by Joe Moran
This decline of associational life is a familiar refrain in the work of other American social theorists such as Robert Putnam, John Cacioppo, and Sherry Turkle. They suggest that loneliness is the virus of modern existence, cultivated amid our customized consumer lifestyles, which isolate us from one another, and then sell us cheap techno-fixes to ease the pain. We rely ever more on what Turkle calls “sociable robots”—machines that displace flesh-and-blood intimates—such as Siri, the Apple iPhone digital assistant, or Paro, the cuddly baby harp seal used in elderly care in Japan, which makes eye contact and responds to being stroked.9 We are becoming a culture of semi-absent citizens, “alone together,” since even in public our faces are glued to cellphones and tablets, our ears are cushioned by headphones from other people’s noise, and our glances are turned down as we converse with friends elsewhere via those dancing thumbs on our touchscreens. The new machine age allows us to relate to each other in amounts we can control, like a saline drip.
And yet there is a curious thing about this new ice age created by technology. The free market may indeed be turning us into atomized consumers who buy, read, listen, and talk to each other virtually, who make our separate ways silently through the aisles of produce and enter our PINs at the electronic checkouts. But the market also wants to know all about us. It insists that nothing get in the way of the free flow of information, that we live out our private lives in a digital public square in which everyone’s likes, activities, and personalities are exposed. Facebook calls this form of online self-disclosure, which handily links our identities to our purchase histories and makes us easier for advertisers to target, “radical transparency.”
The rise of social networking and the smartphone has made it normal for people to lay bare their private lives, to post photos of themselves in states of inebriation or to update the world on their changing relationship status in ways that would have seemed bizarre to all of us a few years ago, and which still seem bizarre to me. Like the Big Brother housemates who really do appear to forget that the television cameras are there, social networkers have lost any sense that a different type of language and behavior is suitable for public as opposed to private life. Their default mode is that of a free-flowing, private conversation, albeit one that strangers can overhear.
I have spent much of my adult life artfully avoiding looking in mirrors or at my reflection in shop windows. I feel like a Martian dropped into this new world of selfie sticks, digital avatars, and that unnerving little talking-head rectangle of yourself in the corner of the screen on Skype. Are there really citizens of this brave new world who happily upload photos of themselves to dating apps that allow strangers to select “like” or “nope” to their pictures, swiping away rejected suitors as if they were swatting flies? It feels as if we have sleepwalked into something strange, become inured in a historical blink to a major reboot of the limits of personal intimacy.
I comfort myself with this thought: it is the conceit of every era to think it has changed everything utterly. After 150,000 years of evolution the human personality must surely be resistant to short-range effects. New technologies do not change our natures; they mold themselves around them. Although many people online seem unaware that they are in public, others craft a bulletproof cyber-identity that is never punctured by their offline life. There are now anti-Facebook apps that allow you to send anonymous messages to your whole address book or have them self-destruct after being read, as on Mission: Impossible. One of the lessons of the Internet is that the desire for privacy and anonymity is very resilient, even if fulfilling that desire online does not always make us kinder or more considerate. There will always be a pull between our social instincts and our desire to creep away from the tribal campfire and be alone with our thoughts. In all of us that tension is differently strung, but surely it was ever thus, since the first hunter-gatherers went to the back of the cave for a sulk.
In DSM-III social phobia merited just a few paragraphs. In DSM-5, published in 2013, the entry stretched across seven pages. While stressing that “normative shyness” was “not by itself pathological”—hardly a reassuring caveat—it listed a wide range of symptoms for social anxiety disorder. The sufferer was concerned that “he or she will be judged as anxious, weak, crazy, stupid, boring, intimidating, dirty, or unlikable.” Variants included paruresis, or “shy bladder syndrome”—the inability to urinate in a public toilet with others present—and “selective mutism,” a particular anxiety about speaking in social settings.10 It is striking that those we now diagnose in this way are especially the shy and anxious. I wonder whether this is because, just as depressives respond better to therapy than psychopaths do, it is somewhat easier to make the overly timid more confident than it is to make the overly confident more timid—partly because the timid are more likely to be self-questioning and open to treatment in the first place.
Although I once thought about asking a doctor to prescribe me Seroxat—the British name for Paxil, available through the National Health Service—I now realize why I never went ahead. The sadness caused by shyness is real, and helping others to take the edge off that sadness is a noble aim. But taking a drug for social anxiety—for feeling stupid, boring, or unlikeable—feels like shouting at the wind, arguing with the rain. It feels like trying to find a cure for being alive.
In the late 1960s the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks was working with patients at the Beth Abraham Hospital, a “home for incurables” in the Bronx, who had fallen victim to encephalitis lethargica, or “sleepy sickness,” in the 1920s epidemic and had been in semiconscious limbo for over forty years. When Sacks treated them with the drug L-dopa, normally prescribed for Parkinson’s disease, they emerged dramatically from their catatonic states. Sacks became fascinated by people like this, who underwent dramatic personality changes owing to brain damage, drugs, or surgery. The long-buried effects of neurosyphilis led one of his patients, a shy ninety-year-old woman, Natasha K, to shake off her inhibitions and flirt with young men. A brain carcinoma turned another patient, a reserved research chemist, Mrs. B., into a facetious joker. These cases seemed to suggest that our personalities were fragile things, because they were contained entirely within that delicate and damageable object, the brain.
