INTJs don't get lonely, you get understaffed

detail New Yorker Cover January 24th 1977 by Pierre Le-Tan

Loneliness is a word other people use for missing people. You don’t miss people. You miss functions.

The last time you felt something you’d reluctantly call lonely, it wasn’t a longing for company. It was an open position: nobody to test this idea against. Nobody who can hear the plan and find the flaw in under a minute. Nobody who can share a room without filling it.

This is why loneliness cures don’t work on you. Join a club, go to the party, put yourself out there — you go, and you come home depleted and exactly as understaffed as before. The party is a hiring fair for a job nobody there is qualified for.

Your relationships are already a staffing model. The person you send the article to. The person you call for the second opinion that’s really a first opinion, because you don’t trust your own excitement. The person for the four-hour drive with no talking. Each role is filled by exactly one person, and you have no bench. When the flaw-finder moves away or gets archived, you don't grieve. You absorb the job yourself. Your own devil’s advocate, your own second opinion, your own silence. That’s what you were doing when you told yourself you were fine alone.

You’re not wrong that three people is enough — when the three roles are filled. The problem isn’t headcount. It’s that you run mission-critical functions with no redundancy, and you last opened a requisition in 2014. Your hiring is purely reactive: you recruit only when a vacancy becomes unbearable. You’d fire a manager who ran a team this way.

So skip putting yourself out there. Write the job description. Name the role that’s been empty so long you stopped noticing the workload, and recruit for that, where that specialist actually goes. It’s not networking. It’s a search.

What role has been open the longest?