Non sequitur aside, I bumped into this article to which I felt I could relate very much. I am not as extreme as the nocturnals, but I am comfortable with being alone, even if it were for months. All other things being equal, if I had access to the internet, I could live alone without issue indefinitely. But I have a family and prefer being around them, yet I still crave some alone time now and then.
When it comes to acquaintances or strangers--the larger the crowd the more stressed and exhausted I get. The population explosion and resultant crowds here in northern Utah is painful. Like physically and mentally stressful, exhausting, and vaguely depressing. I really need to get out.
Anyway, here are some excerpts I found among the most noteworthy:
...while most people are fast asleep, there’s a whole world of people who are wide awake. They go to work, drive around, run errands at 24-hour stores. In this parallel universe, there are rarely crowds, nor traffic, nor lines; no awkward shuffling around other shoppers in the grocery aisle, no run-ins with neighbors or cacophony of email notifications. As the sun rises, these nocturnal people settle down to sleep.
They don’t all want to live this way. Some of them have to; they have sleep disorders, or night-shift jobs. But some of them want this very much—enough to seek out those night shifts, to train themselves to wake in the dark. They do this because of the isolation, not in spite of it. I talked to people who painted me a magical picture of their nighttime world: of exquisite, profound solitude; of relief; of escape.
I used to work swing shifts in my youth. And there was something very, very nice about getting off work and nobody is out. It's dark, quiet, little-to-no traffic, you can go grocery shopping in peace where the likelihood of idiots who think it's a good idea to stop in the middle of the aisle oblivious to the concept of other people, or elderly women paying with 1 part check, 1 part expired gift card, 1 part exact change is near zero. I miss grocery shopping at 2am in a nice clean & quiet store.
Much of the article is about how these people find relief from being nocturnal and avoiding people, how it may or may not be a disorder according to psychologists.
But perhaps most interestingly was this part:
Pathologizing introversion sounds absurd—until you start considering the extreme end of the spectrum. Colin DeYoung, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, didn’t comment on the DSM debate—but he did explain that the clinical version of introversion is known as “detachment,” characterized partly by low sensitivity to reward. That means disconnection from social relationships, but also from “energetic or upbeat positive emotions like joy or excitement,” he told me. Clark said something similar. “There is a connection between social interaction and pleasure,” she said. “So people who live their life alone without others, they may not be unhappy. But they also may not experience the full spectrum of pleasure.” And they might not even realize it.Emphasis mine. "Low sensitivity to reward." I get this, I have it, and I have mixed feelings about it. I do not get a rush, high, thrill, nor elation when something significant and "good" happens to me. Other than stuff like sex, food, drugs (legally prescribed!)--yeah, those affect me like everyone else. But if I won the lottery, a competition, got married, had a kid--I don't feel much of a change in my mood. I am happy, but it feels very similar to other normal days where I'm not unhappy. You might think I'm a monstrous unfeeling psychopath, but I just feel things more slowly. The moment doesn't hit me like a truck, it slowly seeps its way in and I adjust. The big elation for me comes later--after I am very familiar and comfortable with someone or something: then those little and big moments of good things trigger my dopamine receptors constantly. I have to be intimately tied to whatever good thing happens to get immediate elation.*
It's strange, I never thought that characteristic was related to my introversion.
Like a lot of things, introversion is a multidimensional spectrum. I like being alone, but I also like having very few close friends and family around. Knowing just how much other people bother me, I can only imagine how hard it is for those on the more extreme end. Forcing people to conform and intermingle with large groups, like we do however, is insensitive at best, and literally torture at worst.
*I should mention that bad things affect me pretty much immediately. I may have low sensitivity to reward, but I am very much sensitive to loss and failure.
