First up: I’m a libertarian with my drugs. Crutch they may be in many psychotropic cases, I’ll be damned if 21st century rationalism hasn’t delivered in troves.
Secondly: I work in the pharmaceutical industry. I directly benefit from your (prescription) drug consumption. Although upper management, more so. Also, I probably get a little too high off my own supply, colloquially speaking. I am that guy at your local chemist, always buying up the Benadryl.
Thus concludes the preliminaries.
Which brings us, sadly, to insomnia.
Antihistamines are a potent class of sedatives; alongside ATAP’s we have Phernergan, Benadryl, Remeron et al. And they work in most patients, like dimming a light switch with a nuclear weapon. They also have the lovely effect of not inducing total tolerance, dependence, and the resulting crash from withdrawal symptoms (contingent on dose, course duration, and the drug itself, of course) This is in stark contrast to Ambien & Friends, which don’t actually effect sleep architecture as profoundly as has been claimed (just don’t mix with alcohol) but do induce aforementioned tolerance, withdrawal, and nightmarish dependencies.
But there’s a reason Seroquel is in the title of this essay, and the reason is thus: there’s a wonderful essay by The Last Psychiatrist on the “rum/champagne fountain” effect psychiatric medication has in regard to receptor binding, and for the most part, I agree. However, it is in need of slight modification. Taking drug X, of any kind, will have various binding affinities to different receptors. However the distribution of the molecule throughout the body will be (BBB aside) reasonably homogenous (assume so for the purposes of this essay - yes I’m aware of the technical nuances here) and thus what drives binding to different receptor sites is an entirely stochastic process; the molecule floats in the ocean of your blood until it strikes a homing beacon. Therefore, take as little Seroquel as you please, but there will always be some binding to Serotonin, adrenergic, DAT et al. just at levels commensurate to the binding affinity/dose ratio. The histamine receptors have the stronger pull, but the process is random.
So take a billion to the power of a billion 30 year old men, and give them all 6mg of Seroquel. Who wants to play Russian roulette that there will not be a single molecule of quetiapine bound to 5HT-2A? DAT?
The question is always: how much binding of one receptor do we need for the patient to self-report a subjective change in [some property]?
If I split a 25mg Seroquel tab in half, and give you 12.5mg every night for a week to help with your sleep, are we rolling with the hypothesis that no one will see any change in any of your other systems? Check the binding affinities for Quetiapine; at steady state, we’ll get partial desensitisation of your histamine receptors, and very probably a very minor change along the serotonin and/or adrenergic axis. How minor? Individual results may vary, but people swear that 12.5mg helps with anxiety. And I’m willing to bet there’s a legitimate pharmacological (read: non-placebo-chemical) effect to this.
If you’re married to the rum fountain metaphor, think of it this way: you’re standing there, pouring in rum, and occasionally, some splashes out (by random chance) and lands in the lower sections before the top part is full. See? It really was a great metaphor.
What kind of person advertises one kind of information on their dating profile, who they are, what they do, what they enjoy, and so on, and then turns out to posses none of these attributes or qualities in real life? When in fact, what they explicitly state that they seek, and what they are are actually seeking, are two very different things?
I’m not talking about machiavellianism, outright lies, or even a modicum of outright objective deception. The concept I’m thinking of here more closely resembles neuroticism. Not even narcissism. Not the projection of identity of the kind of person one wishes to be - everyone is culpable - or capable - of this to some extent.
Neuroticism drives people to present themselves as comfortable, relaxed, easygoing, and positive. When in fact, they are none of these things. No one will explicitly state that they are a miser. An anxious neurotic. A misanthrope incapable of human companionship or warmth. And of course, they are not; they are, after all, on a dating app. Searching for someone, or, much more specifically, some thing.
Consider:
Person A: (consultant)
“by day, I grow the size of hedges. otherwise, I enjoy rock climbing, tennis, and surrounding myself with positive, interesting, fun-seeking people. essentially, I am the good thing that comes in small sizes
currently learning python and looking for fun tutors”
Despite egregious orthographic errors, this is a reasonable profile. It demonstrates effort, if nothing else, when so many tinder profiles present simply pictures. So, where is the disconnect between the words and reality?
The obvious counter-argument is that there will always be a disconnect between words and reality; words, especially only several dozen of them, cannot compress an entire human psyche. Ergo, meet for coffee as soon as possible.
