After seeing the movie Inside Out, I began thinking about the dark things of life, not in a bad way, but how they sometimes help us to exceed the boundaries placed upon us by ourselves.

Solitude matters.

Susan Cain

Extremist have shown what frightens them the most. A girl with a book.

Malala

Whatever you do, don’t try to escape pain, but be with it.

Tibetan Book of the Dead

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

Cynthia Ozick

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert.

Luke 4:1

           In the Disney Pixar movie Inside Out,  when the main character is almost to a breaking point, Sadness is the one who saves the day, much to Joy’s astonishment.  The movie sees the character Joy running around always cheerful and trying to fix or put the best face on things.  In fact, her biggest fear is that Sadness touches anything, which makes memory blue and Joy feels she will ruin anything things she touches.  As the film reaches its climax, Joy suddenly realizes that Sadness has a part to play and at times, may be the only one who can get Riley (the main character) through rough and bad times.   Sometimes, it not the forward pushing thought that is best, but the soft reflective one.

           In the book of Ecclesiastes it its written in chapter 3:

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.

           Here expressing two actions, one outgoing and one inward, one positive and one negative, both equally presented as valid and a way to live one’s life.  It represents a balance, it is one of the main messages of the book of Ecclesiastes, a message that speaks of all things in moderation.  The other message of the book, is basically, not everything is fair and just, sometimes bad things happen and things, at times, just are not right.  In Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking,  she explains that in 1921 Carl Jung in his book, Psychological Types,  explained that introverts were inward focused and extroverts were focused on the outside world.  Yet today it is different, the introvert is seen as one who lacks  qualities such as assertiveness and sociability.  Dr. Gabor Mate accuses the modern world of seeking to run from hell, avoid pain, looks for instant relief, quick solutions, and run from themselves.  To him this is the root of many of our present day addictions,and the solution to many of these problems is allowing a person to confront the pain in their lives and thus understand it and master it.  To confront pain, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead says that, “Whatever you do, don’t try to escape pain, but be with it.” Instead of looking for temporary relief from the outside, we must, as Buddha and Jesus advised, find the light within and give the inner self the power over our pain.

           Susan Cain explains that before the urban society of the 1900s, America switched from what Warren Susman called the “Culture of Character,”  to the “Culture of Personality.”  This was a direct result of the shift in American life from an agricultural lifestyle to an industrial urban on.  Cain explains:

In the Culture of Character, the ideal was serious, disciplined, and honorable.  What counted was not so much the impression one made in public as how one behaved in private.  The word personality  didn’t exist in English until the eighteenth century, and the idea of “having a good personality” was not widespread until the twentieth.

But when they embraced the Culture of personality, Americans started to focus on how others perceived them.  They became captivated by people who were bold and entertaining.  “The social role demanded of all in the new Culture of personality was that of a performer,” Susman famously wrote.  “Every American was to become a performing self.”

(Susan Cain, Quite: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,  New York: Broadway Books, 2013. 21)

          So, as society today is in the mist of this “Culture of Personality,”  just how is the introvert seen by the culture as a whole.  For a person to seem shy, quiet, and withdrawn is usually looked upon as a person with some social disorder.  After all, we must always be engaged and happy, never bored, never totally disconnected from the world.  Shyness, a condition where social situations are painful and anxiety ridden, is seen as something that will hold a person back in any endeavor.  While a good proportion of introverted people are shy, not all of them are, there is a difference between finding a social situation painful and just preferring a more solitary experience.  A shy person would go to great lengths to avoid a situation, where an introvert may just as soon avoid it, but will put up with it if he or she must. To either, today’s world is an overstimulated mess of noise and movement, little of which makes any sense or has much of a purpose.

