condition into personality traits, it is elevating them to, in the immortal words of Rob Zombie, something more human than human. While the rest of you are rutting around in the mud trying to eat and screw, I will be over here, CONSIDERING POETRY. You heathens.
On top of that, we now have the hangover, which not only assumes this inherent advantage but goes so far as to suggest that even interacting with these boors for too long can make you physically ill; that because the world is not properly attuned to the sensitivity of these beautiful flowers, it can make them wilt. It is not, of course, that sometimes we all get tired of being around people; it is that I am a delicate soap bubble who may burst if someone’s gaze lingers on me too long.
As someone who also prefers my own thoughts to most forms of social interaction — you know, a person — I can understand the sentiment. Still, for a group that is so intent on solitude, introverts sure are ones with a tremendous focus on just how different they are to others (to say nothing of enumerating those differences in the most condescending way possible). Perhaps if they spent a little more time on honest self-reflection, they might see this for what it really is: misanthropy.
Granted, that doesn’t give you any superpowers, but is at least an eminently defensible position in a world where every personality type is trying to get one over on every other.