And yet a recurring motif in Sacks’s work is that people are abnormal after their own fashion, and diseases adjust to our uniqueness. People with lethargica or catatonia are still indubitably themselves. The idea that the immaterial personality could be housed wholly within the material brain is a shocking thought that for most of human history was inconceivable and even sacrilegious. And yet equally shocking in its own way is Sacks’s central discovery: that this three-and-a-half pound lump of jellified fats and protein between our ears manages to sustain a coherent human personality that lasts, for most of us, all our lives.
Sacks himself was proof of this. He suffered from childhood with unshakeable shyness, his loneliness relieved by some of the usual shy stratagems (chronic letter-writing, workaholism, Dutch courage) and some less usual ones. As a young man in England in the 1950s he loved motorbikes, because they offered an escape from self-consciousness in their sensual union of body and machine—just as they did for T. E. Lawrence, another victim of English reserve who liked to ride at speed on powerful Brough Superiors on bad roads. Sacks also found the biker community welcoming; motorcycles seemed “even in stiff England, to bypass the barriers, to open a sort of social ease and good nature in everyone.”11 In the early 1960s, living near Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach, he overcompensated for his timidity, rather like the ninety-seven-pound weakling of the Charles Atlas bodybuilding advertisements, with a brief but fanatical career as a weightlifter. In later life he sought sweet self-forgetting in water, spending hours each day swimming alone in Long Island Sound.
Sacks’s writings are littered with autobiographical fragments that reveal how his life was blighted by his shyness. His first book, on the involuntary twitching known as myoclonus, was never published because he ga
ve his only copy of the manuscript to an expert in the field who shortly afterward committed suicide, and Sacks was too shy to ask his widow for it back. He compared his passivity in relationships to that of his encephalitic patients, who never initiated contact but who could catch a ball thrown by someone else. When he tried to learn sign language, he found his forefingers repeatedly forming the crossed-swords symbol for “but.” Along with other shy physicians, however—W. H. R. Rivers and Robert Cawley come to mind—he found the structured nature of the clinical relationship a liberation from social unease and was able to form close relationships with his patients.
As a neuroscientist he called his shyness a “disease” and was inclined to posit clinical causes, such as his lifelong prosopagnosia, or “face blindness,” which meant that he could not recognize people, even his own reflection, and learned to identify others from their silhouettes. He avoided parties, knowing they would lead to embarrassing situations when he failed to greet friends or greeted strangers as friends. This would worsen anyone’s shyness, since recognizing faces, which most of us do brilliantly, is one of the basic building blocks of social life. But Sacks conceded that the root causes of his own shyness were as much psychological as neurological. Ever since he had been bullied by a psychopathic prep school teacher, part of him, he said, felt “forbidden to exist.”12
Sacks had the further predicament of wanting to be known and recognized but being unsure that this was allowed. When his first book, on migraine, was reviewed in the British press, his father, also a doctor, was appalled to find his son in the newspapers, for at the time one could be struck off the medical register for advertising. Sacks half-agreed with him, and for years misread the word “publish” as “punish.” This base-level reserve in his personality stayed constant, even after some fairly reckless encounters with psychoactive drugs in 1960s California. On reaching old age, he declared himself “sorry to be as agonizingly shy at 80 as I was at 20.”13 Diagnosed with ocular cancer, he would close the door and cry, but found that even on his own he was too shy to scream.
Personal growth is the growth industry of our age. Its guiding principle is that personality is plastic and pliable, a skill set you can learn and change. Dale Carnegie’s children populate the mind-body-spirit shelves of bookshops: How to Talk to Anyone, Goodbye to Shy, Make Yourself Unforgettable, How to Light Up a Room and Make People Like You. They trade in stories of recovering shy people who have transformed themselves from depressed solitaries into social butterflies, the psychological equivalent of those dieters of the year who pose delightedly inside their old and now outsized pair of trousers. The shyness institutes use phrases like “social fitness classes,” which make working on your personality sound like going to the gym. In this positive-thinking mode, shyness always has to be “busted” or “conquered.”
But if I have learned one thing from exploring the lives of shy people, it is that our personalities do not make these kinds of handbrake turns. All the people I have written about in this book were as shy at the end of their lives as at the start of them. They found ways to hide their shyness, channel it, finesse it, or work round it, but it never went away. And I suspect that, if I make it to my ninth decade as Sacks did, I, too, will simply have found more ways to adapt to my shyness, just as a stammerer learns to avoid certain words.
