Social Anxiety

I like socialising and I feel everybody does too. It has got to do with our evolutionary instincts. Part of us wants to interact with our fellow embodiments of DNA. It relieves us from the burden of our consciousness. Leave a person alone with it and he will go crazy. 

Social interaction is a precursor to the need for collaboration for our survival. So our brain has a reward mechanism to make us want to somehow interact with others.

Why then is social anxiety a thing. Why should all the embarrassing encounters haunt me at midnight instead of cheering me up with happy thoughts? Well turns out that is perfectly explained by an evolutionary perspective. To refine our social interaction and optimise the returns our brain penalises us for the things that have the potential to ruin the future encounters too. So being mindful of any embarrassing thing you did at a gathering is your brain explicitly telling you to avoid that thing. It is a simple but elegant solution.

But that's just one way of seeing it. Sometimes the social anxiety is crippling to the point where the return on any interaction is so low that one is forced to not participate at all. That is where introverts are born. A breed of individuals so sensitive to the stimulus of the social interaction that they stop actively participating in it.

Come to think of it majority of the developments in past decades has come because those godforsaken people have been given access to contribute to growth without having to interact one on one. Particularly developments in computer science, open-source software. (Think of Linux and many programming languages and frameworks)

With the rise of social media, social interaction has been effectively democratised. By hiding behind the blue screens we are less mindful of having to avoid embarrassing situations. So some introverts can finally let it go. Yet an evolved breed of introverts, let's call them social media introverts, who are so shy of their opinions that they can't own up to them are still there and again the anonymity and privacy offered by some internet forums come to their rescue.