Hey everyone, and welcome back to the show. We are sitting here in our usual spot in Jerusalem, and I have to say, looking out at the street below, it feels like the perfect backdrop for today's discussion. There is so much movement, so much interaction happening right outside our window on Jaffa Street. You see the tourists, the vendors, the groups of friends huddled over coffee, and it really makes you think about how we all navigate these social spaces differently. The energy out there is palpable, but for some people, that energy is a battery charger, while for others, it is a massive drain.
Herman Poppleberry here, and you are absolutely right, Corn. The energy of the city is a constant reminder of that fundamental human drive for connection, but as we will see today, that drive is not a one size fits all kind of thing. It is more like a fingerprint—unique to every individual. Today's prompt from Daniel is a deep dive into the mechanics of social need. He is asking about the vast spectrum of how much socialization different people actually require to feel fulfilled and happy. It is a question that challenges the very core of how we define a healthy human life.
It is a great starting point because Daniel mentions this very relatable tension between his own preference for a focused, consistent workday and his wife's enjoyment of the city center's social energy. He is really questioning that traditional introvert versus extrovert binary that we have all grown up with. He is wondering if there are people who genuinely do not feel a need for human interaction at all, even outside of clinical pathologies or what we usually label as personality disorders. He is asking if being a true loner can be a healthy, baseline state of existence.
It is a fascinating question because it touches on everything from neurobiology to evolutionary psychology. We often talk about humans as social animals as if that is an absolute, unchanging rule for every individual. We cite the fact that solitary confinement is considered a form of torture to prove that we need each other. But when you look at the research, especially the more recent studies from twenty-twenty-four and twenty-twenty-five, you realize that the social brain is incredibly diverse. The amount of social stimulation one person needs to feel alive might be the exact amount that makes another person feel completely drained, distressed, or even cognitively impaired.
I love that Daniel brought up the context switching aspect. He mentioned that he prefers a workday without those social breaks because of the cognitive cost of shifting gears. I think that is a really important piece of the puzzle that often gets overlooked when we just talk about being shy or outgoing. It is not just about how you feel in a crowd; it is about the mental architecture of focus. For some, a conversation is a refreshing detour. For others, it is a bridge collapse on the highway of their productivity.
Precisely. For many people, especially those who might identify with neurodivergent traits like ADHD or autism—which Daniel touched on in his prompt—social interaction is not just a pleasant break. It is a high effort cognitive task. When you are deep in a flow state, what psychologists call an autotelic experience, your brain is firing in a very specific, synchronized pattern. A quick fifteen minute coffee chat is not just fifteen minutes of your time. It is the thirty minutes it took to get into the zone, plus the fifteen minutes of the chat, plus the thirty to forty five minutes it takes to reorient your brain back to the original task. That is a huge investment. In the world of software engineering or creative writing, we call this the maker's schedule versus the manager's schedule.
So if the cost is that high, it makes sense that the perceived value of that interaction has to be even higher to make it worth it. But let's look at the broader question Daniel asked. Is there such a thing as a person with zero social need? Not a pathology, not someone who is afraid of people or has social anxiety, but someone who is just... indifferent? Like a person who doesn't have a taste for sweets. They aren't allergic to sugar; they just don't care if they ever eat a cookie again.
That is a tough one to answer definitively because our entire scientific framework is biased toward sociality. In the history of psychology, we have often viewed the desire for solitude through a lens of suspicion. If you want to be alone, we assume you are depressed, or you have an avoidant attachment style, or you are a misanthrope. But there is a growing body of thought around the idea of positive solitude or what some researchers call autonomous solitude. Virginia Thomas, a researcher who has done extensive work on this, distinguishes between loneliness—which is the painful feeling of being alone—and aloneliness, which is the unpleasant feeling of not getting enough time alone.
Aloneliness. That is a fantastic term. I think a lot of people listening are probably nodding their heads right now. It is that irritability you feel when you haven't had a moment to yourself all day. It is a hunger, just like social hunger, but it is directed toward the self.
