The Introverted Thinker Newsletter #001
Finding your psychological 'sweet spot' and why it matters, three classic books I read, an insightful podcast on meditation, and much more.
Seeing as this is the first edition of The Introverted Thinker newsletter, I thought discussing personality traits would be fitting.
Enjoy!
As an introvert or an extrovert, there are certain things that stimulate and arouse your brain. For an extrovert, this will typically be things like enjoying the company of many people at once and partaking in loud and high-energy activities, like dancing and nights out.
Whilst introverts can certainly do all the above with thorough enjoyment, they tend to gravitate more towards one on one conversations about life, or spending time in nature.
However, in the mixed-up world we live in, we can never do one or the other. Most of the time we are being overexposed to activities that aren't well suited to our personality traits, and as a result, we will feel restless, drained, and out of place.
For example, as an introvert, I feel awfully drained after two days of meeting up with large groups of friends. I’d probably need two days of time alone at home ‘recharging my batteries’.
This is because I have gone out of the environment which favors my personality, overstimulating myself. Extroverts tend to have problems with under-stimulation, where things are too boring.
A ‘sweet spot’ is a place where you achieve optimal levels of arousal to feel more energetic and alive than before. Personality psychologists stand by this claim.
You won't get bored after reading a book and similarly you won't feel like leaving a social function early due to being overwhelmed. It’s about priming your life to what feels best.
For me, I found my sweet spot to be something like making sure I have the day to myself before going out to a party. I’ll read a book for a few hours, do some writing, go on a walk, then proceed to go into the highly extroverted social environment.
This way I’ll be craving social company after spending a day alone, as opposed to going for lunch with friends prior to a big social function in the evening. That way I’d probably feel tired and feel reluctant to go out for a second time.
“People who are aware of their sweet spots have the power to leave jobs that exhaust them and start new satisfying businesses…Understanding your sweet spot can increase your satisfaction in every arena of your life.” — Susan Cain, Quiet
What I’m Listening To:
The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name by Brian C. Muraresku
I started this audiobook last year but never got around to finishing it. However, in the last week, I’ve really started to get back into audiobooks and thought I’d pick this one up again.
It’s about the roots of Christianity, and it digs deep into the hidden origins of where all the beliefs and scripture about Christianity come from. It goes as far back as 500BCE to Eleusis, an ancient Greek city that had a temple dedicated to mysterious psychedelic experiences, which supposedly formed many of the key philosophical teachings we have today, from the likes of Plato and many more famed names.
The author dives deep into the mysterious hallucinogenic origins of spiritual beliefs within Christianity, and how the forgotten Greek God of wine, Dionysus, was spreading a potent wine laced with psychedelic compounds that everyone was raving about at the time.
The evidence is compelling and thought-provoking to say the least. For anyone who grew up in close vicinity to religion, I recommend it. As a skeptical atheist, this book was right up my alley, I’m always trying to find different ways of finding flaws in outdated teachings.
A great podcast episode: The Tim Ferris Show #481: Dan Harris on Becoming 10% Happier, Hugging Inner Dragons, and Training the Mind.
This podcast episode was truly a breath of fresh air. It mainly discusses meditation in an easy and insightful way for the average person to understand. Most westerners won’t be in touch with what it means to meditate or how it works, but Dan Harriss bridges those gaps for us as he refers to himself as Buddhist, but not in a religious way. He views it as a philosophy for life.
Meditation is a big part of my life, and for too long I thought I was failing at it because my mind kept drifting. Dan taught me that it’s impossible to stop the mind from drifting and that meditation is way simpler than you think.
Check it out if you are interested in understanding how meditation works and just in general if you want some unique insights into the spiritual practice.
Books I’m Reading:
If you want to keep up with books I’m reading, books I plan on reading, and my reviews for them, follow me on Goodreads here.
Over the last three weeks, I’ve started reading more classical literature. I used to strictly read self-help books or anything non-fiction, but as of recently, I’ve really grown to appreciate beautifully written and historical literature.
Here are three books I read in the last two weeks.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Brave New World was published in 1932 and it’s a dystopian sci-fi.
I picked this book up in early March, read half of it, then put it back down. I found it extremely ambiguous and just strange in general. I had no clue what was going on, plus I tend to stay away from dystopias, they aren’t my thing.
Fast forward to two weeks ago, I picked this book back up. And finished it the next day. I was blown away. There was so much to unpack and uncover that I’ll just mention one thing that scared me the most.
