I came across the term "autonomy contentment" a few months back, in the context of describing the psychologically healthy outlier — those few people who are actually happier (not out of a fearful response) with being by themselves than with having a lot of friends and a busy social life.
Most conventional thinking in the field of psychology suggests that people live longer, and enjoy a higher level of contentment, suffer less depression and generally have fewer medical conditions when they have people in their lives, and close friends, and an active social life.
However there are a few people who buck this trend and throw a bit of a wrinkle into the statistics by being the exact opposite.
In fact these people often feel stressed out and slightly irritated at the process of having to socialize not because they are antisocial, nor because they're introverts or have an anxiety disorder but simply because they prefer their own company in a healthy and well balanced fashion.
And just to clarify: these are not the creepy reclusive Unabomber types, but perfectly normal people that you probably bump into on a regular basis and you may even see at events from time to time but the bulk of their life is spent in happy solitude and they are actually very healthy and happy with that situation.
What they generally have in common is a very strong internal locus of control, meaning that they are largely self-directed in their choices, choosing their path through life largely independently of other people's opinions and influences.
For example (figuratively speaking) you would never catch them wearing blue sweaters just because blue sweaters are considered fashionable or the appropriate thing to wear, they would only wear blue sweaters because they like blue sweaters.
These people are also fairly frequently accused of being "selfish" because they tend to steer clear of interpersonal dramas. That's not to say that they choose to not have friends at all, but their friends are generally very few and carefully "curated" because — for lack of a better term — they have very little tolerance for other people's bullshit, only for sincere and authentic interactions.
Because relatively few people are sincerely interested in living in drama free zones as it were, they often discover that they have very few peers, but at the same time they don't consider that necessarily a drawback or a difficulty while the few true peer level relationships they do have they value very highly.
While it may be true that this set of attributes is primarily found in introverts it is by no means limited to introverts only; extroverts may experience the same thing... just feeling a need to participate in social activities with others a little more frequently but still with a preference for being by themselves.
These people are likely less common than the typical reclusive loners who are dealing with trauma and issues like social anxiety, agorophobia, antisocial personalities and such.
The article I read was actually the first I've come across to admit that there are some people who are actually healthier and better off as loners... a state/choice that is virtually always associated with some kind of pathology.
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