The COVID Quarantine: Bane of Extroverts

Will the quarantine make public life more friendly to introverts?

Image by Cottonbro, from Pexels

Capitalistic societies tend to have extroverted popular cultures, because introversion and introspection are bad for business. The idea in business is to prey on customers’ weaknesses, to maximize profit amorally, by steering the customers into an impulsive purchase. You want them distracted by your fallacious associative advertisements, so they’ll react emotionally to your product instead of thinking critically about it.

Roughly a third of these societies, then, namely the population of the more introverted individuals, typically feels alienated from public life. The trouble isn’t just the inanity or tackiness of having to be so professionally disingenuous, nor is the problem that pretending to respect these conventions for extroverts is emotionally taxing. No, introverts are also annoyed that so much of public life is about pretending, in turn, that introverts don’t exist, that keeping quiet and thinking before you speak and showing humility and depth of character are secular sins that ought to marginalize you.

To fit into these cultivated playpens for adults, the introvert has to practice her fake smile, learn to think on her feet, and keep her opinions superficial and inoffensive. She has to reduce the scope of…