If you don’t know what this book is, it is usually compared to 1984 by George Orwell. It’s set in 2540, yet they use Henry Ford (founder of Ford Motor Company) as a metric and also as a God. Yeah, I’m telling you, this book is strange as fuck.
Anyway, it describes this dystopian reality where we have all become slaves to the political system we are living in, but the catch is that we have become willing slaves. We are eager to be slaves because we have a drug called “Soma” that helps us escape reality and make everything bearable and tolerable.
The connection I and many others have made is that Soma (the drug to escape reality in the book) has actually manifested it into our society in two ways. The first is through pills, particularly the opioid epidemic sweeping the streets of most countries. Soma, similar to opiate pills, are constantly taken as an escape from reality.
The second way is our usage of electronics, particularly phones. Wherever you go, most people will be glued to their phones, especially when you sit on a train full of people commuting to their 9-5 job. They use it to make their reality bearable and give them quick bursts of dopamine, just like Soma.
This book is extremely freaky and accurate. In my opinion, it’s a necessary read.
The Catcher in The Rye by J. D. Salinger
This book was published in 1951, so it’s another classic. It’s a Bildungsroman. If you don’t know what that is it’s a story about an adolescent coming of age and realizing the responsibilities of adulthood etc, pretty much at the stage I am in life.
This was a refreshing, light, and entertaining read. I finished it in four days. It doesn’t have any major life lessons but was really nice nonetheless. It’s about a 17 year old named Holden who keeps getting expelled out of every school, and it follows his journey of hiding the fact he’s been expelled from boarding school for about a week.
He encounters prostitutes, goes to clubs, and spends the nights sleeping in the park. Holden gets depressed and lonely, and the book explores that theme of loneliness as an adolescent really well. It’s good and pretty funny, too.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott. Fitzgerald
Another classic published in 1925, it explores the ‘roaring twenties’. A period of glamour, music, crazy unprecedented parties, drugs, and scandalous affairs. It’s also set in New York, like the previous book.
This is a novel that is centered around a mysterious rich man named Gatsby, and his pursual of this girl he is in love with. Gatsby hosts the craziest parties in his mansion and the story is told from his less-rich neighbor across the road.
This is a classic, and also a really popular film, most of you are probably familiar with it. For this reason, I won’t go into it too much. This too was a short and thoroughly entertaining read.
The Thinker of the Week
Every week, I include a key historical thinker who has impacted the world through their thoughts and actions. They can vary from philosophers, artists, designers, psychologists, sociologists, writers, eastern meditators, and political theorists.
Émile Durkheim 1858-1917
Durkheim is a Jewish-French philosopher whose writings can best help us understand why the current state of western society is making people more miserable than ever, and why suicide rates are rising as countries develop further.
Durkheim lived through the rapid transformation of France, from a traditional agricultural society to a booming urban and industrial economy. What really caught Durkheim’s eye was the psychological cost of this new capitalist boom.
The pinnacle of Durkheim’s academic work came in the form of Suicide, published in 1897. In this book, Durkheim seems to have made a potent discovery: suicide rates seem to shoot up as a nation becomes industrialized and consumer capitalism takes over.
In Durkheim’s time, he noticed that the suicide rate in Britain was double that of Italy, and in richer Denmark, it was four times that of Britain. All of this sheds light on the general level of unhappiness that existed amongst society, which still does to this day.
Individualism:
In a traditional agricultural society, the individual has everything done for them. They live in a tight-knit society, their beliefs, attitudes, occupations, and status are already chosen for them.
They could simply step into the place that their society and families had created for them.
However in the modern capitalist society, there is a heavy emphasis placed on the individual choosing to do whatever he likes, marry whoever, work whatever, everything is in our hands. Yes, this can be a good thing, but in Durkheim’s eyes was one of the major things wrong with modern society.
If things go bad for the individual in modern society, he has majorly fucked up. He becomes the source of his own despair and has no one else to blame. This failure becomes a huge burden to bear, and with no traditional form of community to rely on anymore, the individual falls into depression or suicide.
This is a pattern all too common in our current society, and one that Durkheim recognized early on. Perhaps we should take all this as a sign to try and build up the communal way of living more, whether that be online, or with the people around you.
Delicious and nutritious.
When you described the 'sweet spot', I resonate with that quite a lot. I too have to balance with lots of me-time to not feel overwhelmed with social gatherings.