For three years clinical psychiatrist Dr Rami Kaminski ran a little-known website exploring how some people felt like outsiders in society. “If we had three registrants a month it was considered to be popular,” he says. Now it’s getting hundreds of visitors a day, with “40,000 registrants in the last four months”.
The transformation came with the publication of his book The Gift of Not Belonging (Scribe) over the summer, popularising the idea of an otrovert. Kaminski uses the term to describe someone who enjoys meaningful one-to-one relationships but who feels alienated in groups. Think of a self-sufficient free-thinker who hates workplace banter about TV shows or football results.
Speaking by Zoom from his office in New York, he reads from a letter by an 82-year-old woman who said she had struggled all her life “not understanding why I never quite fit in, why I refused to join in … Then I came across your book. I felt an immense wave of relief”. She had “already let go of friends of family as I could no longer bear the boredom and pretending”; now any doubts had disappeared. “I am wild and free.”
Kaminski marvels at her sense of independence, adding he has received “over 1,700 letters like this” from countries including Ireland.
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The term otrovert comes from otro (other) and vert (direction). An otrovert is “one who is facing a different direction”. Or, more precisely, “the personality trait of non-belonging: remaining an eternal outsider in a communal world,” explains Kaminski who is self-diagnosed as one.
But is there a contradiction at the heart of the “otrovert movement”, if one can call it that? Taking on the identity of an otrovert seems to fly in face of the defining instinct to reject membership of a collective. And is it really a coherent “personality style”? Or is it just a pleasing label for stubborn individualists?
Kaminski answers the questions as this week’s Unthinkable guest.
Is it good or bad to be an otrovert?
“The only problem with otroversion is you cannot fit in. There is no group, even your own family, that you feel you belong to. The problem is when you, or others, are trying to get you to fit in. That creates potential problems, which fall by the wayside when you understand you will never be part of the group.”
There’s an argument to say you can’t have an individual identity that is divorced from the community. How do you respond to that criticism?
“There are two criticisms that I got. One, which I must confess I find amusing, is some people said to me: ‘It seems like you thought about it, you sort of observed it, and then wrote about it. Where is the research? Where are the references?’ My answer is: I just wrote a book about not needing consensus; you’re saying I need a consensus before I allow myself to write. I don’t think this way!
“The other thing is I didn’t write the book to convince anybody about anything ... I wrote the book for otroverts and for people who know them. If other people don’t understand, or disagree with it, that’s fine.
“Some people do say, well, we have a communal impulse – which is fair – but then ‘What communal?’ is the question? In other words, in order to know your group you have to learn. And you learn it from your surroundings, from adults, and they always teach you their own notion of community ... No child is born religious, or Irish, or American, or whatever.”
Given otroverts don’t like get-togethers, have you any advice for the Christmas season?
“That is indeed a hardship for otroverts. I didn’t even want to go to my own wedding. I think the best advice for otroverts is don’t try to fit in. If you cannot go, don’t go ... We accept a lot of unnecessary obligations.
“Unless you have children, you owe nothing to anyone in the world. The only people you owe something to is your children because they didn’t ask to be born.”
What would you say to someone who calls this selfish?
“It just betrays the communal perception of the world. If you are not in a community – if you don’t identify with a group – it means that you are weird, a kind of misanthrope, loner ... but people like otroverts are very nice, very affectionate, can have phenomenal interpersonal relationships. Of all of my friend group, I am the only one who stayed happily married for 40 years.”
Are otroverts by definition nice?
“To me every person I meet is a person, and that’s it. I think that’s what makes otroverts very empathic – and also, interestingly, the person is equal.
“I will say one thing to you: You are the most important entity in your life. There is no one else that is more important than you. There is no else for whom you should give your life, or give this or that. And it’s not about being selfish, it’s about being self-centred.
“If you are not centred on yourself, and the primacy of your self in your life, you start having a delusion about shared faith. Like, many people feel if you drown alone, or drown with 100 people, it feels like drowning with 100 people is easier.”