Exactly. Autonomous solitude is the idea that choosing to be alone is a proactive, healthy state of being rather than a reactive withdrawal. For some people, their internal world is so rich and their self regulation is so stable that the external validation or the mirror of another person just is not a primary requirement for their happiness. They might enjoy people occasionally, but they do not feel that gnawing hunger for connection that we usually associate with the human condition. There is a concept in biology called social homeostasis. Just like your body wants to maintain a certain temperature, your brain wants to maintain a certain level of social contact. For some people, that set point is just very, very low.
But even then, aren't there basic biological mechanisms at play? I mean, we talk about oxytocin as the cuddle chemical or the social bonding hormone. Do these people just have lower levels of oxytocin, or are their brains just not as responsive to it?
It is likely a bit of both. We know that there is significant genetic variation in oxytocin receptor genes, specifically the OXTR gene. Some people might literally get a smaller hit of reward from a social interaction than others. Think about it like a spicy food. Some people have a high tolerance and need a lot of heat to feel the sensation, while others find a tiny bit of pepper overwhelming. Social interaction might work the same way. For some, a small dose is plenty to meet their biological baseline, and anything more becomes a sensory overload. There is also the role of dopamine. Extroverts tend to have a more active dopamine reward system in response to social stimuli. For a low social need person, the dopamine hit from a conversation might be negligible compared to the dopamine hit they get from solving a complex problem or finishing a book.
That makes a lot of sense. And it really challenges the idea that everyone who seeks solitude is lacking something. Maybe they are just easily saturated. I think about the concept of social satiety. You know, like being full after a meal. If your social stomach is small, you are going to feel full very quickly. And if you are forced to keep eating after you are full, you start to feel sick.
I like that analogy, Corn. That is exactly what a lot of introverts or low social need individuals feel when they are in high density environments like a city center or a busy office. It is not that they hate the food; they are just stuffed. They are experiencing social indigestion. And in a world that is constantly pushing more social snacks at us—notifications, emails, small talk—these people are in a state of chronic overstimulation.
Daniel also mentioned the idea of the hermit. Throughout history, we have seen people who retreat from society entirely. Often it was for religious or spiritual reasons, like the desert fathers in the third century or the anchorites who would literally have themselves walled into a room attached to a church. But even then, they were often seeking a connection with something else, like a divine presence. Is that still a form of socialization, just directed toward a non human entity?
That is a profound point. Many of the most famous hermits in history were not necessarily asocial; they were just very selective about their companions. If you believe you are in constant dialogue with a deity, you are not truly alone in your own mind. You are engaged in a relationship. But if we look at modern secular examples, like Christopher Knight, the North Pond Hermit who lived in the woods of Maine for twenty seven years without speaking to another human soul, we see something different. When he was finally caught, he said he didn't feel lonely. He said he felt a deep sense of loss when he was forced back into society. He had found a different kind of connection—a connection to the rhythm of the woods, to the passing of the seasons, and to his own consciousness.
It is like they are consuming the products of human thought without the friction of human presence. I think about people who spend all their time reading or listening to podcasts like ours. They are engaging with ideas, which are human products, but they are doing it on their own terms.
Exactly. You get the ideas, the stories, and the insights without the need for the real time performance of a conversation. Because let's be honest, conversation is a performance. You have to monitor your tone, your body language, the other person's reactions, and the social norms of the moment. You have to engage in what sociologists call impression management. If you can bypass that and go straight to the information, it is much more efficient for a certain type of brain. This is why many people on the autism spectrum prefer text based communication. It removes the exhausting layer of non verbal processing.
I think we should talk about the city living aspect too, because that is a huge part of Daniel's prompt. His wife finds the city center energizing. There is a specific kind of person who thrives on what sociologists call weak ties. These are the brief, low stakes interactions with the barista, the neighbor, or the person walking their dog. Mark Granovetter wrote a famous paper on the strength of weak ties, arguing they are crucial for information flow and job opportunities. For some, those interactions provide a steady stream of micro rewards that keep them feeling connected to the world.
