A Poem and an Essay about Recharging in Private, the Introvert Energy Economy and Why Small Talk Drains My Battery

Back on December 5th 2017, I typed the following poem directly into the relentless chatter-void of FarceBuck. No edits, AI was still just sci-fi, no overthinking, just a raw, unedited transmission of a very specific mood in a single take.

Extroverts recharge in public. They draw energy from the crowd, the noise, the idle banter in the lift. Introverts recharge in private. We get our energy from being alone. Forced small talk is a parasitic drain on a finite power reserve.

So, here is a little rhyming reminder of that from 2017.

Just I’ve better things to do

I am not friendly
I am not mean
It's just that on idle chatter
I am not keen

If you try to talk while
my dog's doing a shit
Don't expect me to be
too thrilled about it

If you try strike up a conversation
While I am in the lift
Don't be surprised
at my conversational thrift

If you tend to natter,
in the corridor, say
Don't be alarmed if
I tell you to go away

I'm not a bad person
Really, I'm not
Just I've better things to do
than talk to all you lot

The Introvert Energy Economy

If you want to understand why a harmless bit of idle chatter in a lift can feel like a psychic vampire draining your life force, we have to look past the pop-psychology labels and dig into the actual mechanics of the human brain. If you have a brain you will enjoy this next bit.

You probably know about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which is essentially corporate astrology. You have likely taken it—perhaps forced into it during a team-building exercise —and been assigned a four-letter acronym that supposedly defines your entire personality’s operating system.

The problem is, modern psychology views the MBTI with the same raised eyebrow a physicist reserves for a flat-earther. It relies on strict binary categories: you are allegedly either an ‘I’ (Introvert) or an ‘E’ (Extrovert), a ‘T’ (Thinker) or an ‘F’ (Feeler). But human personality does not exist in rigid, mutually exclusive boxes; it exists on a spectrum. Furthermore, Myers-Briggs lacks empirical validity and what psychometricians call ‘test-retest reliability’. You can take the assessment on a Tuesday, take it again a month later after a strong cup of coffee and a bad commute, and end up with an entirely different personality type.

Serious, empirically rigorous psychometrics favours the Big Five trait model (often remembered by the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism). If you search the literature for Costa and McCrae’s ‘Five-Factor Model’, you will find an absolute avalanche of citations; it is the undisputed heavyweight champion of quantitative psychology, measuring extraversion as a sliding scale rather than a fixed box, and we all sit somewhere along that continuum.

So, if the binaries are defunct, why do the labels ‘Introvert’ and ‘Extrovert’ still stick so stubbornly to our shitty cultural fan? Why is the Introvert Energy Economy so fucked?

Jung’s Lunatics

The terms were originally coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in the 1920s, specifically in his 1921 work Psychological Types. Jung theorised that extroverts direct their psychological energy outwards towards people and objects, while introverts direct it inwards towards concepts and ideas. Jung himself actually warned against treating these as absolute binaries, noting that “there is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.”

The labels survived the evolution of modern psychology because they are incredibly efficient heuristics. Humans love cognitive shortcuts. Even if the MBTI framework is profoundly flawed, the broad strokes of Jung’s observation map perfectly onto how we experience social friction in our daily lives. The labels persist because they give us a shared, instantly recognisable vocabulary to explain our boundaries without needing to cite clinical literature at the person cornering us in the corridor.

But beneath the defunct tests and the cultural shorthand, the introvert/extrovert divide is rooted in a very real, measurable physiological difference in how our brains process stimuli and dopamine. It is, quite literally, an energy economy.

In the 1960s, the psychologist Hans Eysenck proposed that the difference between introverts and extroverts comes down to their baseline levels of ‘cortical arousal’. Your brain has a network called the reticular activating system (RAS), which regulates your levels of wakefulness and how much sensory information you let in.

