How to Be Alone (School of Life) by Sara Maitland

different. There is a helpful vocabulary for anyone trying to think this through, although recently it has got clogged up a bit – the language of Introversion and Extroversion.
    Based on Carl Jung’s 1921 definition of personality ‘traits’, a whole system of analysis has developed around the question of how much solitude people want or need. The suggestion (and there are various ‘explanatory’ theories, ranging from cortical stimulation to childhood expectation and experience) is that there are two distinct types of people, who process stimulation differently. For example, in one set of defining qualities you have statements like:
Extroverts are ‘action’ oriented, while introverts are ‘thought’ oriented.
Extroverts seek ‘breadth’ of knowledge and influence, while introverts seek ‘depth’ of knowledge and influence.
Extroverts prefer more ‘frequent’ interaction, while introverts prefer more ‘substantial’ interaction.
Extroverts recharge their energy by spending time with people, while introverts recharge their energy by spending time alone.
    Unfortunately it has proven extremely difficult to create a satisfactory way of testing who is which in any very useful way. This is partly because most people do not have a single consistent style of responding, but are more introverted or extroverted in different contexts or moods, and partly because it has proved nearly impossible to find a testing method which is not heavily culturally biased. ‘Do you enjoy going to parties?’ is based on the Western assumption that there are parties of a particular type to go to, whereas in some countries gathering in groups may not perform the social function of ‘parties’ at all. (For example, going to church, a social gathering that is enjoyable to most of the participants, and often noisy with singing and dancing, may well be a ‘party’ for some individuals or cultures and not for others.)
    So some psychologists have claimed that happiness is a matter of possessing three traits: self-esteem, optimism and extroversion, and that studies prove that extroverts are happier than introverts. However, these findings have been questioned, because the ‘happiness prompts’ given to the studies’ subjects, such as ‘I like to be with others’ and ‘I’m fun to be with’, only measure happiness among extroverts!
    Furthermore, even if extroversion makes people happier, this might be because Western Europeans, and especially Americans, live in an ‘extroverted society’ that rewards extrovert behaviours and rejects introversion. Extroverted societies have been described as validating a ‘culture of personality’, whereas other cultures are ‘cultures of character’ where people are valued for their ‘inner selves and their moral rectitude’. These cultures, such as in Central Europe or Japan, prize introversion. And it transpires that in such cultures introverts report greater happiness than extroverts! This is not as twisted as it looks: it makes people feel happy to be approved of.
    There are two social tendencies which further complicate this: the first is the apparent irresistible desire to move these sorts of words from adjectives to nouns. So someone with strongly introverted inclinations becomes ‘an introvert’. This divides and separates people from each other and traps people in boxes. (‘She is a blonde’, ‘he is a homosexual’ and ‘they are disabled’ are other examples where a single characteristic comes to define the person; they may all be true, but they do not describe the fullness and complexity of most individuals.)
    The other social tendency that goes with this is the universal difficulty we all have with difference itself: the principle of ‘different but equal’ is almost impossible for people to maintain without effort – once you have created this sort of binary system, almost everyone instinctively gives higher value to one or other of the ‘differences’, usually