The Coming Conflict Between Introverts and Extroverts

Once, we had a wide world of socializing opportunities: crowded bars and intimate dinner parties, stadiums full of strangers and weddings full of everyone we loved most. The coronavirus pandemic made many of those things dangerous or impossible, and shrank our social worlds dramatically.

Now, as vaccination rates go up, the floodgates of social life are poised to reopen. But not everyone will want to use this newfound freedom in the same way. Even before the pandemic, introverts and extroverts disagreed on the optimal size and frequency of gatherings. Post-vaccine life may breed some misunderstandings between the extroverts who want to dive headfirst into a sea of other people and the introverts who are excited to see their friends but don’t want to pack their schedules so full that they have no time to just be.

[Read: 2 competing impulses will drive post-pandemic social life]

To get a sense of how these personality types are planning to approach life after the pandemic, I had a chat with two of my colleagues—Amanda Mull, an extrovert, and Katherine Wu, an introvert.

We talked about what they are and aren’t looking forward to, how they would design the new normal if it were up to them, and how we can be kind to our friends who aren’t ’verted the same way we are.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Julie Beck: If we had an imaginary scale of introversion and extroversion with extreme introvert being negative 10, and extreme extrovert being positive 10, and zero being true neutral, where would you place yourselves along the scale? And why?

I don’t appreciate