The Gift of Not Belonging by Dr Rami Kaminski: Hate Small Talk? You could be an Einstein!

As a boy, the American psychiatrist Rami Kaminski seemed perfectly normal: he was funny and had plenty of friends, he wasn’t shy or reclusive or socially anxious.

But from an early age, he writes in The Gift Of Not Belonging, he felt apart from the herd.

He abhorred group activities, and though he wanted to share his friends’ interests – sexual conquests, sports teams, the Rolling Stones – he just didn’t care about anything they did.

He was, in short, a true individual, no matter how hard he tried mentally to fuse with the collective.

Kaminski has now come up with a word for people like him: ‘otroverts’. It was Carl Jung, he notes, who invented the terms introvert and extrovert. But otroverts (derived from ‘otro’, meaning other, and ‘vert’, meaning to turn) face neither inward nor outward: their ‘fundamental orientation’, Kaminski writes, ‘is defined by the fact that it is rarely the same direction that anyone else is facing’.

Otroverts are fundamentally non-communal people, and go through life feeling incapable of fitting in. Parties are a trial; they prefer to do school or work projects alone; they loathe small talk and like to go immediately to the deep stuff.

Queues are a particular torment, as are settings in which people tend to adopt ‘an air of self-seriousness or self-importance’ – such as the opera or avant-garde art shows.

Otroverts tend to obey the rules, because they want to pass as normal, but they have no intellectual respect for them. And though they are keen observers, they are immune to what Kaminski calls the ‘bluetooth phenomenon’ – the ability many people have to emotionally ‘pair’ with others in their vicinity.

You either are an otrovert, according to Kaminski, or you’re not. And particularly for the teenage otrovert, life can be agony.

One therapy client of his sent her 14-year-old son to see him, because she was disturbed by the fact he didn’t seem to suffer from FOMO (the fear of missing out), like most teenagers. But Kaminski saw no reason to be alarmed: her son just wasn’t built for communal life.

Kaminski clearly thinks rather a lot of otroverts like himself, and lassoes all sorts of high-flyers onto his team: Frida Kahlo, Franz Kafka, even Albert Einstein, whom he deems to be ‘perhaps the most famous otrovert’ of all time.

And he claims that there are many benefits to being non-communal. Sure, you might hide in the loos at parents’ evening, but you’re likely to be empathetic, non-judgmental and capable of dazzling out-of-the-box thinking.

The book ends with a fun quiz that seeks to establish whether the reader is likely to be an otrovert or not. I fell short of the category and felt rather insulted not to be in Kaminski’s special club – a reaction presumably appropriate for a communal dullard like me.

Above all, Kaminski argues, otroverts thrive when they embrace who they are. They must not be harassed to take part, but allowed to revel in their glorious difference.