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pktechgirlbackupIn American culture, it's rude not to give someone 100% of your attention. I think this is the root of a lot of the problem. Extroverts people who have bought into the American value system, who can be of any persuasion because culture is like that, think they are simply asking for an acknowledgement when they say hi, and I agree with them that a lack of any acknowledgement would be rude. But I feel like what they are actually asking for is for me to drop everything I am thinking about and give them 100% of my attention until they choose to return it, and that is horrendously unfair. It's like walking into a factory where people are working and demanding they scrap everything they are doing (including widgets that are 95% done), pushing one whosit through the production line (necessitating leaving workers idle or throwing away unfinished whosits at the end), and then letting them go back to the original widgets. And being mad at them for being inefficient, although that's probably internal pressure in my case.
If people would agree that a distracted nod was sufficient to fulfill my social obligations when they held the door for me, I would not resent when they did so.
It's an issue even with people I like though. I have a good friend with whom I have many fascinating discussions. I tend to clean my house while we're talking. She herself is notorious for having a variety of fidgets in her house. I've taken to doing puzzles while talking with my boyfriend sometimes. It looks like multitasking, and I do feel somewhat less responsive. But what I'm actually doing is taking the energy they're giving me and turning it into something else immediately, so I have more room and can keep talking to them. Going back to the assembly line metaphor, I'm keeping a full pipeline going so I don't get a pile up at their station.
This makes me wonder if context-switching is less expensive for extroverts than introverts. Maybe they can hold things in their head better, maybe they find it less costly to wind up and spin down. Maybe they are more like craftsmen than assembly line workers, so trashing all in-progress work is less costly.
If people would agree that a distracted nod was sufficient to fulfill my social obligations when they held the door for me, I would not resent when they did so.
It's an issue even with people I like though. I have a good friend with whom I have many fascinating discussions. I tend to clean my house while we're talking. She herself is notorious for having a variety of fidgets in her house. I've taken to doing puzzles while talking with my boyfriend sometimes. It looks like multitasking, and I do feel somewhat less responsive. But what I'm actually doing is taking the energy they're giving me and turning it into something else immediately, so I have more room and can keep talking to them. Going back to the assembly line metaphor, I'm keeping a full pipeline going so I don't get a pile up at their station.
This makes me wonder if context-switching is less expensive for extroverts than introverts. Maybe they can hold things in their head better, maybe they find it less costly to wind up and spin down. Maybe they are more like craftsmen than assembly line workers, so trashing all in-progress work is less costly.
