Before I begin, I just want to make clear that this post was inspired by a comment from another submission. This is not a response to that comment; that comment simply made me think about its contents very critically. Reddit won't let me link to that submission so I'm just going to name it (Charisma: Forget you exist in any interaction) and provide the specific comment in question:

the introvert is only selfish and self absorbed: he/she is not introverted. Be successful by not living in your own head.

The Average Boy

Being young meant going out into the world and discovering things. It meant listening to my mom and my dad because they knew better and because I, as a child, was raised to believe that I didn't know what was best for me (and that was true). I did think about things, of course, but I would never dwell on them for too long. I wanted to see and do shit, I was amazed by everything, I wanted to have fun with my friends, I was naive and gullible; I was an average fucking kid.

When I got a little older and started high school, I was much more intelligent and I thought about things a lot more. I was rebellious and thought I had figured the whole world out and that I knew the secret to saving it; again, I was just another teenager. What came with that improved intelligence, however, was the ability to understand what was happening around me. When someone died or something really bad happened in my family, I didn't feel better and forget about it just because my mom or dad hugged me. When someone made fun of me for whatever reason, it stuck to me because I was intelligent enough to take it to heart. I understood rejection from girls and it hurt and made me question myself; same goes for disappointment from loved ones, family, etc, you know what I'm talking about. In other words, all the fun-and-games attitude that I had built up in my younger years was slowly disappearing the more I was exposed to the negative sides of life. This happens to everyone, but not everyone deals with it in the same way.

Becoming a Man

In order to become a man, every boy must be able to overcome their problems and take control of their lives. There's a reason the concept of "becoming a man" is almost universal: you have to work for it and overcome some obstacle. The reason I was able to overcome my obstacles and become a man was because I was an introvert. I never liked people, in fact I still fucking hate people, so I lived inside my own head because I didn't want to deal with their shit and I couldn't give less of a fuck about what was happening around me. This didn't mean I always avoided people or that I never had conversations with friends, but only that I had way, way more conversations inside my own head, and that I enjoyed seclusion a lot. Whether my introversion is genetic or not, I don't know, but here is my theory concerning how people generally react and process the "outside world" relative to their personality.

Brick by Brick

When someone hurts you to such a degree that you may question the purpose of your very existence, that shit leaves a scar. When a close family member whose a good person dies of cancer or when you witness some bully break your best friend's arm, or when your girl cheats on your or you get fired for something you didn't do, that makes you question the meaning and fairness of life. I believe that the overwhelming majority of people deal with these issues like this: they look to their friends and their family and everything external to console them. The last thing they want to do is be lonely because that will just make them drown in their own thoughts. They don't want to think about the hardships and cruel sides of life; they want to ignore them and try and look towards better, brighter things. It's all about forgetting what happened, being with other people, and moving on as quickly as possible.

Here's my take on the problem with that attitude:

You're never properly hurt. You never actually internalized and realized how whatever happened made you really feel because you kept distracting yourself with trying to feel better by being around other people. You never cried and felt like you had to solve or overcome this problem on your own because you always had an easy way out of it by just ignoring it and being with others. You tried to relate to others so you wouldn't feel so bad about yourself. You defined yourself and your happiness relative to the "outside world" and compared yourself to others: "Everyone's unhappy and everyone feels like this from time to time because this is a part of life, so you might as well get over it and move on." You never had your back up against the world, boot at your throat, with the realization that you and only you are capable of lifting that motherfucker off you. Society always showed you a way out. And this is why most people who have grown up like this always feel empty inside. Whenever they're reminded of past horrors in their lives, they break down. They live a life of avoiding themselves. They moved on so quickly from what had happened so they wouldn't feel any pain, but that meant that they never truly understood or made sense of that pain. They just wanted the pain to stop. Whenever the pain returned in the form of a memory, it hit them really hard because they were concerned with avoiding it rather than building defenses against it.

