Although Sunday’s cornovirus briefing from Bodger Boris has sown mixed message confusion as to whether lockdown has been extended or not (express.co.uk):
For introverts, lockdown is a chance to play to our strengths (theguardian.com).
Yesterday morning I spent an hour doing a jigsaw puzzle, followed by a game of Scrabble, fortified by tea and scones. For once, there was no one I had to see and nowhere I had to be. For introverts, it’s largely business as usual. But for my more extroverted friends, who are clamouring for Zoom calls to fill the gaping hole the pub has left in their lives, it’s a deeply testing time.
Which with the advent of “Zoombombing” during the pandemic will, as with any sort of Omegle-esque random video chat, still inevitably involve Mike Coxlong trying to get you to Ben Dover so as to fill that gaping hole (metro.co.uk, Apr. 2020).
For me, rather than jigsaws and Scrabble, it has been time devoted to a prop/pose Access database art “morgue” (Wikipedia) I’ve built up over the past few years and reworking some of the site’s search functionality that is long overdue, and rather than “prosecco hours” on Zoom, my social bubble has largely been more daily check-ins with a WhatsApp (of course from Fidiotbook) group chat which is much appreciated despite being an Aspie (thisisnocave.blogspot.com, updated 5th Dec. 2019) and so often at a loss with small talk virtual or otherwise—at least until the bawdiness of a posted unusually shaped vegetable (amazon.co.uk) reminds me I am indeed in the right group (Gallery).
Our response to the coronavirus pandemic means that society has changed overnight, reshaped to suit a more introverted way of being – one that is rarely permitted – of thriving in a quiet setting, having time to think and be creative, and having control over how much socialising you do. No social experiment could have gone this far in modelling a way of living designed almost exclusively for introverts. It may just show employers that, as [Susan Cain, author of the 2012 bestseller Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking] says in her 2012 Ted talk, “when it comes to creativity and leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best.”
With time to ponder age-old debates about the foundations of creativity:
The most creative types are introverts. And extroverts (inc.com, Apr. 2016).
So which is it? According to researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: “If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude.” Creative people are both introverted and extroverted, but at different times. They need and use the companion of other people to build better ideas, but they also use solitude to let ideas incubate, and the use [sic.] triggering activities (even dangerous ones) to force combination of those incubated ideas.
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