2. Neurosis
But what becomes apparent, rapidly, over the course of not one but several dates, is the severe anxiety. This is what insecure people do: “my taste in music is shit, you select the music”
The entire third date was essentially a set of questions: “What do you think of probiotics? Should I take them? What should I eat?” My personal favourite, when queried about being a coffee drinker, “Yes - but only one per day!” Jesus, it’s coffee, not arsenic. “What did you think of my blog?” I did not give her my true opinion. Writing is hard, spelling “sashimi” correctly is not. This is why I like anonymity.
“I ended up pigging out on chips when I got home, I feel so fat haha”
During sex: “I might look ok, but I’m sucking in”
This will never stop.
3. Conclusion
When people are driven to perfectionism by an external source, i.e. their parents, or some other parental figure (what becomes their super-ego, to borrow from the psychoanalytic lexicon) never lets up. The anxiety will be omnipresent until the grave. “How do I look compared to others? How much money do I have? If I attain this level in category X, will it matter next to category Y?” The Python will never be learned, or will be learned with only moderate success at best. After Python it will be some other project, soaked in from whatever trend is coming from the environment. Never, “I should start my own business” That would require rejecting external authority, which such people will never do. It is ultimately a lack of both courage and imagination.
Was any research ever conducted into the difference between most brains, and John von Neumann’s brain?
An eidetic memory, multiplying five digit figures, and so on, doesn’t necessarily seem to correlate with high IQ (although smart money indicates he would have killed). Case in point: although Gauss purportedly had somewhat similar abilities in arithmetic, he came up with lateral solutions to a lot of the problems he worked on (the famous example being pairwise disjoint addition of the integers up to 100)
When von Neumann was asked the question of the fly travelling between the bicycle wheels, he didn't jump tracks to the “elegant” (deliberate quotation marks) solution, but simply calculated the geometric series in his head.
Obvious pathology of this example is that I’m comparing two titans, but the point is (badly defined) creativity (non-obvious), vs. brute force.
I need to rewrite the Ken Levine essay now that I’m in a particular mood. A stream of consciousness with no editing was always going to contain errors; glaring contradictions, awkward sentences, and poor structure.
I need to actually put more effort into practicing writing.
In Nausea, the narrator becomes sickened at a world in which he can no longer perceive clear demarcations between objects. It is pointless. His life, and the world in which he lives take on the import of nihilism. The mauve shirt that refuses to be one colour or another, the intolerance and misunderstanding of his own countenance reflected back at him from the mirror; an eyeball with too much white exposed, too much red, too many veins.
“What does it all mean?”
“This is pointless.”
Nausea is the label Sartre has chosen for when man no longer comprehends any meaning in life around him. When minuscule detail and macroscopic event are swept away and reality is smeared like oil on paper. Sharp detail is obliterated, outlines and distinctions are blurry. The image is gone, swept into the abyss. Meaning is nowhere.
Humankind wasn’t meant to exist in an abyss. I can’t answer the philosophical question of life’s meaning, but a preponderance of, “why?” only ever hurts the soul and the intellect.
For some people, the most difficult concept of all is to understand that human beings were built not to think, but to feel.
Amongst my friends and associates its becoming commonplace to talk about how the ultimate endgame of Uber is to “screw the workforce that they’ve created” by hooking consumers onto the Uber service, and the ultimately switching to self-driving cars, putting all the Uber drivers out of a job.
To clarify and explicitly state: you’re not getting screwed by Uber (if you’re a driver); they’re enabling you to have a job for a period of time that you wouldn’t have otherwise had. If you have a good argument for how a company that creates jobs for a period of time, and then takes those jobs away, is screwing its workforce, I’ll be down at the bar.
What if a company creates one thousand jobs, then goes bankrupt and can’t pay its workers any benefits or accrued sick leave? Is this the same or different? What if the company goes bankrupt because the executives were spending the company credit card on drugs and prostitutes?
2.
People tend towards a sense of entitlement. “They gave me a job, now they’re trying to take it away, bastards!” No, they gave you a job. What else were you going to do with that time? Smoke weed and play Xbox? With Uber you get to contribute, earn money, and plan your next steps.
Corporations can admittedly do evil things. And depending on the regulatory and economic environment, can indeed take steps to actively harm their workforce and customers. The issue here is that 1) Uber is not this kind of company (I’m thinking finance firms who place individual profits above externalities i.e. your 401k management a la Goldman in the late 90’s) and 2) you can’t rely on on someone else to provide for you. I don’t mean to take an all out apocalyptic don’t get a job worldview. I mean, always be aware of what could happen, and plan for it.
