I bill myself as an extrovert, but a lot of my hobbies are inherently solitary. There’s an ideal number of participants in a conversation where I thrive — typically four — and anything after that my voice easily fades. As a result, I’m hopeless at group settings in house parties and feel most at ease in intimate 1:1s.
“Extrovert” tendencies:
- Going to random events. I love to meet new people. This drives me to attend social events where I may only know 1 - 2 people, especially sourced from the Internet (X, Instagram, Partiful).
- At the same time I’m starting to get tired of going to these random events - they tend to have low hit rate
- Hosting. Huge huge fan of gathering my own friends together and trying to connect nodes from different friend circles in the hopes that they form a connection on their own.
- Being a huge texter. Maybe this is just me being an over-sharer? I will externalize nonstop over text, Strava, Beli, Substack, etc. I get a kick out of being inappropriately authentic on a social media that typically expects simple text input.
“Introvert” tendencies:
- Photography is a fantastic hobby for an introvert. At overwhelming social situations I can hide behind my camera. I like to float on the edges of a situation, always preferring to observe it in its syncresis rather than fully dive in.
- Reading is the classic introvert hobby that, despite many efforts to make it social (Reading Rhythms, Reading Groups, Book Clubs) requires 100% of my concentration.
- Running is something I kicked off as a social activity to consistently meet up with a friend (at CMU, summer internships, etc). Since moving to NYC, I’ve kept it as an insular activity — I rely on a daily morning run to clear my head, and the pressure of keeping pace with someone and meeting up with them creates too much friction for what I’ve maintained as a consistent habit.
As you can see, no activity is completely tied to introversion/extraversion — there’s ways to draw out social behaviors in insular hobbies, and also moments of intense introversion during a social event.