The Introverts Have Taken over the US Economy

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-01-22/the-introverts-have-taken-over-the-us-economy

17 16 2 years ago

jseliger• 2 years ago

"Caring for Your Introvert" is amusing, related reading: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-...

tharne• 2 years ago

I feel like the introvert/extrovert thing is a lot like comparisons among GenX vs. Millennial vs. GenZ; just a lazy form of thinking used to generate pseudo-intellectual clickbait.

jruohonen• 2 years ago

Exactly. And we've already discussed that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39129748

mypastself• 2 years ago

That’s exactly what a GenZ introvert would say!

fullshark• 2 years ago

The world is chaos, these sort of reductive frameworks help people make some sort of sense of it and whatever issues/trends they are facing in their day to day lives.

antisthenes2• 2 years ago

these sort of reductive frameworks help people make some sort of sense of it and whatever issues/trends they are facing in their day to day lives.

They mostly help generate clicks for the publisher, and to push someone's agenda (if it was paid for).

If it ever helps someone in a significant concrete way, that's a mere coincidence.

Kamq• 2 years ago

I don't think they're that bad necessarily. These sorts of vague and fuzzy categories are very common in human communication. Even though there's tons of exceptions and non-central examples to these categories, to the point that they're basically useless for anything formal, they tend to have actual value to normal human beings that need to communicate.

Quothling• 2 years ago

As far as I know a lot of the Jung and extended personality stuff was never meant to be taken as black and white personality traits the way mainstream western culture often does today. Especially because a lot of things that aren't actually related to introspection, like symptoms of social anxiety or simply general shyness. It's also perfectly possible to be both an introvert and an extrovert at the same time.

In talented HR these personality traits aren't used like that either, but rather used as talking points which make it much easier to get to know a potential hire than not having the test results to refer to. A good example of this is an old boss I had who scored a 0 on empathy in our organisational developed personality spin (because lets face it, these things are big business, and of course our HR consultants had paid an external consultant agency to develop our own). Anyway, he scored a 0 in empathy, and he's one of the most emphatic people I've ever known, but because the opposite was ambition and result orientation, and probably because it was his first leadership job, he had gone in that route with his answers. Now if we had taken the results to be factual rather than just a good baseline for discussion, he wouldn't have gotten the job but it was a good talking point. The tools themselves can also be very useful for getting team members to "bond" or at least get to know each other better. If you simply ask people what they think about something personal, some people will elaborate and give good answers because they are comfortable (and in extraversion) in those situations, while others will give you nothing. But if you base the talks on personality test results, you can very often get everyone to open up and have a good talk.

Obviously it's not completely made up either, there is science which shows different personality traits, but there is nothing that shows you're either or, unless you have some sort of disorder, in which case, you're probably more likely to switch than be of a single version. Sometimes people gather energy alone, sometimes they get energy from being social, and overall you're likely to be more happy the more of your time you spend in extroversion (as an adult anyway). It's also not something that necessarily tells you much about how people want to work, you can be a massive extrovert and still prefer to do many tasks on your own, or you can be an introvert and prefer to do your work as part of a team effort.

Unfortunately mainstream culture likes boxes. Like this article. Because you can be very sociable and still prefer to work from home. Maybe because you're young and used to being social online, or maybe because not having to commute for x hours a day gives you soooo much more time to spend with people. This headline probably gets more clicks than another article about how a lot of people prefer to work from home and the pandemic made them realize it. Interestingly, in my anecdotal life, a lot of the people who are what could be called very introverted tend to be the ones who prefer going to the office, because sometimes it's one of the social parts of their lives.

blantonl• 2 years ago

I think that if you strip out the click-bait and over-generalizations of today's workers, you can boil this all down to:

1) A era of the tech bro is waning.

2) Young workers are focused more on less alcohol in their lives, and more on living a healthier lifestyle.

Mountain_Skies• 2 years ago

Telling everyone that groups are bad and everyone else is a potential vector for a deadly disease was bound to have long term negative impacts on socialization, even after those with the megaphone gave the 'All Clear' signal to start conspicuous consumption again. It's amazing how many involved in the pandemic response assumed they could turn off the consequences switch just as easily as they turned it on.

mlinhares• 2 years ago

Or a lot of people that felt forced to be in large groups to socialize noticed they actually don’t need it and now are much happier with their own smaller groups

nicepplonly• 2 years ago

This is a really bad take that ignores a variety of things, such as the cost of going out and the general enshittification of everything (i.e., decline in quality of goods and services).

It also ignores the growing cultural divide of our clickbait ad-based economy that preys on fear and outrage in order to profit from everyone's misery by trying to sell them the latest plastic junk from China that eventually goes into a recycling bin and then shipped back to Asia where it's dumped into the rivers and ocean.

seydor• 2 years ago

Conspicuously missing the social media aspect. Going out was all about social signaling but chats are now better for that. It's not like people became introverts, but extroverts now prefer a well publicized exotic selfie-cation to bars

antisthenes2• 2 years ago

Utter nonsense hit piece, considering the widespread push to RTO.

NooneAtAll3• 2 years ago

what's rto?

nathanaldensr• 2 years ago

Return to office.

The Introverts Have Taken over the US Economy

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