Сьюзан Кейн - Quiet [The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking]

On the first night we drift to our bedrooms, housed in a dormlike building. I brace myself instinctively: now’s the time when I’ll want to read or sleep, but will instead be called upon to have a pillow fight (summer camp) or play a loud and boring drinking game (college). But at Walker Creek Ranch, my roommate, a twenty-seven-year-old secretary with huge, doe-like eyes and the ambition to become an author, is happy to spend the evening writing peacefully in her journal. I do the same.

Of course, the weekend is not completely without tension. Some people are reserved to the point of appearing sullen. Sometimes the do-your-own-thing policy threatens to devolve into mutual loneliness as everyone goes their own separate ways. In fact, there is such a deficit of the social behavior we call “cool” that I begin thinking someone should be cracking jokes, stirring things up, handing out rum-and-Cokes. Shouldn’t they?

The truth is, as much as I crave breathing room for sensitive types, I enjoy hail-fellows-well-met, too. I’m glad for the “cool” among us, and I miss them this weekend. I’m starting to speak so softly that I feel like I’m putting myself to sleep. I wonder if deep down the others feel this way, too.

Tom, the software engineer and Abraham Lincoln look-alike, tells me of a former girlfriend who was always throwing open the doors of her house to friends and strangers. She was adventurous in every way: she loved new food, new sexual experiences, new people. It didn’t work out between them—Tom eventually craved the company of a partner who would focus more on their relationship and less on the outside world, and he’s happily married now to just such a woman—but he’s glad for the time with his ex-girlfriend.

As Tom talks, I think of how much I miss my husband, Ken, who’s back home in New York and not a sensitive type either, far from it. Sometimes this is frustrating: if something moves me to tears of empathy or anxiety, he’ll be touched, but grow impatient if I stay that way too long. But I also know that his tougher attitude is good for me, and I find his company endlessly delightful. I love his effortless charm. I love that he never runs out of interesting things to say. I love how he pours his heart and soul into everything he does, and everyone he loves, especially our family.

But most of all I love his way of expressing compassion. Ken may be aggressive, more aggressive in a week than I’ll be in a lifetime, but he uses it on behalf of others. Before we met, he worked for the UN in war zones all over the world, where, among other things, he conducted prisoner-of-war and detainee release negotiations. He would march into fetid jails and face down camp commanders with machine guns strapped to their chests until they agreed to release young girls who’d committed no crime other than to be female and victims of rape. After many years on the job, he went home and wrote down what he’d witnessed, in books and articles that bristled with rage. He didn’t write in the style of a sensitive person, and he made a lot of people angry. But he wrote like a person who cares, desperately.

I thought that Walker Creek Ranch would make me long for a world of the highly sensitive, a world in which everyone speaks softly and no one carries a big stick. But instead it reinforced my deeper yearning for balance. This balance, I think, is what Elaine Aron would say is our natural state of being, at least in Indo-European cultures like ours, which she observes have long been divided into “warrior kings” and “priestly advisers,” into the executive branch and the judicial branch, into bold and easy FDRs and sensitive, conscientious Eleanor Roosevelts.

Just after 7:30 a.m. on December 11, 2008, the year of the great stock market crash, Dr. Janice Dorn’s phone rang. The markets had opened on the East Coast to another session of carnage. Housing prices were plummeting, credit markets were frozen, and GM teetered on the brink of bankruptcy.

Dorn took the call from her bedroom, as she often does, wearing a headset and perched atop her green duvet. The room was decorated sparely. The most colorful thing in it was Dorn herself, who, with her flowing red hair, ivory skin, and trim frame, looks like a mature version of Lady Godiva. Dorn has a PhD in neuroscience, with a specialty in brain anatomy. She’s also an MD trained in psychiatry, an active trader in the gold futures market, and a “financial psychiatrist” who has counseled an estimated six hundred traders.

“Hi, Janice!” said the caller that morning, a confident-sounding man named Alan. “Do you have time to talk?”

Dr. Dorn did not have time. A day trader who prides herself on being in and out of trading positions every half hour, she was eager to start trading. But Dorn heard a desperate note in Alan’s voice. She agreed to take the call.

Alan was a sixty-year-old midwesterner who struck Dorn as a salt-of-the-earth type, hardworking and loyal. He had the jovial and assertive manner of an extrovert, and he maintained his good cheer despite the story of disaster he proceeded to tell. Alan and his wife had worked all their lives, and managed to sock away a million dollars for retirement. But four months earlier he’d gotten the idea that, despite having no experience in the markets, he should buy a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of GM stock, based on reports that the U.S. government might bail out the auto industry. He was convinced it was a no-lose investment.

After his trade went through, the media reported that the bailout might not happen after all. The market sold off GM and the stock price fell. But Alan imagined the thrill of winning big. It felt so real he could taste it. He held firm. The stock fell again, and again, and kept dropping until finally Alan decided to sell, at a big loss.

There was worse to come. When the next news cycle suggested that the bailout would happen after all, Alan got excited all over again and invested another hundred thousand dollars, buying more stock at the lower price. But the same thing happened: the bailout started looking uncertain.

Alan “reasoned” (this word is in quotation marks because, according to Dorn, conscious reasoning had little to do with Alan’s behavior) that the price couldn’t go much lower. He held on, savoring the idea of how much fun he and his wife would have spending all the money he stood to make. Again the stock went lower. When finally it hit seven dollars per share, Alan sold. And bought yet again, in a flush of exhilaration, when he heard that the bailout might happen after all …

By the time GM’s stock price fell to two dollars a share, Alan had lost seven hundred thousand dollars , or 70 percent of his family nest egg.

He was devastated. He asked Dorn if she could help recoup his losses. She could not. “It’s gone,” she told him. “You are never going to make that money back.”

He asked what he’d done wrong.

Dorn had many ideas about that. As an amateur, Alan shouldn’t have been trading in the first place. And he’d risked far too much money; he should have limited his exposure to 5 percent of his net worth, or $50,000. But the biggest problem may have been beyond Alan’s control: Dorn believed he was experiencing an excess of something psychologists call reward sensitivity .