Right, the social snackers versus the social feast seekers. A city center is like a twenty four hour buffet of weak ties. For someone like Daniel's wife, that might be exactly what she needs to feel like she is part of a living, breathing community. It provides a sense of belonging without the heavy lifting of deep emotional intimacy. But for Daniel, those same weak ties might feel like constant interruptions or background noise that makes it harder to focus on his internal work. It is the difference between ambient noise and a targeted distraction.
It is interesting how we have built our modern world around the assumption that more interaction is always better. Open plan offices, social media, constant connectivity. We have almost pathologized the need for focus and solitude. If you are not responsive to a text within ten minutes, people assume something is wrong. We have created a society that is optimized for the high social need individual, often at the expense of the deep thinkers and the focused workers.
And that brings us back to the neurodivergence point. In episode seven hundred and forty three, we talked about the concept of the double empathy problem, coined by Damian Milton. It is the idea that it is not that autistic people lack empathy, but rather that there is a mismatch between how neurotypical and neurodivergent people communicate. I think there is a similar mismatch in social need. A high social need person might look at a low social need person and think, oh they must be lonely, I should go talk to them and save them from their isolation. But they are actually projecting their own fear of loneliness onto someone who is perfectly content. They are trying to feed someone who isn't hungry.
It is a well meaning but ultimately intrusive kind of empathy. It is like trying to give a glass of water to someone who is already swimming. They don't need it, and it actually just gets in the way.
Precisely. And that can lead to a lot of friction in relationships, like the one Daniel is describing. If one partner feels that social outings are essential for health and happiness, they might feel like they are saving their partner by dragging them along to a party. Meanwhile, the other partner feels like they are being dragged away from their source of peace and productivity. It creates a cycle of resentment. The extroverted partner feels rejected, and the introverted partner feels smothered.
So how do we find a balance? If we accept that there is this huge range of social need, how do we coexist without one side constantly feeling neglected and the other feeling smothered? Especially in a marriage or a close partnership where you are sharing a living space in a busy city.
I think it starts with exactly what Daniel is doing, which is recognizing that this is not a character flaw or a lack of love. It is a fundamental difference in how our brains process the world. It is a biological reality. Once you frame it as a biological or cognitive need rather than a personal choice or a slight against the relationship, it becomes much easier to negotiate. You can start talking about things like social quotas or scheduled solitude. You treat it like any other logistical need, like sleep or exercise.
Scheduled solitude. I can imagine that being a very helpful tool for couples. Like, okay, Tuesday nights are my night to be completely alone in my office, no interruptions, and Friday night is our night to go out and see friends. It sets clear expectations. It removes the guilt for the person who wants to stay in and the anxiety for the person who wants to go out.
And it is also about valuing different types of connection. Daniel mentioned that he prefers a focused workday. For him, the deep, quiet work might be his primary way of contributing to the world and feeling fulfilled. If his wife can see that work as a form of meaningful engagement—a way of connecting with ideas or solving problems for other people—even if it doesn't involve talking to people in that moment, it changes the dynamic. It is a shift from valuing the process of socialization to valuing the outcome of focus.
I want to go back to the question of whether there are people who truly don't need anyone. There is a term in Japan, hikikomori, used to describe people who withdraw from society for months or even years. While it is often seen as a social problem or a result of economic pressure, some researchers are starting to look at it as a response to the overwhelming pressure of modern social expectations. It is like the brain just says, I am done, I cannot do this anymore. It is a total system shutdown.
It is an extreme form of social burnout. But even in those cases, many hikikomori are very active online. They are still seeking connection, just in a medium that they can control. They can turn the screen off. They can choose when to respond. They have removed the physical and temporal demands of face to face interaction. They are still social animals; they have just changed the habitat. This suggests that the need for connection is still there, but the tolerance for the traditional format of that connection has been exceeded.
