Before the industrial revolution people were living on farms or in small towns in America with limited production, limited trade and therefore limited contact with people other than the ones they had known since childhood. In the twentieth century, the nation started to develop from an agricultural society to an urbanized capitalist one and this new economy required everyone to be a salesman. You had to be a social, talkative, confident person to grow your business. Selling a product and, more importantly, selling yourself became the most important ability and virtue in this capitalist society.(Cain, 2012) And this is how the extrovert Ideal was born. Countless books were written on how to promote yourself better, how to enhance your relationships, how to be a star in wherever you are. Quickly, this extrovert ideal spread to the world and affected every area of life from business to education to religion.
Very far away from that extrovert ideal, I have always been a quiet, introverted person and I was surrounded by extroverts since I was born. My mother and my little brother are the epitome of the extrovert. Having such high standards on being outgoing, my mother and brother used to think that I was antisocial for a long time. She would worry whenever I stayed at home on a Saturday night. And whenever we were in a car ride together, she would bombard me with questions, desperately trying to start a conversation because she couldn't stand silence -- unlike me.
During middle school, I struggled to be a social being because I didn't like to talk and I would be anxious in social environments where I didn't know anyone. My quietness became an obstacle in making friends because what was the point of having friends if you didn't have fun constantly around them. When you don't talk enough, people assume that you don't have anything good to say as if everything they said was brilliant. At high school, my quietness started to be appreciated. It was seen as a virtue. My friends learned all these SAT words to describe my quietness; laconic, pithy, terse -- and suddenly it became something that made me cool. I wasn't just quiet. I was a listener, a thinker. And weirdly enough nearly all of my close friends have been very extroverted people until college. I was loved, respected and accepted as the way I am.
I know that not every introvert is as lucky as I am and, especially in America, it becomes a struggle for them to keep up with the extrovert ideal. Many introverts force themselves to act like an extrovert to be accepted in this society because your ideas are not worth listening if you aren't loud enough. Nowadays, it is not important what you say but how you say it. The ones who talk the most are regarded as the smartest even if half of what they say doesn't make any sense. The ones who seem to have the most friends and who are always out socializing were on the top of the social hierarchy.
We, introverts choose to stay at home on a Saturday night sometimes and be perfectly okay with it. We sometimes enjoy the company of our book more than the company of friends. We prefer having deep relationships with a couple of close friends rather than having superficial ones with many people because honestly we hate small talk. We like to engage in deep sophisticated conversations. We don't want to waste the time of thinking while talking so we don't say much but when we do it is always worth listening. We don't say the same things over again with a louder voice just to be noticed because honestly we don't care to be noticed. We don't care if we are the center of attention. We don't pretend to listen for a second only to draw the attention back to ourselves again. We genuinely listen without any concern of being included in the conversation because we care about what you think and feel. (But, honestly, we don't care about what you wore to your cousin's wedding -- at least I don't.)
The world is full of empty boxes with flashy packages and we, introverts spend time filling our boxes rather than glossing the packages. That is why we don't get noticed all the time but we are cool with it because we know our worth and we know that we don't need flashy packaging to succeed.
(I was inspired to write this article after reading the book, “Quiet," by Susan Cain. I recommend it to everyone, especially to those introverts who are not yet aware of their value.)