         How did we get here, Dale Carnegie and the rise of industrial America.  Carnegie led a revolution in how Americans saw themselves and sought to make their way in the world. Earlier self-help books stressed things like citizenship, duty, work, golden deeds, honor, reputation, morals, manners, and integrity,  (Cain, 23) and pushed the ideal of a self-reflective person who like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were modest men of high moral standards, who mastered the language of rhetoric and valued solitude as a time when one could seek answers to the great questions of the time.  They came from a more formal time, which was highly restrictive in many social interactions,  a time when an introvert may have been seen as the ideal.  Starting in the 1920s, spurned on by the advertisement industry and psychology, things changed as society evolved into today’s norms.   Formality crumbled and one had to project aggressively to be seen as a competent individual. Alfred Adler wrote at the time of the inferiority complex,  a feeling of insecurity that had to be overcome if one wished to be a successful adult.  By 1956 William Whyte in his book The Organization Man, describes how this effected society:

William Whyte’s The Organization Man, a 1956 best-seller, describes how parents and teachers conspired to overhaul the personalities of quiet children.  “Johnny wasn’t doing so well at school,” Whyte recalls a mother telling him.  “The teacher explained to me that he was doing fine on his lessons but that his social adjustment was not as good as it might be.  He would pick just one or two friends to play with, and sometimes he was happy to remain by himself.”  Parents welcomed such interventions, said Whyte.  “Save for a few odd parents. most were grateful that the schools work so hard to offset tendencies to introversion and other suburban abnormalities.”

(Cain 27)

         In today’s time one now must have the characteristics of being magnetic, fascinating, stunning, attractive, glowing, dominate, forceful, and energetic to be seen as normal. (Cain 23-24)  Susan Cain sums it up in her book on introverts in this fashion:

Even T. S. Elliot’s famous 1915 poem The Love Song of Alfred Purfrock  –  in which he laments the need to “prepare a face to meet the faces you meet” – seems cri de coeur about the new demands of self-presentation.  While poets of the previous century had wandered lonely as a cloud through the countryside (Wordsworth, in 1802) or repaired in solitude to Walden Pond  (Thoreau, in 1845), Eliot’s Prufrock mostly worries about being looked at by “eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase” and pin you, wiggling , to a wall.

Fast-forward nearly a hundred years, and Prufrock’s protest is enshrined in high school syllabi, where it is dutifully memorized, then quickly forgotten, by teens increasingly skilled at shaping their own online and offline personae. These students inhabit a world in which status, income and self-esteem depend more than ever on the ability to meet the demands of the Culture of Personality. The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up.  The number of Americans who consider themselves shy increased from 40 percent in the 1970s to 50 percent in the 1990s, probably because we measure ourselves against an even higher standard of fearless self-presentation.  “Social anxiety disorder” – which means essentially pathological shyness – is now thought to afflict nearly one in five of us.  The most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), the psychiatrist’s bible of mental disorders, considers the fear of public speaking to be a pathology – not an annoyance, not a disadvantage, but a disease –  if it interferes with the sufferer’s job performance.  “It is not enough,” one manager at Eastman Kodak told author Daniel Goleman, “to be able to sit at your computer excited about a fantastic regression analysis if you’re squeamish about presenting those results to an executive group.  (Apparently it’s OK to be squeamish about doing a regression analysis if you’re excited about giving speeches.)

(Cain 31)

         She goes on to lament, “All of which raises the question, how did we go from Character to Personality without realizing that we had sacrificed something meaningful along the way?” (Cain 33)  Jill Neimark in a Psychology Today article (“The Culture of Celebrity”  May 1, 1995), “Where once the famous achieved an almost godlike status, one that seemed impermeable and historical (consider Lincoln or Washington, Charles Lindbergh or Jesse Owens), today celebrity exist for and by an information age.  In our global and atomized world of bits and bytes, where information is instantly available and massive in its quantities, and as perishable as an electronic image, celebrities help personalize that information.  They put a human face on it.  However, they are diminished in the process.  The trouble is, so are we.”   Where once people were famous for achievement, Einstein for relativity, Jim Brown for athletic ability, in today’s culture of images, one can be famous just because they are famous.  It is all about the show and those who can put the biggest show, win the biggest prize.  A quiet, reserved person has no chance in this game.

