I am not terribly attached to the term introvert but it seems the best available term that communicates a dynamic I experience. Maybe lean into that confusion?

I am not terribly attached to the term introvert but it seems the best available term that communicates a dynamic I experience. Maybe lean into that confusion? Certainly, we would agree that to socialize one needs to try doing it and grow. Sometimes there will be failures and consequences. I've done the work to acquire my social skills and would hazard a speculation that I might have more sophisticated social skills than many. Having to learn a skill to use it is not the thing I am objecting to. That is unless by "skills" you mean willingness to meaninglessly spend my time and resources practicing the skill. To be more concrete, a normality in business is checking in with people about their children and other important aspects of their lives. I actually like that but find it annoying that very few people actually want to dig in to any depth and talk about the flows of their emotional journeys, their core intellectual advanced, the things that they've learned, or instructive errors that they've made so that we gain wisdom from the conversation. They're responding to incentives because having broad social capital has in many scopes become a gating function to prosperity. It is such that those who enjoy socializing voluminously have quite a bit of advantage. I would much rather build and create tools that solve problems, or use my socializing to really clearly identify the cores of problems so that they can be better solved. I completely appreciate the value of socialization and collaboration. It is simply that those who really enjoy socializing in and for itself will dilute conversations to make them less valuable and have created a norm of this that seems to me to carry a lot of opportunity cost. We completely agree that sometimes we must experience and accept pain and struggle. There's a big difference between feeling our efforts and being self displacing. Consider an engineer who gets positions because they are well connected and another who is an effective teammate and simply amazing at their job. Which one do you want to hire? You're more likely to hire the first. What if they're in the same team and the latter did most of the work? Often it's the former that gets the recognition.