Social Economics: How I Explain Things To My Extrovert Boss

Essentially Selfish: Social Economics

Your capacity for social interaction is a type of currency. It’s the only type of currency, in fact, that is universal and globally traded. And, like when you were trying to learn about the stock market in high school, everyone begins with an inherent amount of it. 

Some people have more. We call these people extroverts; like their monetary counterparts drive the material economy, they drive the social economy because they have a high capacity for both consumption and donation. The quality of their social interaction is not the question nor the defining factor of their ‘class.’ Rather, they are able to handle volume. They can ‘buy’ expensive social interactions – multiple people, loud settings, frequent interactions – because they have that amount in their social bank accounts.

Introverts can and do also participate in the social stock market, but they don’t have the capacity of an extrovert. Both their input and output is limited – they can only buy so much, but they can also only sell so much. If they deplete their account on, say, a large party, then it takes time to build their reserves back up. 

This is where introverts and extroverts fail to understand each other. 

An extrovert responds to the poverty of another extrovert by quickly loaning them capital. Because of the way the extrovert-driven economy works, they have no reason to doubt that they will be paid back. The market is open and honest, and no one is ever destitute because the currency is in a constant flow. 

Even if offered a loan, however, an introvert simply does not have the internal capacity necessary to store the amount an extrovert who wants to help would offer without thinking. They must build their reserves in order to participate in the economy, but are only capable of making small trades that allow them to build them over time. They may even initially want to take what the extrovert is offering, but will quickly find themselves overwhelmed and facing overdraft fines that leave them just as impoverished as when they began; a little bit of social currency is forever removed from the system when this happens, so that extroverts feel slighted because they did not get their full repayment, and introverts feel guilty for defaulting, or bitter that they were given an amount they were not capable of controlling.

For this reason, a lot of introverts read extroverts as greedy, or hoarders, when extroverts are really just expecting a higher capacity exchange. So they take a lot and in fact are giving a lot, but the introvert they're giving to can't receive it. So the effect is draining but it's not the intention. 

There ARE people who just take, without a reciprocal exchange, but they'll impoverish even an extrovert eventually. A truly extroverted participant in the social economy can be seen as a free-flowing conduit. They are both energized by and energizing to those around them. A social hoarder will take all that is offered to them – dinner invitations, sympathetic ears, compliments – but then make no attempt to reciprocate. Extroverts sometimes begin to see introverts this way, because they are so accustomed to larger gestures that they barely even notice the smaller ones introverts are able to make. In this way, both groups mistake each other for economical non-participants. This generates acrimony and eventually leads to economic shut down – i.e. the termination or dissolution of friendships.

It's Me Manifesto

This is my real resume.

The one that I could never submit anywhere, because it wouldn't be taken seriously, despite the fact that it's the most accurate representation of me I think is possible in a resume.

Cover Page

I’m an introvert who taught herself to be an extrovert.

I could read when I was four years old and they felt they couldn’t justify keeping me out of kindergarten at that point. Smaller than my so-called peers, I kept my nose in a book and never developed social skills; if my family culture wasn’t against psychological diagnoses I probably would have carried the Asperger’s label before they retired it. I was painfully self-conscious and easily bullied. I dreamed of being a farmer so I could talk to animals all day and read books by myself at night, but when I was seventeen I made myself learn to talk to people so I could counsel rape survivors. I did that until I realized it was breaking my heart beyond repair, and then made a series of stumbling, pre-adulthood missteps that netted me a lot of experience and a lot of reason not to trust people.

Then almost without meaning to, I rediscovered what it was like to learn. And not just learn but absorb, to catch the thread of something interesting and grab and pull and follow until I could wrap myself up in it. My first attempt at college hadn’t gone so well, and I’d decided that I was just simply not meant to go to college, but I tried again and realized that I simply hadn’t been ready. Everything was there, waiting to be learned, and college was the excuse to do it. I threw myself into academia, made the Chancellor’s list every semester, and realized that, far from being able to hide in books, I needed to be able to communicate with people even more. Every day, every second was a test of adaptation and communication: if I do this right, if I talk to this person in just the right way, there’s no limit to what they can teach me.

I got an internship at the [leadership teaching place] because I decided to ask for one – there was nothing posted, I simply sent in my resume and said, “I would love to intern for you.” I didn’t know at the time what I was chasing; in hindsight I would say that it was only a natural that I move from learning about things to learning about learning, that I would migrate from writing papers about the innovation I could see on the page in the transition from Victorian to Modern British literature to working in a place where they literally study innovation. I made a conscious decision when I started to learn how to “network,” as they say, and what I’ve learned is that if you’re honest, and open to what other people have to teach you, people will notice.

I’ve learned that the world is a really cool place. There are ideas happening all over the world, all the time, and it’s not that all of them are good ideas - in fact a lot of them are pretty bad ideas - but it’s the fact that we, as humans, our natural state is to have ideas, to come up with new structures and new ways of explaining How Stuff Works, Why Stuff Works, and How We Can Make Stuff Better.