Social Withdrawal and the Cost of Being with Others

In writing about social withdrawal I have tended to write mainly about the economic and socioeconomic factors that seem to me to encourage this--the way the gap between "middle class" aspirations and what people are actually achieving, for example, has grown, the high monetary costs of participating in social life, and how all these create inducements for people to just "drop out" of the job market, the dating market, every market, and stay home, and immerse themselves in the world of Azeroth (or whatever has replaced it these days).

Still, it does seem to me that the quality of interpersonal relations does enter into this. I recall, for example, David Foster Wallace writing that the lonely are often people not willing to bear the costs of being with others--emotional as well as financial. It stands to reason that those who give more and get less satisfaction out of the experience of being with others--who, around others, find themselves repressing themselves all the time, for example; who find themselves enduring rather than enjoying the company of other people--will simply have less to do with those others. The resulting isolation may not be what they really want out of life--but as is much more often the case than those pampered idiots who speak so pompously about "choice" admit, life for most people, most of the time, is about what seems "least-worst" within a fairly unappealing range of options rather than the truly desirable.

It also seems to me the case that there is an interaction between the economic and the emotional here. Those who have not managed to live up to social expectations and "fit in" for whatever reason have fewer contacts and less status. Their choice of personal relations is smaller, and whatever their range of choice the people they deal with are likely to treat them less well--leaving them with that much more incentive to keep to themselves.