The universe is a vast and uncaring place. People suffer, we all suffer to some extent, and my sympathies extend to all. But don’t pretend that one company is short changing you when they’re actively enabling you to do something that you weren’t going to do by yourself.
I understand that TLP, Hotel Concierge, and Samzdat tend to believe that the increase in narcissicim, or the use of narcissism as an ideology, coincides with the end of world war the second, and the invention and adoption of television (and then the internet)
So ok, why?
For starters, the march from WW2 to present day probably began to seriously knock out the bottom rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy for the first time in human history. In most developed countries you can take a stroll down to your local Megalithic Grocery Corp (tm) and stock up on a weeks worth of food for not a huge amount more than min wage (probs) - and no matter how crappy your apartment, if you have a flushing toilet and hot water, you’re better off than any king of yore. However, compared to what you can see others have...? So, the HC comparison hypothesis for #millennial anxiety checks out if we’re talking material goods.
So rewind history to the 50’s. Television. Marketers sell us products based on the idea of who we are, not what functional needs are met. “Camel cigarettes, for the man who [X]” And thus it begins. Soon consumers conflate products with self-image. It becomes a reinforcing loop, unconscious. Parents teach their kids, marketers continue along this axis because it works (we’re no longer squabbling over food) and (duh) it makes money and keeps the plebs happy to an extent.
The internet runs along the same axis, except now we can signal more broadly. It’s not just advertising the kind of person we are to those in our immediate neighbourhood, it’s anyone we can click to check off as a “friend”
So, we have television = sells us products to signal to others, and internet = showing who we are to others.
In the parlance of economics, if you’re not producing, you’re consuming. And in the lexicon of Freud, you need to discharge some kind of libidinous energy. Production for immediate need/lower Maslow has gone down, i.e. cooking, butchering game meat, stoning your neighbor to death etc and consumption has gone up - Ralph Lauren v necks, eminently Instagrammable sushi made to look like a dolphin. But the Freudian interpretation is the astute one; in 2018, consumption = production.
In summary, what began as a clever trick by marketers using television to entice us to buy what we never really needed (“need” begs definition here, but that’s another essay entirely) proceeded through to the internet and a broader signalling base. “‘Human beings determine their own meaning’ blatantly untrue if you’ve ever spoken to one” - that’s Samzdat. Unfortunately perspicacious.
Ken Levine has often concerned himself with philosophical exposition as the subtext permeating his narratives in video games. Beginning with System Shock (1997), he explored the idea of our race creating life, life in the form of an artificial intelligence in control of a space station orbiting the earth. An artificial intelligence that would ultimately come to assume demigod status both in function and self-realisation. He would continue this theme with Bioshock, expanding his oeuvre to encompass a political agenda. It is not subtle; that Levine disagrees with libertarian political philosophy and social structure is simply to say that his context, the environment, the antagonist of his story, the very conditions under which the story takes place, leave no room for cross examination of an alternative viewpoint. It is a sledgehammer. Intellectually there is no breathing room. And in this he is relentless. His next project, Bioshock Infinite, more closely examines the idea of prophecy and religion. It is a view of America captured in the early 1900’s; racist remarks from NPC’s permeate the dialogue, religious dogma enervates both the visual style and the monologue of the antagonist. He is currently working on a third System Shock title; in interviews and articles he expounds on the virtues and his intent of exploring the motivations of the demigod from the original series. He despises individuals wielding great power. The irony of the player character being the arbiter of ultimate power may not be lost on him.
