Why everyone's an introvert now

It started with a listener's observation: "Everybody in their mama is proclaiming to be an introvert." Ladell, a self-described extrovert who had dated an introvert and read The Introvert Advantage, noticed people he knew—people he'd seen "swinging from chandeliers" every weekend—were now calling themselves introverts online. He wasn't trying to gatekeep temperament, but the trend was unmistakable. So he called Vox's Explain It to Me to ask: is this real, and if so, why?

What introversion actually means

Shannon Sauer-Zavala, a psychology professor at the University of Kentucky who researches personality, started with a correction: introversion and extroversion are not categories you either belong to or don't. "Most of the things that we use to describe people are on continua," she explained. You can be more towards one side or the other, but there's no clean dividing line.

People on the introverted side need less stimulation, have less energy to expend in social situations, and derive less energy from them. Extroverts are the opposite: more excitable, more positive, and they get energy from being around others. But Sauer-Zavala herself described as "neither" introvert nor extrovert—she's in the middle, shifting depending on context.