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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.

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.”

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.