Video games are an immature art form, but they are an art form, despite protestations of other art critics. The famed film critic Roger Ebert comes to mind. But Ebert’s argument was incredibly facile, simply outright false: “the player controls the narrative, therefore games do not equal art.” That the player has absolutely no control over the narrative is obvious to anyone who has ever played a video game. It also brings into question exactly why a conflation of narrative and art must occur. Is music art? Is an inverted bicycle wheel art propped upright in a museum art? He was a fine writer, and a passionate lover of film. But he was an idealist. Unable to understand the peculiar anthropological dance of a human being and his environment through time. And using the term “literary” as a comparison is unfair, to even use the word implies a semiotics of direct comparison; as an art form, aesthetics, philosophy, psychology, and other phenomenology find no easy point on which to grasp. Games are composed of visual art, music, animation, dialogue, and other isolated instances of art. Where we can directly compare elements of literature and film to games, we can do so. But this can occur at the expense of the game mechanics themselves. Video recordings and Voxophones, the post facto narrative device that Levine was forced into using due to technical constraints of System Shock, have now become his favoured narrative devices. But he is unable to integrate these with other methods (cut scenes, less constricted scripted sequences vis-a-vis Half-Life) While true that Bioshock Infinite allowed greater NPC interaction due to the players role with Elizabeth, Elizabeth is simply a facade; designed to provoke sympathy with excessively emotive eyes, she brings to mind the Seinen manga so popular in Japan, with an equally shallow depth of emotional investment. A kind of emotional pornography. No interaction with her is deeper than a demonstration of an excessively expressive face powered by impressive technology, and her use as a MacGuffin. A way to progress the plot in a vacuum of other ideas. I choose Levine specifically because he has the distinction of being one of the finest writers working in video games today. Despite my critique of intellectual and philosophical shallowness, it is a miserable state of affairs when we contrast this with what else currently exists. Marc Laidlaw, of Half-Life fame, is akin to Stephen King. Half-Life has an almost perfectly integrated story with its level design; but the story itself is simply an exposition of events concerning an alien invasion and mysterious forces behind the scenes. The game itself is outstanding. Rage has a story. But it is a waste of resources to devote more than this sentence to it.
Writers working in video games today have a difficult balancing act to achieve; video games are neither books nor art. To treat them as such is not merely to do a disservice to all these forms of art, it is to restrain the potential of games themselves. Scripted sequences requiring limited input from the player are a ghastly travesty. They are neither fun, nor informative, nor provocative. They make the player all too aware of the artifice into which they are forced. Halo treated NPC’s magnificently; no direct interaction, they would simply use your behaviour as a context to modify their own. Bioshock Infinite deserves mention here too; the conversation of passer-by’s on the beach, the casual, overt, relaxed racism. The kneeling acolytes at the baptism with their chanting.
Perhaps we ask too much of video games in this way. They are not books or films. Devices that would work in other mediums fare badly in video games. Thus far their execution has been cheap and transparent. The self-immolating nun of Infinite does not invoke horror at her suicide, does not invoke a deeper psychological horror at the hold Comstock has over his flock. She simply constricts player movement while the camera is shaking and you are trying to move through the room. Literally, the top of the screen is telling you to exit the Zeppelin, and this poor woman has just set herself on fire. I was frustrated because I couldn’t quickly move past her.
Returning to Levine; it is possible his methods would work better under different game mechanics. I always feel that player to NPC interaction works more effectively with a third person camera than a first. A third person viewpoint enables context, enables the player to construct the interior landscape of the characters as everything unfolds before him. The first person viewpoint demands action; Halo and Half-Life work so well here precisely because they choose not to use forms of exposition that force you to break the fourth wall.
It’s much easier for me to defend use of nicotine, so that’s all I try to do: nicotine is pretty much harmless, the studies are clear, the relevant areas & studies comprehensible with not too much work, and I feel I can discuss it with a clean conscience. Really, about the worst you can say about pure nicotine use is that it might be a gateway to tobacco or that one’s blood pressure might increase a tad, which are issues that can be easily addressed empirically via additional studies/surveys or by eg. measuring one’s own blood pressure after taking nicotine, respectively.
Is Gwern the archetype of our generational neuroticism? Is writing something like, “the archetype of generational neuroticism” a symptom of neuroticism?
On the other hand, even if one does develop tolerance to nicotine, that simply suggests spacing it out or rotating with other stimulants. One could imagine a 3-day cycle: nicotine, caffeine, and modafinil.
I can imagine that this is an enormous pain in the ass. You could also just, you know... drink the damn coffee and chew gum.
Does there come a point in time where rationalism has no further payoff? What does the graph for that look like? Does it have an equilibrium point?
The finale of Rage; build up to climactic battle, poetic movement from set piece to set piece, press E, upload complete, (waves!) of mutants, and then... ?
... hang on, isn’t this just some mid-level cutscene to show us some sweeping change in narrative trajectory? Wait, you mean, the credits are rolling?! Aren’t we stuck in the uber-panopticon of the future awaiting Christopher Lambert to break us out?
idSoftware were never strong with storytelling, but I feel like the part of my mind that sequences pictures and puts them in temporal order just had a colonoscopy. That can’t be the final scene.