Now, I never had the opportunity to do any of that. Like I said, I was an introvert; a very, very strong introvert. When shit hit the fan and I had a bad day, a bad month, a bad year, whatever, I couldn't look to the "outside world" to help alleviate my problems because I didn't want to talk to anyone. I didn't care about the "outside world" so it never dawned on me that I could find the solutions to my problems in it. I wanted to be alone. And I was alone. And I would cry and contemplate suicide and the meaning of life at night. I thought I was a failure because there were so many negative thoughts in my head and only one will. I was sorry I was my mom and dad's son. When my girlfriend left me and I put on weight and slid into depression, there was no one there for me. But as the days, months, and then years went by, everything that I had thought had been so bad and crippling in my life suddenly felt... less bad. I didn't understand why. Nothing changed, right? I was still the same old introvert and I still remembered all the bad days like they happened yesterday. Why wasn't I afraid of remembering them and why didn't they make me feel as bad as they used to make me feel? And how come when I broke up with my next girlfriend, or when a friend died, or when I lost a job, it didn't hit me as hard? It's not a matter of me getting older. There are countless people my age and older who go through the same problems but who are affected much more severely. So what happened?

My mind and its happy attitude was a glass house when I was a kid. Every mind was. It was pretty but very susceptible and very fragile. People could look right through me and read who and what I was. I was very honest and so I was very prone to being gullible, but I was still happy because I didn't know any better. And as I grew older, I was intelligent enough to let external life have an effect on it. It was no longer only rays of sunshine that my mind was receiving (the good moments), but also bricks (the bad moments). Fucking bricks. The next bad thing that would happened to me and make me feel really shitty was another brick flying at my fucking beautiful glass house. And the glass started to shatter. And ultimately at one point the whole thing broke and collapsed and that was that. I was on the verge of suicide because I felt like I had nothing left. If I had been an extrovert, I would have looked for help from others and I would have tried putting the pieces of glass back together (and you know it's never going to look the same, and this is why most people remain scarred for the rest of their lives). I would live a life of patching up my glass house and trying my best to dodge (avoid) all the bricks (problems) flying at my house. But because I was an introvert and because I never bothered reaching out and patching up the glass house, all I had were fucking bricks. And what's better than a glass house? A fucking fort. All I had were bricks, so I decided to use them. All the problems and all the heartaches and all the pain I had felt, I used to literally build a fucking fort. I was stuck in my own head, I had nowhere to go, so all I could do was try and make sense of the troubles in life and reflect. Why did this happen? What can I do about it? What lesson am I going to take from it? There's no one here to figure this out for me, so I better figure it out on my own. Be a man and face what just happened and try and make sense of it. And the more I understood these problems, the more I faced them and the more I matured with them, the more bricks I had to add to my fort. Whenever another brick is thrown at me now, it just bounces off the walls of my fort. If it's a big brick, it might still do some damage, but it's not gonna break me and one day I'm gonna take that big brick and build an even thicker wall. The wall that makes up my fort is the accumulation of all the years of pain and trouble transformed into wisdom, maturity, and confidence. I've turned all the negativity and bullshit in my life into a base of operations, and only now do I have a genuine, healthy, and clear path ahead. I used the bricks that were thrown at me unlike the vast majority of people out there. I became a man.

Conclusion

Be successful by not living in your own head.

I cannot understand such a comment. I know I might be misinterpreting what the OP of that submission meant and for that I apologize, but those words could not be more wrong in my case. I am successful, and I cleared a path forward, precisely because I lived inside my own head. It was the act of living in my own head that might have saved my life. I am a man with ambition and drive because I lived inside my own head and because I didn't rely on solving my problems by diverting my attention.

I just want to make a final point: moving on is good and talking to people about your problems is a great thing. It's awesome when you can share a beer with your friend and talk about how she was a slut anyway and how you'll just find another girl next week. It's why I come on TRP, because I feel like I can relate to like-minded individuals and because I like to share and hear new ideas. I also don't think that just because you're an introvert or that just because you're an extrovert, x will happen. All I'm doing is describing my scenario (and hopefully the scenario of other men here) and emphasizing the point of facing your problems. I certainly don't think or advocate that you need to contemplate suicide like I did before you make a similar realization. All I'm emphasizing is to not avoid what scares you and to not try and distract yourself by the "outside world." That is a recipe for disaster. Admit your problems and your troubles and face them head-on by understanding them and making sense of them. It doesn't matter how long it takes, just make sure you never try and avoid them. Facing your problems will slowly but surely allow you to gather wisdom and maturity which will eventually help you overcome them and move forward. The more you suffer now and the harder you work now, picking up and moving bricks, the more confident and the more relaxed you will be in the future. You will become a man with a fucking fort of a mind.

Question: I always wondered how this tied to women. Because they're generally much more emotional and in need of attention, does this mean they're less likely to face their problems in the aforementioned, rational, way, and does that then explain why they're so fragile internally and why a lot of them remain unhappy their entire lives?

Build a fort, you men.

Good night.