I mentioned to Graham today that sometimes I feel that I have too many friends. The late John Cheetham once explained introversion and extraversion to me in terms of energy. He said that extroverted people feel energized after doing things like going to parties and spending time with friends, and introverted people feel energized by doing things like reading and relaxing at home.
Although a lot of the personality tests that I've taken have said that I'm pretty borderline between introverted and extraverted, I find it hard to believe that when I find myself feeling so drained after spending time with friends. I went shopping with Graham today and bumped into another friend afterwards. I kept him company for a bit while he was waiting for his friend to show up, but I started to feel a bit drained after a bit.
It's strange though, because when we talk online, we can usually talk for hours, and I don't feel tired at all (except maybe fatigue due to being up really late). I told Graham that I would be happy spending maybe 1 or 2 days per week spending time with people, but that included time spent with MrMan5.5. He asked me what I would do instead of spending time with people and I said maybe play more WoW. Graham pointed out that WoW is just a virtual world where you are spending time with people, and so why would I prefer doing that to spending time with people in the real world?
I think the biggest appeal is that you can just switch off if you are no longer interested. If I'm doing some battlegrounds with Olek, MrMan5.5 and Smooke, and I don't really want to keep going, I can just tell everyone I'm taking a break and there will be no hard feelings. I find that in most social situations, it's hard to break away so easily. At a friend's bachelorette party, I was talking to one of her friends and telling her about the graduate job that I would be starting next year. I said that I was pretty excited about starting and told her which company it was with. She replied that she had recently gotten fired by that company, and that I should get out as soon as I can. She said that she didn't want to talk about it, and so I really didn't know what to say next. There was a huge awkward silence, and I would have killed to just be like, "OK, seeya!" /logout.
The other reason is probably a lot more selfish. I like the idea of being able to do what I want whenever I want, which is a lot harder to do with friends, especially friends who are pushy. I prefer waking up and deciding what I want to do, than planning things well in advance. Unfortunately, it's really hard to properly organise something unless it is well in advance.
My odd sleeping patterns didn't help things all that much either. Sometimes I will be playing games with friends until well into the night, and then remember that I have plans the next day so I will have to go to bed early and resent whoever I made plans with because in my mind, it's their fault that I wasn't able to stay up late and play games. So compounded with my tiredness, I tend to feel all grumpy being with them, and it is like a chore to me, something I have to endure until I can go home and get some sleep.
I thought maybe if I culled my friendship list, then I wouldn't feel like this all the time, and I wouldn't have the problem of having to spend so much time doing extraverted things. Graham asked me who I would cut, and I'm unsure who I would pick, but also unsure how I would go about doing so.
When I was hanging around second floor, I found that even though I was doing stuff with people, I didn't always feel drained. Maybe it is because I felt more on their wavelength, and so it didn't feel so tiresome trying to keep up conversation - although sometimes it took no effort at all, as there were some people who liked to talk, and some people who liked to listen, and I was happy being a listener.
MrMan5.5 gives me more energy, but I find that if I spend a lot of time with him, I don't really feel so inclined to want to do things with other people. Maybe because it's so easy being with him that, in comparison, everything else feels difficult and I am just too lazy.
One of the topics for my Intimacy and Technology tutes was whether face-to-face interactions are better/worse than interactions via things like the Internet or mobile phones. While I still believe that I could never date someone without ever having met them face-to-face first, I consider some of the people that I've only met online friends. For a long time, I didn't even know what Stringbeans looked like, other than the display picture he had for MSN, which was a picture of him with his face painted all white. We still did friend-like things though, like chat like chums and hang out together (in WoW). Meeting him in real life didn't really change our friendship at all, except that I now know he can eat a lot of pasta and drink a lot - but it doesn't seem to go anywhere. @_@
So all of this leads to my theory of online extraversion. Perhaps the reason why so many personality tests find that I'm borderline is because I enjoy spending time with friends and doing group activities, but prefer them being online to offline.
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