In The Day’s End, published in 1959, the nurse Pamela Bright wrote about working on the cancer ward at Middlesex Hospital in London. She noted that her patients died in the same manner in which they had lived: “Aggressive, shy, fussy, humorous, grateful, weary, talkative and assertive, they all had their word to say and then departed.” The egocentric were high-maintenance to the end, the theatrical orated their last words con brio, and the unassertive expired quietly in the small hours, not wishing to cause bother, “slipping out of life as wild animals creep away into solitary places.”14 It makes no sense to cling to your shyness when your life is almost over. Why be self-conscious when your consciousness is about to end? But since when did shyness make any rational sense? If you were rational, you’d have cured your shyness earlier, when it might have done you some good.
I have come to think of my own shyness as an unyielding reality, rather as Sacks’s patients’ personalities were never entirely erased even by lesions and carcinomas in their brains. The best strategy, I have realized, is Zen acceptance. I now assume that after any conversation with a stranger I will come away feeling slightly defeated. If I accede to my shyness as an obdurate fact, like having ears that stick out or crooked teeth, I can live with it. I have decided, as the software developers say, that being shy is a feature, not a bug. If I stop berating myself, the symptoms abate, and I can start paying more attention to the world and to others. Shyness feeds on itself, so if you don’t think about it, it may not get better, but it doesn’t get worse. I do my best to struggle against it while learning to live with it, to be neither ashamed of it nor secretly proud of it. And so the war against my own shyness has ended in an uneasy truce.
Now that hostilities are suspended, I can say that at least I managed to body-swerve away from the fate of the hikikomori. No one needs to leave my meals on a tray by my door or hire a surrogate sibling to coax me out of the house. I no longer think of myself as giving off some invisible, people-repelling pheromone. I am occasionally seen walking round in public spaces in daylight, and in the evenings I can be taken to parties and left on my own without anyone fearing I will do a tearful flit. If someone knocks on my office door, I answer it (most of the time); if the phone rings, I pick it up (usually).
In other words, I can rustle up a passable impression of a normal person because I know it is part of the deal, the levy we pay on being alive, even if sometimes I have to scrape together every penny of emotional effort to pay it. And, like a reformed smoker, I long to leave the pub or restaurant table with the nicotine addicts and nip outside for a few furtive drags of the precious drug of solitude. I once attended a fire safety awareness lecture at work in which we were told that on entering any building we should take note of the emergency exits, so we knew how to leave in a hurry when the alarm sounded. That’s me, I thought: always with one eye on the door, my escape route planned.
“Do you not think that shyness can be a gift to us?” a friend said to me. “I mean, by giving us a slanted outlook, a special way of seeing the world?” I demurred then, but I am coming round to her way of thinking. Shyness is an unwanted gift most of the time. But a gift it still is, its attendant feelings of apartness granting us hard-won insights we cannot now imagine living without.
In a beautiful essay, “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf writes about how the experience of illness can shatter “that illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another.” When we are ill, we become deserters from the “army of the upright” and look on that army as fighting bravely in a futile cause, while it in turn shuns or forgets about us. The otherness of being ill, its enforcement of stillness and isolation, makes us see that we are all, finally, on our own in this world. In our normally healthy state we keep up the genial pretense and try “to communicate, to civilize, to share.” But in illness “this make-believe ceases.”15
And yet illness, Woolf suggests, also opens up “undiscovered countries,” new fields of awareness that can be as creative as they are chastening.16 They remind us that our lives are built on sand and that in the end nothing matters. People trapped in the impenetrable bubble of grief often say the same thing: forced to step outside the routines of communal daily life, they see them for what they are, a collectively conjured-up chimera. Shyness offers us a low-intensity but longer-lasting version of this state of feeling lifted out of the swim of social life and looking askance at a world that seems baffling and strange.
The sense of alienation this brings may turn us slightly mad, just as illness and grief do. Think of the unnamed narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, who w
onders how many people there are in the world like herself “who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.”17 But being behind that distorted wall also lets us look at the social world from the outside in. And that is a gift—as long as we keep a grip on reality by scaling the wall occasionally and joining in once again with the make-believe of the army of the upright.
We still cannot make up our minds about shyness. Some see it as a form of rudeness or conceit, others as a sign of sensitivity and sagacity. I have come to feel that it has little meaning in itself. It is so dirt-common that no especially disagreeable or virtuous human attributes can be extrapolated from it. It cohabits with egotism and self-pity as readily as with modesty and thoughtfulness. Shyness is just there, another piece in the intricate jigsaw of human diversity, and all that studying it has taught me is what I knew already: human behavior is endlessly rich and odd.
In The Scars of Evolution (1990), Elaine Morgan argues that many parts of the human body are accidental residues of the weird, purposeless process of evolution. That kink in the lumbar region of the spine that allows us to stand up, for example, is an evolutionary botch, which means that our vertebrae are unable to take too much strain without slipping out of place. And so a choice made by a few of our ape-like ancestors about four million years ago, to stop moving on all fours and stand erect, accounts for today’s most common reason for being on sick leave: lower back pain. In a phenomenon that evolutionary biologists call maladaptive behavior, traits that evolved to allow an animal to thrive in one situation may not work in another.