The Gift of Not Belonging

Otroverts, by contrast, are always facing outside, even when they are standing on the inside. They are welcomed into the circle, but they never feel part of the shared experience taking place inside it. While outsiders and, to some degree, introverts are social loners, otroverts are emotional loners – they feel the most alone when surrounded by others. Many might be described as ‘popular loners’, a contradiction the otrovert sometimes finds almost unbearable. Facing outward makes the otrovert’s perspective increasingly separate from that of the collective, including other otroverts; it’s as though there is an invisible yet impenetrable boundary between them and all the others. The otrovert’s journey is solitary, as every human journey essentially is. The difference is that otroverts cannot ignore that truth, as most people either try or are able to do.

The best definition of ‘normal’ that I’ve encountered is being predictable to others. For the social contract to succeed, every member of the collective needs to meet a ‘threshold trust’ with all the rest. And we assess trust by degrees of predictability. Predictability is generally benevolent and helpful; it is meant to ease social integration and manage the tension thinking or would do next). Those who cannot adhere to the social script decided by the majority cannot count on the trust of others.

This is the plight of otroverts: they are penalized for being unable to abandon their deepest selves for communal purposes. The power of communal suggestion requires that everyone go along with it. This means that anyone who sees reality as an individual experience may disrupt the shared perception of the rest, which is threatening to the communal order. Otroverts are made to feel weird and wrong for preferring solitude over socializing. They realize they will always be misunderstood, and even mis-trusted, so they spend significant time working to create an illusion of belonging by abiding by group decorum. But following these social scripts can make routine encounters with peers maddening-and very exhausting.

These social pressures to appear ‘normal’ and nonthreatening can combine to result in otroverts’ real frustration about the need to constantly mask their real tendencies. Otroverts will do their best to follow the rules and appear predictable, but they can sustain this pretense for only so long. Because they become very good at hiding their distaste for communal events, they are often subjected to well-meaning peer pressure from those who genuinely desire their companionship or who would feel sorry for them if they ‘missed out’ on all the fun. But other times, what might appear like the desire to spend time with them and/or spare them from FOMO is actually an unconscious attempt to validate the group. Since otroverts are nonconfrontational and conflict averse, they often cave quite easily to such peer pressure. But going against our instincts will almost always backfire.

[...] The fact is, the otrovert personality is incompatible with many features of corporate life: from being forced to waste hours a day in pointless meetings, to having projects stalled by red tape and bureaucracy, to the exhausting task of navigating all the power grabbing and status seeking (aka ‘office politics’).
Worse yet is having to watch their opinions and ideas be brushed aside in favour of the group consensus, all while working in an environment where they are being constantly distracted by colleagues, clients, and an ever-expanding inbox.

This is all exceedingly tiresome to otroverts, who sooner or later will discover that they do their best work on their own, in environments where they can make their own decisions and are solely accountable for the successes and the failures. With no one to ask, no one to consult, and no one to share the responsibility with – a terrifying prospect for communal people – otroverts are free to do what they do best: think creatively and expansively, outside the hive.