Introverts are drained by performing, not by people

The claim

The exhaustion is real. Most of it comes from managing how you come across, not from the presence of other people. Connection and popularity are different things, and the performance only ever buys the second.

Structure

1. Lead. The common belief and the alternative. Test it against one memory of an evening that did not drain you.
2. What performing is. Being interesting, hiding an interest, withholding an insecurity, waiting for the other person to go first.
3. Connection is not popularity. One fills you up, the other leaves you hungry. As a YouTuber I treated viewers as numbers and reshaped my personality for the algorithm. Same mistake, bigger scale.
4. Evidence. The conference: late, alone in a full room, a friend's text to look for someone who feels the same. Simple questions, no performance, the whole evening.
5. Authenticity as a mask. Calling yourself authentic and looking down on others as fake is the performance wearing a different costume.
6. The practice. Next event, one rule: ask, don't present. Find out one real thing about one person.
7. Journal prompt. "In which situations do you feel pressure to be interesting? What changes if your only task is curiosity?"

Notes

Adapted from Chapter 5. Companion to the Oct 10 video; publish first so the video can link to it.