         This is why the quiet child is often ignored or becomes the object of ridicule in society, as now he or she is the unusual, the abnormal, the different one.  Once in a classroom a young man spoke about what he looked at on his phone, the class was amazed as he cited the articles on animals and national parks that he passed his time looking at and studying.  The class was amazed that he did not look at the latest trend in social media or follow some gossip about some celebrity in the news.  He was unusual, as unusual as a child a generation before who related his fascination with history and the many people who were in it.  He had been chided by many in his family that he always had his nose in a book and never seemed interested in normal kid stuff.  Both were usually met with nervous giggles when they expounded on some subject that they were interested in or felt whatever class discussion would be supported by. In another time they may have been held up as an example of what a student should be doing in the way of study, in the modern world, they are just a funny distraction to the norm of instant news on instant stuff.

         In television and movies the introvert is usually portrayed as a needy person or a self-conscious nerd type, very smart but wishing to be more normal in the world of extroverts. The Disney Channel and Nickelodeon are full of such stories and in the end, the quiet young person is transformed in an extrovert ideal by some great process in which they conquer their fears and blossom out into the extroverted norm of society.  In these shows introversion is shown as a thing to be overcome, never as a normal behavior.  A person different from society norms may proclaim that they are an introvert, in an effort to justify their differences for the normal expectations of the world.  A person afraid of just what society says is the normal feelings and behaviors of a certain age group, may also say this for the same reason. In other words, to fit in they create a legend about themselves to survive the modern word.  But as actress Jeannette McCurdy said in an article in the Wall Street Journal,  “We’re living up to a legend created for us, and we’re living in the hype, or dwelling in the fact that it’s impossible to live up to.”  (Wall Street Journal, August 15,2013)

        This has created a culture that has no firm foundation, that is rootless and wandering, like lost tribes in the wilderness. In Ecclesiastes, the author warns all that, “Do not say, ‘why were the old days better than these?’ For it is not wise to ask such questions.” (Ecclesiastes 7:10)  This is nostalgia, a creature that one can wallow in and get lost in, sometimes not a good thing.  In a Sports Illustrated article (7.8-13 2015 volume 123 no. 1, page 124) Steve Rushin says of nostalgia:

The word for this – nostalgia – was coined in the 1680s by a Swiss physician named Johannes Hofer, and it originally described a medical pathology.  Nostalgia was a sickness, a painful longing for home.  Throwback jerseys, retro ballparks, the baseball cards in the basement, resistance to rules changes… it’s all a form of homesickness.

       This is not a modern thing however, Rushin points out in his article, “As humans we can’t help but to idealize the past: In every age, the world was always better 40 years previously.”  Without this firm foundation, modern society is in a state of flux, moving from one thing to another.  Today’s society is searching for something and it cannot find it in the internet or in fame for fame’s sake.  This is today’s society is searching for relief from and what Gabor Mate spoke of as the cause of modern addictions, the inner emptiness that was born when society moved to a culture of personality.  Jeannette McCurdy  said it best in her Wall Street Journal article “I was a Teenage Hashtag,” (August 15,2013) “It’s no secrete how many lives have tragically been lost to people trying to fill void that simply can never be filled.  What’s worse is that nowadays drugs come in all shapes and sizes, including if not especially in phone-size.  There are a million apps out there used to connect and share with your friends, or in the case of a celebrity, with your fans.”  She also warns that when one is the object of everyone’s affection, you have become an object and no longer are a person.

       If one does not believe this, watch a group of young people, from middle school age through the early twenties, standing in a group, or at a table, and texting each other, not talking, texting. Our world that exposes the extrovert ideal, now sets us apart in an internet cubical.  We have lost the ability and urge to do an inner search and exploration in the canyons of our minds.  People need to, as an old song said, “just drop in to see what condition our condition was in.”  (Kenny Rogers and the First Edition)  That is a job for that best suits the introvert, and they must teach the extrovert how to do it.  Society needs to take a break from all the noise and running around, take some time to just sit back relax and wander through all the walls and valleys of our inner-selves.  This is what Joy and Sadness did in the movie and here it was discovered that sometimes a quiet, nostalgic reflection is needed to get through a hard time.  While we have times of joy, healing, planting, love,and peace, we also have times of hate, war, anger, and failure.  Both are part of life, and only the quiet time of self discovery, in the valleys and canyons of our inner selves can put us in contact with that.  So when the introvert is sitting quietly, don’t automatically assume he or she is lonely, or depressed, but maybe they are visiting themselves and discovering the greatness within.