Our Cultural Social-Deprivation

An Atlantic article about what it calls ultra-introverts discusses people who deliberately adopt nocturnal or semi-nocturnal lifestyles in order to minimize social interactions. Or, as someone who relies on this technique myself, I might add or maximize solitude and uninterrupted time.

(For about the first eight years of being a father, I kept as close as I could to a strict 9:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. sleeping schedule so I could have a decent amount of time to think and to write.)

I have some issues with the terms introvert and extrovert, but I think they do loosely serve a useful purpose. Most people feel energized by being around others, but many, including myself, feel drained by company -- if it is the wrong kind, we're not in the right mood for it, beyond a certain amount of time, or any combination of those. This puzzles extroverts to no end, but it is a fact, and no, those of us who have these issues are hardly misanthropes.

I also have issues with the locution wired to when referring to psychological needs. It's hand-wavy and smacks of determinism.

With that out of the way, this is a very interesting article, and it comports with my suspicions that the current state of our culture contributes to (if it doesn't outright create) the clear extroversion-introversion dichotomy. This doesn't mean that individuals wouldn't still vary regarding the amount of solitude they want or need, but I wonder if the difference between the two ends would be as obvious in a more rational culture.

Consider the following two paragraphs from the Atlantic piece:

In his book Bowling Alone, the political scientist Robert Putnam argued that this urban boom initially spurred a flourishing of connection. But, in his view, the late 1960s and early '70s saw those bonds begin to break down, as urban sprawl and new technologies led people to spend more time alone, watching television or driving. In 2017, once and future U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned of a dangerous "loneliness epidemic." As he wrote in the Harvard Business Review, "During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness." In recent years, commentators have implicated loneliness in a wide swath of society's ailments, including steep suicide rates and the opioid crisis. Twenty-first-century American culture is now often associated with profound isolation.

At the same time, much of modern life still entails being around other people whether you like it or not. From a young age, kids shuffle into schools, where they spend all day with their peers. The people I spoke with told me they'd always resisted this forced socialization. Daniel Herman, who lives in Orland Park, Illinois, and has been working a night-shift machining job since the late '80s, told me he always wanted to be alone as a kid, though he didn't understand why he felt that way. After high school, he started drinking more and more often; in social situations, he felt like it allowed him to interact like everyone else. But he didn't like feeling so dependent on alcohol. "While other people are drinking and actually getting drunk," he told me, he was "getting normal." (Now he's sober; he told me that living nocturnally makes it easier not to drink, because he doesn't need to in order to power through social interactions.) [links omitted, format edits, bold added]

I find it amazing that anyone could be puzzled by the choice to opt out of being around other people altogether when so much of "being social" is enforced and is failing to meet the need for connection that practically everyone has -- emphatically including semi-hermits like myself.

I bet -- on top of such benefits as solitude and increased intellectual autonomy -- that many of these people might agree with a statement like, If THIS is what being social entails, to hell with it:

Image by Floatguru, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

I talked to people who painted me a magical picture of their nighttime world: of exquisite, profound solitude; of relief; of escape.

... "I've tried to hold down day jobs, but I couldn't handle waking up early, rushing to work, and most of all just ... being around people all the time," Chris Hengen, a 26-year-old nighttime security guard living in Spokane Valley, Washington, told me via email. (He didn't feel comfortable talking on the phone.) "I don't have any ill will towards people, it's just exhausting to me." John Young, a 41-year-old network engineer living in Hammonton, New Jersey, told me he's "more than happy" living a fairly solitary life. Young has worked night shifts on and off since the late 1990s; he prefers the peace of night, but that preference is sometimes mistaken for social anxiety or depression. In fact, he told me, he's an introvert and this is just how he likes things. And many others I spoke with had similar reasoning. [bold added]

The above passage in particular reminds me of Ayn Rand's 1966 lecture, "Our Cultural Value-Deprivation," particularly when she speaks of the incentives and impediments a given culture can offer to the individual to exercise reason:

The choice to think or not is volitional. If an individual's choice is predominantly negative, the result is his self-arrested mental development, a self-made cognitive malnutrition, a stagnant, eroded, impoverished, anxiety-ridden inner life. A social environment can neither force a man to think nor prevent him from thinking. But a social environment can offer incentives or impediments; it can make the exercise of one's rational faculty easier or harder; it can encourage thinking and penalize evasion or vice versa. Today, our social environment is ruled by evasion -- by entrenched, institutionalized evasion -- while reason is an outcast and almost an outlaw.

The brashly aggressive irrationality and anti-rationality of today's culture leaves an individual in an intellectual desert. He is deprived of conceptual stimulation and communication; he is unable to understand people or to be understood. He is locked in the equivalent of an experimental cubicle -- only that cubicle is the size of a continent -- where he is given the sensory stimulation of screeching, screaming, twisting, jostling throngs, but is cut off from ideas: the sounds are unintelligible, the motions incomprehensible, the pressures unpredictable. In such conditions, only the toughest intellectual giants will preserve the unimpaired efficiency of their mind, at the price of an excruciating effort. The rest will give up -- usually, in college -- and will collapse into hysterical panic (the "activists") or into sluggish lethargy (the consensus-followers); and some will suffer from conceptual hallucinations (the existentialists). [bold added]

And some will retreat as far as they are able to.

The alert reader may have noticed the author who placed the start of the epidemic of isolation started in the 1960s or 1970s. I disagree with his culprit, but think his estimate of the timing is correct: That is also the time of the emergence of the New Left, of what Peter Collier and David Horowitz would call the destructive generation. From that time onward, the avant garde has relentlessly attacked Western civilization and such values as rationality, individualism, and independence.

In the noxious atmosphere this produces, some will understandably conclude that being around others is far more trouble than it is worth. I disagree with them, but it is much harder than it ought to be to find rational, stimulating company.

-- CAV