Yeah I’m not from California LOL. I do not have the standard INTJ defense lines against instantly hating people who believe in astrology. If I had thought that being nice to someone who believed in astrology would facilitate my having had an additional sexual partner at 21 I guarantee I would have found this my damn self lol.
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This is really interesting. I imagine there are often things we misidentify about ourselves because it is an adaptation response to a disorder or trauma rather than our authentic self.
I dunno. Like I’d be hard pressed to call myself decisive - I change my mind 400 times before arriving at something.
I’m probably squarely in the middle tbh. I crave order and cleanliness, but I prefer the flexibility to… not be orderly and cleanly. And I frequently do things on a whim, but once I have engaged a whim, I stick to it firmly.
I decided to go to college with all of like 15 seconds of thought. Now look where my life is. A lot of stuff in my life has been like that - very little thought given, but just roll with the punches and let it work out.
I prefer freedom more than anything else. It’s a major reason why I fear settling down with a family - it’ll limit my options
I generally feel like ADHD is a filter that gets laid over your entire personality like a lense or something. A certain personality type + ADHD is the right way to think about it.
I like this model because as you medicate the ADHD the filter changes but the personality stays constant underneath it (plus or minus any hormonal changes from the meds… drugs that fuck with your hormones change your personality)
My experience of winning poker players is that most of them could be well described as INTJ’s with ADHD. This might be why so many of us like this crowd so much. It’s a bunch of people who are very similar to us personality makeup wise.
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Let me think on it, but from my readings years ago, the way you’re describing the J function is a common misconception. It’s not really about being decisive. It’s about your need for internal or external organization, whether you prefer things being spontaneous or planned (which is not the same as whether you tend to act in a planned or spontaneous manner).
For example, a lot of people with ADHD are hyper-spontaneous and do not enjoy it at all. But the imbalance makes it hard for them to perceive where the disorder vs their preference begins.
Some similar thoughts are what led me to conclude it’s important to seek treatment and if necessary medication. It’s super helpful to alter your state and see what parts of yourself become available or minimized and then live like that long enough to get used to it and see if that’s the state that enables you to thrive.
I discovered that the version of myself that’s easy to manifest on a medication, for example, is far preferable to the person that most easily manifests when I’m not on the stuff such that it’s well worth the side effects. I mean the side effects are things I don’t care about anyway.
The universe is composed of random and unrelated facts. Astrology and personality tests are ways for people to organize relevant facts in a cognitive map that they are capable of understanding. The same can be said for religion, ideology, philosophy, or belief system. It’s a crazy world and most people would go mad trying to contemplate its entirety.
Some intelligence is really just pattern recognition. Lots of people are stupid and bad at recognizing patterns, so they love it when someone hands them a pre-existing pattern to use in understanding the world. Of course, since they are bad at recognizing patterns, they are at risk of being fooled by a bad pattern, one reason why QAnon is so popular.
The danger of personality tests is that people want to fit neatly into a pattern, so a score on something like Myers-Briggs risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, where some people try to make themselves a better fit for the description. The same goes for astrology. It certainly happens in politics, where when someone identifies with a political party, they are prone to moving their political beliefs to be more in sync with the party’s mainstream to reduce cognitive dissonance.
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I believe Indiana Jones said it best when he told his students that archeology is the study of facts. If they want truth, they need to go down the hall to the philosophy class. I don’t think anything has any meaning but what we manifest.
A good point too about pattern recognition. I hear you about the concern for people being drawn in by faulty but persuasive patterns from things like QAnon, but I tend to have a more optimistic view that the people swimming in the deeper end are grappling with something that transcends QAnon or whatever cult they’re in. You leave one cult, you just join another. Nothing else will feel right until they deal with the mentality that draws them to cults.
That is a really good point that it can be as much a tool to reveal your current self as it can be to determine in what direction you’d like to grow. Kind of a chicken and egg situation, no? It’s hard to say where the representation vs growth begins.
Are they growing in the direction of a political party at the cost of their authentic selves? I take you to be saying that people sometimes are, and while I wouldn’t deny that this happens, I again take a more optimistic view that people grow in that direction because they meaningfully identify with those aspects. I mean that as much for progressives I agree with as people who understand the concept of systemic racism but reject that it exists.
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I just took it for the second time ever. Got a different personality than a few years back.
Want to guess @RiskyFlush?
I will as soon as I calm down from hitting “view post” on someone I keep on eternal ignore.
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Sorry for the @.
You can put me back on it.
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LOL!!!
Years back I was INTJ but this fits me better.
Still not perfect as I’m a clear communicator in relationships and am an open book in general.
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That is because you are an Assertive mediator (vs a Turbulent mediator). In my experience, assertive mediators more closely resemble the emotionally mature and deliberate expressions of an ENFJ. This sometimes unsettles people who aren’t used to checking in so often or so deeply, but for the people looking for vulnerability and connection, the Assertive INFP may be an unusually good fit. Some of my closest friends identified as INFPs and ENFPs.
By clear communicator, are you referring to whether you are conflict-averse?
Have you found a purpose for your talents or do you feel kind of aimless? Just thinking of INFPs I’ve known. How remarkably competent and assured they can seem, yet have a deeper talk and discover finding fulfilment in a hollow situation is a talent that prevents them from manifesting what would fulfill them longer than a moment.
Hard to be certain about my social self-assessments after a year of quasi-quarantine. I could see this changing somewhat 6 months post-COVID.
INTP-T to be exact
|Introverted|-|89%|
|Intuitive|-|66%|
|Thinking|-|65%|
|Prospecting|-|74%|
|Turbulent|-|67%|
Used to test as INTJ for years.
I typed this out and deleted it a few times. The internet is such a public place and I’m afraid of being seen.
Being poor sucks
I tell myself this is how a lot of people felt all of 2020 so I’m actually lucky to have had periods where I had several months of income and could relax. I’m not worried about being evicted, there’s still food in the refrigerator. But I still am struggling to cope day to day while waiting for the feast/famine of freelancing to turn again or for any of this government assistance this year to manifest.
It takes me back to being a kid when we’d lose the lights or starve until we went to the food pantry or got evicted again. We kept candles on hand in case that was the only way to see at night. One year we ran a line through a window to our next-door neighbor to borrow electricity and keep the fridge running. That was really generous of them.
Compared to that kind of poverty, I may as well be a millionaire. But that’s not my perspective as it stands today. In some ways I learned to be happy and thrive with none of the financial comforts or security that at some point began to matter to me. It’s taken me a long time just to grow into more than what I grew up in.
I have this feeling of both imminent possibility and overwhelming futility. Half a dozen different things could cross the line any day now, but every day they don’t I think okay, I won’t just sit here and wait for those things to happen. What else is within my power to influence this situation? If it’s nothing then I’ll choose to do nothing until there’s another option, but if there’s something…
I don’t share a lot of personal stuff here out of fear of encountering what for me can feel like an aggressive cadre of dudes. But I feel I’m unusually sensitive to such things and don’t say it as a judgment or to blame anyone. I like that dynamic when it comes to the forum’s discussion of politics, and everyone ITT is generally not at all like what I described anyway as long as I don’t interact with anyone in a Politics thread.
Okay thanks.
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keep your head up is all i can say, you can get through it
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This is interesting. I’ve tested as an INTP forever. The T/F scale was always the one where I was closest to the middle, so I guess it makes sense.
Interesting.
Do you primarily ask
- WHO does this help?
- HOW does this help?
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