For the first time in many years I found myself in a big group of friends in a new city. Good social life is something I always thought I was missing and now I have it. I realized, though, that my problems are still there. Maybe I had put too many hopes into this, but I am rather disappointed. In fact, lately I came to appreciate again solitude and my alone times. I still think friends should be a top priority in life, but now I also think you need to reserve time to do stuff on your own, it gives you the chance to always try out new things.
Sure, it's always a question of balance - I enjoy spending time with my friends, but I need frequent and long breaks, which sometimes leads to confusion and misunderstandings ("Why would stay in alone tonight?"). Maybe it's an introvert thing but I'm often surprised when I see people that need other people around them constantly and rate time spent alone as wasted.
I couldn't put my finger on the phenomena until I read that comic one day: [0]. It's about energy generation and expenditure - extroverts gather their energy from human interaction, introverts have to expend it on those social moments.
I keep sending this picture to people who know me personally and are surprised I consider myself introverted - after all, how someone who is seen publicly speaking so often and finds it easy to make friends can possibly be introverted? The answer is simple: I like people, but spending too much time with them exhausts me, and I need to "waste time alone" to recharge.
Yeah I can completely relate to this and have attributed it to being introverted as well. I am extremely social when I do attend social events, often being the most talkative if it's a group of 4 or less, but need to recharge alone the day after whereas my friends will continue to want be around each other. They often accuse me of being horrible at communication and making the effort to hang out with them, but to me, it's a simple matter of needing to be alone for a period of time, which I assume they are not familiar with as they all seem on the extrovert side of the spectrum. Sure, it's important for me to override that sense of wanting to be alone to catch up with friends and be a better communicator/friend, but it is in no way natural for me.
I'm the same way, and I've heard that repeated a few times now.
I have to wonder though, does anyone actually "recharge" when they're with a group of people or do they just have a higher tolerance for spending time with others before they need to be alone?
If you can't tell, I don't really buy the introvert/extrovert distinction and I haven't seen any evidence that anyone can spend unlimited amounts of time with others without recharging alone. From my own experience it seems like there's a continuum from "needs lots of alone time" to "doesn't need all that much alone time".
> I have to wonder though, does anyone actually "recharge" when they're with a group of people or do they just have a higher tolerance for spending time with others before they need to be alone?
In American and Australian societies, extraverts outnumber introverts 10 to 1. Growing up a fairly severe introvert as an American had me labeled as that weird loner outcast from a young age. Always spending time with other people is the norm. Spending a lot of time alone is seen as weird and antisocial. I've known kids whose parents have sent them to shrinks and medicated them because of such "antisocial behavior" as sitting in their room for days on end reading books.
In cities, most people literally don't have 10 minutes of alone time. I certainly didn't and it drove me to the brink of insanity after a number of years. Outside of cities, most people have families and also have little time alone.
That said, introvert/extrovert isn't an on/off switch. It's a spectrum. A sliding scale.
If you read through the comments here, there are people that go crazy when alone, and people which go crazy when in groups. It's kinda like saying you don't buy gravity. Sure, we don't fully understand all of the details, but to say the dichotomy doesn't exist isn't logical.
Well sometimes I go crazy when I'm alone, and other times I go crazy when I'm with a group. The reason I don't buy the dichotomy is that if these two things can be true for the same person, is there any value in making the distinction? They seem to describe moods (that some people have more often than others) rather than personalities.
