Introverts’ Yearning for Privacy and Authenticity
In his new book The Right to Oblivion, Lowry Pressly explores a sacred quality he calls “privacy” that I believe introverts especially value.
During the decade and a half that I thrived as a marketing consultant for entrepreneurs, self-employed professionals and small business owners, I attracted quite a few introverts as clients. In the early portion of that period, neither they nor I used the word “introvert” to describe our current of commonality, but I noticed the pattern all the same.
What they observed in me, I think, was someone who presented herself as herself, not as a hyped-up performer who posed, bragged and pretended. Some told me straight out that I gave them hope that they too could succeed by harnessing creativity, talent and genuineness while avoiding the icky aspects of self-promotion. Others told me that they easily talked their work up one on one, face to face with potential clients but couldn’t wrap their head around the idea of packaging themselves and their work for the public in general.
After reading Stanford University political science professor Lowry Pressly’s book The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life, I reflected on my introverted fans who feared the definitional compromises that marketing seemed to entail. They cared deeply about privacy – a kind of privacy that Pressly describes in tantalizing terms in his book.
Pressly’s view of privacy involves not so much keeping certain personal facts to oneself, but more importantly, safeguarding one’s unknowable inner essence as a hallowed zone not for public consumption. One’s self is one’s castle. One’s inner life matters, and it is one’s own business.
The Right to Oblivion doesn’t say much about how such privacy affects one’s presentation for others, but I made the connection. In the kinds of professions where human-to-human relationships rule, my cohort craved permission not to pose as someone other than themselves. They strongly resisted becoming a staged image, pestering others to respond to hype or pretense, or conforming to someone else’s boxed-up version of a supposedly universally liked ideal. They felt: I’m me, and don’t tell me I need to become like you in order to be successful.
The phrase my introverted clients often used when they resisted the aggressive outreach and conformist image-making advocated by mainstream marketing advice was “That’s not me.” Remember that introverts tend to regard our inner being as who we most are, while extroverts tend to view how they are with others as most important. Introverts care about being fully present to and for ourselves, which may feel inconsistent with putting on the façade of an outgoing, energetic, ultra-confident person.
As I understand Pressly’s vision, privacy consists in a realm where individuals or families can relax fully being ourselves, off stage and unobjectified, where we are a person rather than a copied persona, a unique individual rather than a concocted and false brand. For introverts, that realm is the same physical and mental space where we recharge our energy by ourselves or with trusted intimates. The introverts who chose to be in my orbit hoped to have that same natural kind of ease, freedom and truth in their work. Eventually I created a course pointing the way for those who strongly felt this concern.
Pressly quotes a Wallace Stevens poem that aptly points toward the privacy of the personal sphere:
“Some true interior to which to return
A home against one’s self, a darkness
An ease in which to live a moment’s life,
The moment of life’s love and fortune,
Free from everything else, free above all from thought.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson put the idea into words this way: “the infinitude of private man.” Pressly himself explains:
“Individual and collective well-being require regions of possibility and experience that are essentially opposed to the fixity of information… Privacy permits us to become acquainted with the ambiguous parts of ourselves by being ambiguous ourselves and to enjoy the range of human experience that lies beyond the limits of knowledge and control. [Let us value] the sense that our lives, relationships, and collective projects have depth, meaning, and an inexhaustible capacity for change and renovation.”
Very much related to Pressly’s notion of privacy is authenticity. We introverts need to recoup energy by retreating from the intensity of social interaction. When we come back to our shared world, we also care about honoring there the fullness of who we are. That’s the connection I understand after reading Lowry Pressly’s suggestive book.