To be clear, I didn't intend to suggest this at all. I was responding to the situation where you want to approach but then you think vaguely that their feelings may be disturbed by this. I'm not suggesting introverts stop strangers in the streets to talk to them, just that if people (introverted or extraverted) have already formed the intent to approach a person then they shouldn't allow it to be derailed by vague concerns fueled by anecdotal 'data'. I'm just trying to say "Trying to connect is ordinary, don't accept the proposition that it's not."
This doesn't address the point I was making at all. It's not a matter of the action being ordinary or not, but of it costing psychological resources and not being a good return on investment for them.
In general I guess what I'm trying to point at is, any given immediate feeling is usually untrustworthy and essentially useless to pursue. Reproducible emotional trends (for example, feeling better about life when you go for a walk or run, which is well documented) and other types of mental trends (flow?, habits of thinking you have or want to have) are a much more sound basis for decisions and planning. You still have to deal with your feelings on a moment-to-moment level, but it's smart to treat them like children that you have to parent rather than reliable peers.
This goes back to one of the points for which I made that book recommendation. Introverts can force themselves to behave in an extroverted manner in the long run, but doing so comes with an associated psychological cost. For an introvert, forcing oneself to behave in a more extroverted way as a matter of policy, rather than in select instances, is liable to produce significantly negative long term emotional trends.
For an introvert, forcing oneself to behave in a more extroverted way as a matter of policy, rather than in select instances, is liable to produce significantly negative long term emotional trends.
I'm aware of that. Since it's not what I'm suggesting, and as far as I can see, not what anyone else is suggesting, why is that at all relevant?
If they were routinely forming the intent to approach even though it drained them, THAT would reflect a policy of forcing themselves to behave in an extroverted way. Merely making yourself carry through on an already-f...
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.