INTROVERSION IMMERSION

Having never been slow to judge extroverts on what I perceive to be their alpha over-confidence and selfishness, I began to wonder whether it’s people like me, the introverted, who are truly the most self-absorbed and self-centred; potentially capable of a greater deal of empathy, but prone to neurotic navel-gazing, forever scarpering to the solipsistic sanctuary of their own company.

INTROVERSION IMMERSION could be described as a self-portrait. It’s a warts and all representation where I focus on the warts, examining the worst of my impulses. It’s recognition of where I’m at and what I need to get better at. It also stands as an indictment of where we’re all at when we actively endorse a society that puts the individual at its centre.

Introverts have no control over what they are. We are always going to need time to decompress and be alone with our thoughts after periods of social interaction with others. That time to recharge is essential to our wellbeing. It’s a time of deep reflection and calibration. By its nature it involves absolute self-absorption. I suppose the intrinsic danger of this is that once alone with your thoughts, you can spin off into your mind’s own echo chamber. Problems and opinions can become magnified and distorted. In the same way that society has arrived at a place of extreme tribal politics – we choose only to engage with people and media that reflect our own opinions back to us, thereby further entrenching them – the solipsistic sanctuary of the introvert’s interior world can serve to reinforce and amplify prejudice and selfishness.

Left unchecked, this leads to covert narcissism. Covert narcissism is the dark side of introversion in the same way that overt narcissism is the dark side of extroversion. Whilst overt narcissists tend to be aggressively self- aggrandising with delusions of grandeur, covert narcissists are prone to hypersensitivity and anxiety but still with the delusions of grandeur. The kind of person who thinks everyone is looking when they walk in a room.

Having grown up with a parent who is most certainly a covert narcissist, I’ve become sensitive to the signs of the condition. I recognised some of those traits in myself at an early age and have worked hard at not becoming that person. But, eighteen years of nurture and a heap of shared DNA means it’s an unending campaign to fight. The calls to IMPRESS ME, IMPROVE ME and ENCHANT ME are representative of the unrealistic expectations that I place on friends and family. In an era when more people than ever get everything they want, everything becomes merely satisfactory. I’ve certainly recognised a shortening attention span and a growing shopping list of requirements for satisfactory living. Not so much material things but a desire for more emotional and intellectual engagement from those around me. I want to be ADORED, PROVOKED, STIMULATED and SURPRISED. I suppose I want to be entertained.

As a society we have truly become obsessed with ourselves. We’re fixated on expressing our own individuality but the platforms on which we choose to do that make us all into a homogenous whole. Entire worlds of user generated content that global businesses have facilitated in order to target us individually with their products. ‘Because you’re worth it’, ‘Because you’re special’, ‘Because you deserve the best’.

The repeated ME ME ME is an insistence that our perceived individuality is no such thing. The choices we think we have are actually extremely limited. We’re all lusting after the same small number of products made by an even smaller number of global companies. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook are repositories of stultifying unoriginality. Taking a selfie at the top of the Eiffel Tower makes you no different to the hundreds of thousands of others doing the exact same thing every year. By promoting the cult of ME, our society fosters a sense of entitlement, a feeling that our opinion matters and matters more than the next person’s. We live in an era where our needs have been fulfilled. Our economy is now focussed on giving us what we want. But when what we want is out of our reach, at odds with what others want or requires compromise, we get furious.

As Dr Rowan Williams wrote:

‘We are able to remember for a moment that even in a society where everyone seems to be insanely focused on getting and winning, there are times when we need to stand still and just face ourselves quietly. We’ve had a few decades of being told we have a right to get whatever we want – cash, status, pleasure. Fair enough, if what’s been normal before is oppression and unfairness. Not so sensible if what it means is a system that sets everyone against everyone else and tells us we can be as angry as we like if we don’t get exactly what we think we want.’