A dictatorship? Are you being forced at gunpoint to talk to people?

Perhaps more unsurprisingly, at the mere suggestion that socializing is good for you (it demonstrably is https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11403199/), you went and wrote a comment that I can only imagine someone who is deeply unhappy would write.

I'm not an extrovert. Introversion itself was probably more of a euphemism that I used to rationalize something closer to social anxiety.

But I feel I'm better off now for doing what the article suggested, over the last 5-6 years. Doing so improved my knowledge, my empathy, grew my revenue, built larger professional networks, introduced me to hobby networks, and helped with better financial planning.

I even changed to the extent of actually looking forward to outreach activities that involve a lot of conversations. I find them very satisfying because they help me understand social realities and people better than social media and books and help me develop empathy.

I wouldn't say I'm now an extrovert. My personality still prefers a lot of alone time. There are times when I still don't feel like talking to anyone. But they're now for positive reasons like books to finish rather than negative reasons like social anxiety.

I now tend to see things like introversion and social anxiety as obstacles. One can rationalize them in many ways but they'll remain objective obstacles IMO.

I can't agree. I'm pretty sure that we're in dictatorship of introverts that convinced everyone that talking or even eye contact with strangers is creep.

"Reduce human contact to bare minimum" is standard now, at least in America.

the dictatorship is doing extremely badly then because in my experience roughly the last two decades have consisted of safety obsession, various 'cozy' aesthetics that don't involve leaving your house, the death of social drinking and an uptick of pills and psychological diagnoses and people staring into their phones on every occasion.

We've completely normalized being a shut-in to the point where your take, that it's authoritarian to push people out into the world and engage others, is quite common. What now passes for 'extroverted' used to be known as the human condition. Even extroverts today probably have fewer friends, smaller families and spend more time isolated and on screens than 99% of humanity.

It's really tiresome. I am happy to have to a conversation if approached, but don't tell me I "should" do the same to others