[Redway]

Originally Posted by Maru

I feel like I went back to college and am listening to a lecture. Just to the tone and way of speaking, it's so detached from everything else of non-importance.

I would say a lot of it correct... excluding the slideshow of all these mega-geniuses I'm allegedly supposed to be in affinity with

The way hub & I have always interacted, we both are intellectual-types and listen to a lot of conversations related to thinking. We still talk a lot by text (when we're not together) so have a continuous IM conversation that documents everything. I'm heavily into documenting conversations and also keeping photos and text conversations active so that there is a "thread" I can to go back to. We're always talking about "what this actually means" when covering current events and reconnecting it back to knowledge and experiences we were bestowed when younger.

As for "out there" thinking, while I try to limit my listening to propaganda (because it's corrosive mentally and emotionally), I do try to listen to enough to where it's "useful" to get a flavor of what motivates people who both make the propaganda and also the type of people who listen to it. I'm much more interested in seeing how other people interact than their interactions with me per say. If I find a good "follower" story (people who heavily into something and form a cohesive ideology), I tend to love to follow those to some extent.

Speaking to your other thread about how others might perceive me, I do worry about one thing, that some people might think I'm more involved in myself than what they have to say at times. I think it's just because of how I construct my thinking around observations, so I have to be careful... not to immediately respond to everything "omg you just said Y, I'm very interested in Y!"... without going into an open wikipedia mode with that person.

Anyway, I think if these tests are useful for one thing, they get us to self-diagnose our own neurosis for the enjoyment of others So there is that.

It also helps take away some of this inherent pathologisation/devaluation of introversion away. We live in a world where social extroversion is often framed as the norm and the converse (introversion) a cause for inherent concern, a social deficit to fix rather than an equally valuable personality-type with (many) advantages as well as drawbacks. Introverts are no more inherently clinically socially anxious, on the autistic spectrum (every cognitive function can correspond to certain Asperger’s-traits anyway), covertly narcissistic, avoidant-personality-disordered, schizoid or incipiently depressed than extraverts are ADHD, communal/grandiose narcissists, on the brink of hypomania, dependent-personality-disordered and so-on. Anyone can be anything but just to play the game of introversion being inherently closer to a clinical concern than extraversion, there are corresponding pathologies for extraversion as a broad social-persona dimension, too. You can, of-course, be both, and things do overlap, but they’re not inherently synonymous. A lot of people see introversion as so inherently unhealthy that they think there must be a clinical reason for it but that’s just a misconception.

Jungian psychology (and other deeper frameworks) also teaches us that if you didn’t have introverts, you wouldn’t have any scientists, writers, counsellors, engineers, philosophers, accountants, strategists, professional chess-players, stoic military-men, poets and so-on. Every personality-type has potential value, but using the reductionist big-5 model (which the guy whose video I linked to you has also spoken against in some detail), introversion doesn’t even get its own chapter, because extraversion is implied as the thing you want and introversion means you’re deficient in it or a neurotic overthinker rather-than holding space for the fact that they’re both equal poles in a continuum that we all have traits of (of both). The fact that no-one’s 100% either-or is another thing that deeper personality frameworks hold space for, whereas in the day-to-day sense of the word people can just see and assess someone by their outward social demeanour (as-if it tells a story of whole personality; even MBTI doesn’t do that) and be like, ‘You’re all-loudmouth. I don’t think you have any traits of being an introvert.’ or ‘You’re super-reclusive and quiet in your disposition. Never seen a trace of being an extravert from you.’ when in reality it’s so much more than that. If someone looks at you and goes “social withdrawal” and your mental health is okay (because obviously social reticence can be clinical, e.g., from depression, social anxiety, schizoid-personality), they’re missing the heart of it.