So maybe the question isn't whether we need people, but what format of people we can handle. It is about the bandwidth of the connection.
That is a great way to put it. The format of the interaction matters as much as the content. For some, a text message is a perfect unit of socialization—low bandwidth, high control. For others, it feels cold and distant. For some, a crowded party is a source of joy because the individual interactions are brief and shallow. For others, it is a nightmare of sensory overload because there are too many signals to process at once. We have to stop thinking about socialization as a single, monolithic thing.
I also wonder about the evolutionary side of this. If we were all high social need, we would never have had the people who were willing to sit alone for years and observe the stars, or spend decades in a laboratory, or go off into the wilderness to scout new territory. There has to be an evolutionary advantage to having a certain percentage of the population that is comfortable with, or even prefers, solitude.
Absolutely. We need the scouts and the observers. If everyone is at the party, no one is watching the perimeter. There is a clear survival advantage to having individuals who are less susceptible to groupthink and more comfortable operating independently. These are the people who often notice the things everyone else misses because they are not distracted by the social static. In evolutionary biology, this is sometimes called the hawk versus dove strategy, or more accurately in this context, the producer versus scrounger model. We need a diversity of social strategies for a population to be resilient.
It is funny how we have flipped that on its head. Now, being independent or preferring solitude is seen as a disadvantage in the corporate world or the social world. We have created a society that rewards the loud and the highly social, often at the expense of the deep thinkers and the focused workers. We talk about the importance of diversity in the workplace, but we rarely talk about neuro-social diversity.
It is a real loss of cognitive diversity. When we force everyone into the same social mold—the open office, the constant brainstorming sessions, the endless Slack huddles—we lose the unique insights that come from a solitary perspective. I think about someone like Isaac Newton or the physicist Paul Dirac. These were men who were famously asocial, bordering on what we might today call neurodivergent. Dirac was so quiet that his colleagues at Cambridge jokingly defined a unit of conversation called a dirac, which was one word per hour. If they had been forced to spend their days in coffee chats and social outings, we might not have the laws of motion or quantum mechanics.
That is a powerful thought. Their contribution to humanity was born out of their ability to be alone with their ideas. Their social need was directed entirely toward the universe itself. They were connecting with the fundamental laws of reality rather than the gossip of the day.
And that is a form of connection too. It is just not a human to human connection in the traditional sense. It is a connection to truth, or beauty, or logic. For some people, that is the most fulfilling relationship they will ever have. It provides a sense of awe and belonging that a dinner party never could. We should respect that as a valid way of being in the world.
So, to Daniel's point, maybe we should stop asking why someone doesn't want to go out for coffee and start asking what they are connecting with instead. If they are happy, focused, and fulfilled in their work or their solitude, then their social need is being met in a way that just looks different from the norm. We need to expand our definition of what a social life looks like.
Exactly. Happiness is subjective. If you are not feeling lonely, then you are not lonely, no matter how many people are around you. Loneliness is the gap between the social connection you want and the social connection you have. If that gap is zero because you don't want much to begin with, then you are perfectly healthy. The problem isn't the lack of people; the problem is the societal pressure to want more people.
I think this is a great place to pivot to some practical takeaways, because I know a lot of our listeners probably find themselves on one side or the other of this divide in their own lives. If you are a Daniel, or if you are married to a Daniel, how do you navigate this without losing your mind or your relationship?
One of the biggest things is to audit your own social energy. Start paying attention to not just how much you talk to people, but how you feel afterward. Do you feel buzzed and energized, or do you feel like you need to go lie down in a dark room? Understanding your own recovery time is crucial. We often plan our social lives based on our desires, but we should plan them based on our capacity.
