Smartphones no longer feel like tools. They feel like absence when they are missing. The anxiety of a lost phone is rarely about the device itself. It is about disorientation. Contacts disappear, memory fragments vanish, and coordination with the world collapses. When something so small can disrupt so much, it stops behaving like an object and starts behaving like a function.

We talk about personality as if it were permanent. You are introverted. You are ambitious. You are bad with people. The language is solid, almost geological, as though personality were something discovered rather than formed.

Introversion feels ancient. We imagine quiet observers in every era, standing slightly apart from the crowd. But the way we understand introversion today as a stable personality type, even an identity may be far more modern than it appears.