If my thinking at times, as I’ve exploded into violent outrage and vitriol directed at some therapist, is, “I should have good grades, my IQ is [X], fuck everything and everyone, you’re all beneath me just give me what I want or else” then you could say I’m a narcissist. And you’d be correct. Or close to, anyway. Not a narcissist per se, but possessed of greater than usual narcissistic defence mechanisms. We may all have them to some extent, it’s just a question of how far the dial moves; are we going from a healthy and acceptable 1-2 of coping mechanisms, or are we going all the way to 11 where reality itself constantly singes our ego? Holding narcissistic delusions of grandeur may keep you happy in the short term, and they will definitely hold off aspects of reality you find painful to deal with currently, but fantasies are just that: fantasies. Please note that when Daedalus swung to hit the ball out of the park, he ignited and hit mother Gaia at terminal velocity. No fantastical delusion, no matter how elaborately constructed, is going to keep you from death. It will certainly constrain your potential.
For the longest time I had terrible grades. All my behaviour was avoidant. If I was set homework, I would simply not do it. If it was an assignment that contributed to the final grade for a subject, I would quibble with, and then finally demand, an extension from the teacher. I would find reasons why the homework, the syllabus, the teachers themselves, fellow students, were beneath me and worthy of contempt. When I saw students I considered beneath me (= not as ‘smart’ where smart is whatever I considered it to be, rate of pattern matching?) get good grades, I would use this as a further excuse to denigrate the educational system and its artefacts. Unconsciously: this was all evidence that I Am Greater Than The System. And of course it was. This is the great trick your unconscious pulls: the ability to interpolate the curve through the points to construct the narrative that eases your pain the most.
But I was horribly depressed. Freud et al. wrote extensively about unconscious tension, and other writers use what I believe is a more damaging turn of phrase: you cannot lie to yourself. Possibly you can, but the psyche of an individual like this beyond my ability to effectively empathise with. I understand, as a matter of fact, that narcissists exist that do indeed kill other people over narcissistic injuries. It’s just that if I even think about holding a gun, I feel sick. A thin film of bile begins to creep up my throat and I can feel the butterflies in my stomach. (if you gave me a gun to murder someone, I can imagine feeling quite uncomfortable, like, uh-oh, this is horrible, putting down the gun, and then going and taking a shower) But my depression was coming from (among other things) that inability to swallow my own lie. “The education system sucks” may actually be true; high school, tertiary, grad school and so on, but my avoidance was only hurting myself. Worse, I was hurting others. Lashing out at someone to defend your ego is aggressive and selfish and hurtful. I would feel ashamed and guilty. I would apologise profusely and restore balance. Then the cycle would repeat. And the whole time I knew my grades could be better, and I should be treating others more fairly. I would receive bad grades from avoidance, feel guilty and depressed, be proactive in making plans to do better next time, and then begin to avoid working once my confidence was restored. I would suffer imposter syndrome when I did achieve something worthwhile. The tension is thus: I knew I could do better, knew I was nowhere near the smartest person alive, and knew I just needed to accept that second fact to develop healthier study habits.
How do you break out of this cycle to begin to more fully realise your potential? Even better: how do you untangle narcissistic defences so that you don’t hurt others around you?
I think that narcissistic personality traits, at least in this particular manifestation, tend to cause the individual to believe others won’t like them unless they’re star performers. Call it (maybe an obvious) observation of myself and others. And in a sense, this is true. If you have the unfortunate upbringing of the particular kind of perverse parenting that demands nothing short of perfection, if love is only given to you because of your grades, then what hope did you have? Little kids need well-adjusted role models, citation hopefully unnecessary and completely obvious. And narcissistic goals range from being the best at school, to being the best with women, having the most money, and so on. You pick your trophy (or more accurately, have it picked for you) and your reality wraps itself into a bubble around that.
As it pertains to study, this is what you must unlearn: “People will only like me for my intellect”
Think about people who you’re friends with, and why. Because they’re members of the Promethean society? Or because they exhibit other traits; loyalty, the ability to help, to lend an ear, to act as a sounding board. To talk to and laugh with and make life bearable and happy. To share experiences with. You need to learn to accept people for who they are. This means understanding that they are not going to be looking to you for a 100% inductive reasoning result. Friendships aren’t built on Raven’s progressive matrices and Scantrons. For most, this will probably never even enter their sphere of consciousness.