And for those in relationships with a mismatch, like Daniel and his wife, communication is everything. But it has to be communication that doesn't use judgmental language. Instead of saying, you are being antisocial, which sounds like a diagnosis, try saying, I see that your social battery is low right now, how can I support you in getting some quiet time? It turns it into a team effort rather than a conflict.
And on the flip side, the lower social need person can acknowledge their partner's needs too. It is about validation. I know that going to this dinner is important to you, and I want you to have that connection, so I will go and be fully present for two hours, but then I might need to head home a bit early to recharge. It is about those small, respectful compromises. It is not about meeting in the middle every time; it is about taking turns supporting each other's needs.
I also think we should re evaluate the value of parallel play. We often think of this as something toddlers do, where they sit near each other but play with different toys. But adults can do this too. You can be in the same room, one person reading a book and the other person working on a project, and that can be a very deep form of connection for people who find constant conversation exhausting. It is what some people call companionable silence.
I love that. My wife and I do that all the time. Just being in each other's orbit without the demand for interaction is incredibly comforting. It provides the security of presence without the cost of performance. It is a way of saying, I am here for you, but I am also letting you be yourself. For a low social need person, this is often the highest form of intimacy.
Another thing to consider is the environment. If you live in a city center like Daniel, you have to find your own pockets of silence. You have to be intentional about it. Maybe that means noise canceling headphones, or a specific corner of a library, or even just a ritual that signals to the world that you are currently unavailable for social snacking. You have to build a fortress of solitude within the city.
And don't be afraid to decline the weak ties. You don't have to have a full conversation with every person you meet. A polite nod and a quick smile is enough to maintain social harmony without draining your battery. You are allowed to protect your peace. You are not obligated to be everyone's social snack.
I think the most important takeaway is that there is no right amount of social need. We are all built differently, and that diversity is part of what makes our species so successful. Whether you need a hundred friends or just one or none at all, the goal is to find the balance that allows you to be your most productive and peaceful self. We need to stop measuring our social health by the number of contacts in our phone and start measuring it by the quality of our internal state.
Well said, Corn. It is about moving away from the idea of a social standard and moving toward the idea of social fit. Finding the environment and the lifestyle that fits your unique neurobiology. If you are a deep sea fish, don't try to live on a coral reef. The pressure is different, the light is different, and you won't thrive. Find your depth and stay there.
This has been such a fascinating dive into something that affects almost every aspect of our lives. Daniel, thank you for sending that in. It really pushed us to look at the nuances beyond the usual introversion talk. It is about the very nature of what it means to be a person in a world full of other people.
It definitely did. It is a reminder that the most important relationship you have is the one with yourself, and if that relationship is solid, the rest is just details. And for everyone listening, we would love to hear where you fall on this spectrum. Do you feel like you have a high social need, or are you more like Daniel, preferring the quiet focus of a solo workday? Do you feel alonely when you don't get enough time to yourself?
Yeah, let us know. You can reach us at show at my weird prompts dot com. We love hearing your perspectives on these topics. It helps us build a better map of the human experience.
And if you are enjoying the show, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. It really helps other people find us and join the conversation, or the quiet contemplation, depending on their preference. We are aiming to reach more of those deep thinkers who might be listening in their own pockets of silence.
Exactly. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and pretty much everywhere else. Plus, our website, my weird prompts dot com, has all of our past episodes and a contact form if you want to get in touch. We have a whole archive of deep dives into everything from the ethics of AI to the psychology of urban planning.
We have been doing this for over eight hundred episodes now, and it is the diversity of these prompts that keeps us going. It is a testament to the fact that even if we don't always want to talk to each other, we are always thinking about each other.
Alright, that is it for today's episode of My Weird Prompts. We will be back soon with another deep dive into the strange and wonderful ideas you send our way. We are heading out to grab some lunch—Herman will probably want a quiet corner, and I might want to sit where I can people watch.
Until then, find your balance, whatever that looks like. Respect your battery, and don't be afraid of the silence.
Thanks for listening. Goodbye everyone.
Goodbye.
