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My "introvert" behaviour patterning and why I do it (2026-01-31)

Jan 31, 20269 min read

  1. Barely talk to people1
  2. Have people who I haven’t had a proper conversation with the entire time we’ve lived together (which could be 2+ months)
  3. Exist in “work mode” up until ~5pm, then do my own thing in the evening, or attend an events2
  • I think this is kind of the ugliest3 thing about me, so I want to name up front that I know this stuff is ridiculous, hence we writing about it, working on changing it, etc

What’s the deal?

Childhood/teenage conditioning

  • I grew up in a very high conflict household from the age of ~6 to 18 (at 18 I went to uni), with my mum and my adopted sister, who I really did not get on with at all
  • So, I spent a lotttt of time in my room alone, playing video games, rereading Harry Potter
  • And at 15, I got a girlfriend, so I spent lots of time with her
  • So, I spent lots of time either alone in my room, 1:1 with my girlfriend, sometimes 1:1 with a friend in my room, (and from 16-18, some time in my friend group)
  • So, I’m not someone who has really any experience living in a community. I imagine even just being an only child with two healthy parents would give a feeling of “I am safe to hang out in this building, and hanging out is nice to do”, which I never really had. I had “I will be in my room, because being in any other room isn’t safe, as there will be conflict”
  • So yeah - it makes total sense, and it’s easy for me to forget this

Being around people is stressful because I have to manage them

  • I’ve had a lot of people pleasing conditioning which was the result of growing up with a dysregulated family
  • For example, my mum suffered a huge amount as a result of adopting my sister without realising how traumatised she’d be. Huge amount of guilt, shame, pain at losing the unproblematic relationships she had with my Dad and me beforehand, etc
  • So, as a child I was in that system, and part of my role was to soothe her, by e.g. going on walks, doing things with her, acting ok, being the well behaved one, etc
  • It’s the “parentified child” thing. I ended up looking after my mum a lot, being very aware of her poor state, her bad mental health, her sadness and shame etc. So I did the “be the sparkly golden son” thing
  • (A very nice outcome from my Mythopoesis 1 - same life story, different conclusions project is seeing my parents as victims here too, rather than the childish/teenage/Kegan 2 thing of “I am the victim and they are the perpetrators who Betrayed Me)
  • So anyway. The dinner table is stressful because if it’s awkward, if the conversation isn’t flowing, then people will be feeling bad about themselves. There’s a 12 year old part (a la IFS) who is sat at the dining table at my grandma’s, taking on the responsibility of the one who actually talks and gets the conversation flowing, because my family was so awkward that I had to take that role. There’s the 20 year old part who resents being forced to spend time with my mum just because she’s lonely, with no insight into how boring it might be for me, how stifling.

Left hemisphere capture and tracking my worked hours

  • This is a big one!
  • For the last 3+ “work years” (years where I’ve had a job), I’ve tracked my worked hours via Toggl Track (I have now stopped this, as an experiment)
  • I also used to track my personal hours for things like “time spent reading” etc, and I used Beeminder to try to enforce habits like “read for an hour a day”. Talk about self-coercion dude!!!
  • So, up until ~2 days ago when I stopped using Toggl Track, I was managing myself in a very, in retrospect kind of oppressive way. Constant reinforcement of the feeling of being “on the clock”. Like, re: Reflexivity, many times per day for years I trained a “I am On The Clock and Being Tracked” muscle. This was very oppressive!
  • So, because of this, and because I installed this belief of “I must hit ~6 hours of tracked work per day in order to Relax/Succeed”, any conversation at the coffee machine felt like a big deviation from the Primary Goal of getting ~6 hours of work done. So, during work hours, I’d be hella heads-down
  • I’m always In The Middle of Something. Like even right now, I just went to make a coffee and saw some team members sat at the dining table but it was like, “I can’t engage with them right now, I’m In The Middle of Something”. But like, why not just talk to them briefly? (I guess one answer is “because I wanna get back to writing this”, but do I genuinely want to because it’s what I really want to do, or is it because getting back to this will resolve the tension in my system?)

You don’t have my Kegan 4 world-view so why even talk

  • I wrote this today - Being Kegan 4 is dumb, 2026-01-31
  • It’s soooo dumb now I’ve faced this pattern clearly, and I imagine it’s going to take some unlearning, but basically the thing of “well, you, AI safety researcher, exist in an entirely different part of phase space/an entirely different attractor basin, and we’ll have clashing opinions and also just like, paradigms made of entirely different stuff, and therefore there’s really no point talking, it’ll be awkward and non-fruitful”
  • This is dumb for a few reasons
    • People are people, and even if you have different careers, you’ll still have lots of overlap, you’ll still value a bunch of the same things
    • I think that’s kind of it actually. I was collapsing the entirety of a person into their career choice or like, “rat vs post-rat vs normie vs etc”, and if you’re not the one I am then you must be made of fundamentally different stuff and we’ll have nothing to say to each other
  • There’s a related thing of thinking (implicitly) that I have nothing to learn from these people because we’re made from entirely different stuff. The concept of A B U has helped me update here - sure, we have entirely different “B” floors in some places, e.g. they won’t have any of the prerequisites for my Buddhism-type stuff, and I won’t have any of the prerequisites to understand their AI Safety views, but I can still learn more about their, their lives, their motivations, interests etc, still gaining interesting “A”s. We have a lot of “U”s, but it’s not all Us. That’s exactly what I was doing - modelling us as only having Us

Training myself out of it

  • First of all, worth acknowledging that I don’t have to do shit. I can stay like this if I want. There’s no obligation here
  • In the Being Kegan 4 is dumb, 2026-01-31 way, I can blend with a “omg I must become more sociable and comfortable in community” axiom, but in a Unscrunching way I can step back from that and see that I don’t have to do anything
  • So with that being said, what could I do next?

Immersion training

  • As I said, I spent the formative 15-18 years mostly solo, or 1:1 with my girlfriend. This lay down the conditioning for me to continue this way of being all the way up until 29 - I’ve truly never been one to “hang out” in a living room/group of friends, always wanting to get back to solo time or 1:1, because that is what feels “safe” (due to the preference being locked in early and for valid reasons and environmental reasons)
  • So, I could do an experiment of e.g. spending most of my time with people, for a month, or something
  • It feels like it needs to be something kind of extreme like that, to be proper immersion therapy. I had considered like “1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours per day in the living room”, but it feels like the thing that is required is a genuine shift into “time mostly spent with people”, rather than “time mostly spent alone or 1:1”. I can’t still primarily be alone/1:1 and spend just a bit more time in groups, that by definition won’t work, as I’ll remain primarily someone who is alone/1:1. I want to make a real clean break from my attractor basin here

That feels like it?

  • Honestly, I don’t wanna pontificate too much more here
  • Immersion therapy seems like the thing, right

And that’s the thing - I’m not like, irreparably broken here. During a “scheduled socialising event”, e.g. watching a ridiculous Alien documentary together, or playing a board game, or going for a drive to run some errands, I’m personable, funny, liked. It’s just that I’ve reinforced this left-hemisphere-captured, contracted-awareness state, and this is where I spend most of my time

Footnotes

  1. Kind of hyperbole - I talk to others on the team, but I have very few (average of 0) real conversations not-about-work, during working hours. ↩

  2. So, I do talk to people, but only during scheduled “interacting with people” time ↩

  3. Ok, that’s very self-punishing sounding. But I do think this is one of my most clear patterns where if you followed me around for a day/week you’d be like “dude, what’s up with that, that seems very anti-social” ↩

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