Some practical advice for class: talk to your peers. You will see that they are human beings with anxieties and insecurities just like you. You will start to like other people, and finally yourself, more. Don’t expect to always be the best, at everything, all the time. Because you’re not. Not a diss. Just reality. You’re not your IQ. “No one reliably produces insight consistently” I’m paraphrasing a guy who received his PhD in Mathematics from Princeton at age 18. If you don’t believe me, try giving him the benefit of the doubt.
There’s a certain romance to the lone genius working against the establishment. But it’s just that: a fantasy. Time to let it go.
hot take: if you think you are an introvert because you find social interaction draining, consider the hypothesis that it is the accompanying anxiety that is draining and if you can get rid of that social interaction is super fun and fulfilling
Definitely true. But practice/repeated exposure decrease social anxiety over the long term, whereas if you’re just an introvert there’s not really any reason to do lots of social interaction you don’t enjoy.
One thing that can probably help disambiguate is to ask whether alcohol makes you more social or less social. (If you drink socially already, of course; if you’re uncomfortable with drinking this will have lots of confouding factors).
Lots of people find that alcohol helps them socialize, because it makes them less anxious and more relaxed, so it’s easier to interact. This is what makes alcohol a “social lubricant”.
But I don’t really have (that kind of) social anxiety, so alcohol doesn’t make it easier to socialize. But it does lower my energy levels, so it’s harder to motivate myself to jump into new/unusual/difficult social situations, because that takes energy and it’s so much easier for me to chill out on the couch reading on my phone.
If I want a social lubricant I drink a little caffeine.
If alcohol makes you more social, then some sort of anxiety is probably a more domineant limiting factor in how social you are. If alcohol makes you less social, there’s a good chance that energy is the limiting factor.
(But of course there’s lots of potential for confounding, and both factosr can be limiting in different people at different times in different situations. Alcohol does actually make me more social in some ways if I’m with a group of people that are going to start conversations with me and I don’t have to put effort into making interactions happen. I’ve had some really good, long conversations on that couch. But usually with people who are already close friends).
Also, again, if you’ve never drunk socially before and you’re nervous or uncomfortable with the idea, please don’t try it just because I posted this. You shouldn’t drink if you don’t want to or it makes you uncomfortable, and also it won’t even get you good data on this question.
Not a massive Tumblr-ite, so this will have been written elsewhere. However, this is a decent conclusion regarding the introversion/anxiety dichotomy.
I get the impression nowadays (via anecdotal evidence) that people tend to rationalise their social anxiety by labelling themselves an introvert (see: Tinder and [other dating apps], and the plea that someone else carry the conversation, “but I’m a great listener!” (I bet))
One issue I take umbrage with: the use of drugs/chemicals/exogenous ligands/fancy-words-of-choice to determine if you’re more anxious/introverted. As mentioned, this (the chemistry) introduces a lot of confounding factors. It also reduces the argument back to chemistry and ignores individual psychology. Online discussions about mental health often focus on individual chemistry, with little nod given to individual circumstances. And so with human psychology on the web, I have a distaste for chemistry. Please note that this is in no way an anti-drug stance; antidepressants can be very useful, antipsychotics and mood stabilisers can be very necessary for day-to-day functioning. The human mind can obviously be influenced by drugs, and many people this side of the enlightenment know even a little biology. But discussing social anxiety in terms of alcohol and caffeine intake is a mistake. Twenty cups of coffee per day in 99% of circumstances is indeed a mistake, but then caffeine can have unexpected effects in people with ADD/ADHD. And alcohol too can have effects that are mediated by the mood you are already in. Drinking after a break-up is a universal (and universally repeated) mistake, drinking when you’re at a party can often make social anxiety a little easier to cope with (it’s also fun in a lot of cases) Also see: dose response curves and hockey sticks.
It’s also a false dichotomy. Unsure where the psychological canon stands on this one, but is there a universally accepted definition of “introvert” ? I reject this notion of a 2 by 2 anxious/confident-introvert/extrovert. Trying to capture social interactions like this would be similar to trawling for fish where each square in your net is over a metre wide. Human behaviour is complex (duh) and pondering whether to drink espresso or merlot before your next date is ignoring why you’re considering that this an issue of espresso or merlot. NB: the keyword here is metacognition.
Over the course of a day, how much you feel like spending time around other people can vary enormously. It can vary based on what’s happening in your environment at that very point in time (maybe work issues are causing you stress i.e. your boss caught you watching porn on your work computer) Maybe that cute girl from accounting has recently become single. Maybe your boss is in a particularly good mood from a recent round of golf. TBC.