Eysenck posited that introverts naturally have a higher baseline of arousal. Their mental resting state is already incredibly active. That’s why you punch yourself in the temples saying “shut the fuck up monkey brain, I HATE you.” No, just me? Anyway, due to this, a busy corridor, a loud room, or the boringly unpredictable demands of small talk quickly push introverts past their optimal level of stimulation into the red zone of being overwhelmed. Extroverts, conversely, have a lower baseline of cortical arousal. They don’t have a monkey bashing cymbals in their heads… probably just like a stupid sloth or something. They are chronically under-stimulated in quiet environments. They need external stimuli—crowds, noise, the frantic energy of a party, or idle chatter in the lift—to bump their arousal up to a comfortable, optimal level. I never understood those fux who go to Starbucks to work on their laptops and I always just assumed they were showing off their latest apple product. Turns out they ARE wired differently.

Eysenck even proved all this with a famously bizarre ‘lemon juice experiment’. He placed drops of lemon juice on the tongues of introverts and extroverts. The introverts reliably salivated significantly more than the extroverts. Because their baseline arousal to stimuli was already so high, their physiological reaction to the sourness was far more intense. The Introvert Energy Economy literally makes you drool.

Dope mine: Small Talk Drains My Battery

This brings us to dopamine, the brain’s reward chemical (and something my stupbeautifulid neurodivergent brain has a hard fucking time with). More recent studies, such as those discussed by cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, show that extroverts have a more active dopamine reward network when it comes to social engagement. When an extrovert strikes up a conversation while your dog is doing a shit, they are getting a hit of dopamine. They are plugging into the grid of other people to charge their batteries.

This biological reality does not stop at the edge of the physical world, which brings us to the precise reason why logging onto social media is so fundamentally exhausting, and probably why I just typed this poem into FarceBuck and then left. Your reticular activating system does not differentiate between a physical nuisance cornering you in a corridor and a digital one performing for the algorithm in your feed. It simply registers stimulus.

When an extrovert opens a social platform, it acts as a dopamine slot machine or a Skinner Box. They are plugging into a global grid of performative outrage, bikini photos, and relentless digital nattering to charge their batteries. But for the introvert, the algorithmic feed is just an infinitely scrolling, inescapable lift. It is a manufactured environment designed to forcefully extract your finite social energy. Participating in that sphere—even just to drop a link to your own work—triggers the exact same cortical overstimulation as being trapped in a crowded room.

You might wonder: if social media algorithms are essentially digital slot machines designed to hack the human nervous system with dopamine hits, why doesn’t that feel good for introverts too? The truth is, it does, but only for about three seconds. We are still human; our brains like validation. But dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter. It is the chemical of seeking and anticipation, and it amps up the nervous system.

For the extrovert’s stupid sloth, that algorithmic hit of validation is clean, sustainable fuel. It wakes the sloth up to a comfortable cruising altitude. The social reward perfectly matches their neurological craving. But for the introvert, that dopamine hit is essentially ‘dirty energy’. You are giving a concentrated shot of digital espresso to the monkey that is already bashing cymbals in your head.

It overclocks the system. The sudden spike of dopamine forces your already highly-aroused brain to process the performative context, the micro-anxieties of how to respond, and the sheer noise of the feed. The cost of processing that social stimulus instantly bankrupts whatever fleeting reward the notification brought, leading to a massive and immediate crash. How do I know this? Just look at the car-crash of my social media accounts.

For the introvert, the reward simply does not outweigh the cost. The interaction is not a dopamine hit; it is an active, taxing expenditure of finite energy. Especially if your dog is doing a shit because it’s almost like you are doing a shit yourself and then you have to pick it up and put it in your pocket. Same thing gets triggered if a big influencer deigns to mock your small group of freaks that you spent years cultivating.

This is the simple truth of the energy economy. So I mean it when I say in the poem that I am not mean, and I mean it when I say I am not unfriendly. It just means your battery operates on a different voltage. Extroverts recharge in public. Introverts recharge in private. To reset the system, clear the cache, and lower that cortical arousal back to a manageable hum, we have to unplug. We have to walk away from the nattering in the corridor and go sit in a quiet room.

Not because I hate you (although chances are if you are an idiot I do hate you). Just because I have better things to do which are literally more rewarding due to my brain’s neurochemical wiring. Or, I could, you know just go and become a full-on meth head.