(I'm still used to "Verby", with the v pronounced as f, from the discord, even if the username-revert button is gone and I'm Wyrd for the time being.)
I've largely been holding back anything like this because frankly I feel embarrassed to even use this forum even if I like a lot of specific people here and I don't want to put out identifying information about myself (you can often identify people in other contexts just from posting styles, subject matter, etc. I had a teacher once that could identify her students on Internet sites. So I post basically in-character, to try to convey myself but not be myself. I can change my language usage so it's legitimately at least not obviously identifiable as me, which is fun, but the point is to keep the character and content similar enough, so it's hard to balance compared to just character-alts). But now I feel like posting this is really the only way to drive all of my points home, and also people can attempt to type me. I've got actual detailed records of my thoughts and actions with and without regard to various typologies over the years and I can make a case study on typology as a concept rather than just a specific typology or aspect of it.
Anyways, here's Schildmaid's ancient questionnaire: http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin...re-(Schildmaid) I always feel like re-reading this would make me cringe, but then I re-read it and don't, although it's not really good either, just meh. I made this based on my records trying not to frame it in terms of socionics (which is difficult once you've been primed to) but I entirely left out the context for the reason I posted, feeling embarrassed to post on a site like this.
The context: This summer, way before I knew about this site at all, I had basically a crisis of values (and a lot of my posts revolve around this). The reason I had a crisis of values is because before, I was completely nihilistic, but I didn't really act it. How I was fairly certain the world was was summarized by this Bertrand Russell quotation:
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.
Basically, I was sort of sucked up into some egotistical idea of my own mental strength, and anyone who wasn't strong enough to face despair and nihilism was self-deluded and mentally weak, including, and even especially, all the sort of optimistic "humanist" atheist types, since they couldn't see through to the end of their own ideals. But then later I started relating these beliefs to every single detail of my life, including attempting to fall asleep at night and get out of bed when I woke up. I couldn't find a reason to, and I couldn't find a reason not to (and I mentioned this offhand in a random post that I won't dig up right now, "If you don't have values, you can't find a reason to stay in bed, or to get out of bed, or to do anything at all!"). So to do anything at all, I resorted to using probabilities: You don't know for sure, so you should do X in case you could find a reason to fall asleep, get out of bed, etc. This bothered me rather extremely, because I used to just be super decisive and opinionated all the time and that was well-known (From Schildmaid's Questionnaire: "I tend to be quite opinionated about things and that can cause a lot of fights,") and now I felt like I knew absolutely nothing and simply couldn't hold onto a strong opinion like I used to. I even got to the point where I was thinking of the blow-everything-up kind of nihilism, and felt like I had no information to hold an opinion on that either and felt like I had to earnestly wonder whether it was wrong or right, and it also seemed like such an extreme thing that it should be incredibly easy to form an opinion on whether it's wrong or right (and it should be obviously wrong, since I just like life, as do most people, but on the off-chance that life is bad like people misinterpret Schopenhauer as saying, and there's some irresolvable flaw in it that no one realizes that's causing my paralysis, that should also be obvious).
So I felt utterly powerless, unable to choose even my thoughts on what seemed like the most obvious things, and was largely settling into a state of actual paralysis due to my perception that I knew nothing (hence all the focus on values on the questionnaire, and this peculiar sentence in particular: "I'd rather someone take the wrong side on something that matters than just be indifferent"). So I just ended up isolating myself and reading and thinking like a lunatic for a while, like someone on some sort of vision-quest or something (and this also spawned my Closed-Eye Hallucinations thread, since I had a lot of those during this time period from trying to induce them and generally succeeding) just to see if I could find an excuse to claim I knew anything at all again. I talked myself out of my old beliefs very easily by beating myself up over "your beliefs aren't driven by a desire to know the truth, which no one knows, but by some vain idea of your own mental strength. Now take yourself out of the picture and try again", but although I found all the things I didn't know (basically anything), I couldn't find a single thing I did know. And after a while, I had some actual experiences that showed me some few things I knew that I could use to go back to being normally super decisive and opinionated again and not paralyzed, which started as "how would I know I knew something?" (which was the first thing I knew, although it took some work) and then went on to some very vague actual things I knew gradually. But swinging too far the other way like on my questionnaire and some other posts feels mildly embarrassing and dumb, although I see the cause of my problems as a generalized external problem in the world that just paradoxically manifested a certain way for me despite my constant referring to myself as having been "drawn away" from everything (what the specific cause is I'm keeping to myself since how I discuss it is far more identifying than anything I've said here, which is generic enough, but still a sort of stereotypical heavy-duty existential crisis) and am just trying to lead people out of it really (my best bet is just to write a lot of well-written fiction books since that's how people are won over to new ideas and ideals again and again, although debating people still makes for good practice to scope out how various other people think and what I should do with that. Writing philosophy books or whatever seems utterly useless to me at this point).
I've had exposure to enneagram years before this actually, but didn't take it seriously and forgot it after a week or two. My mother made everyone do a quiz, IIRC, and she typed me as an 8 because of the description "strive to be in control" (and used this as an excuse not to give me pretty much any control no mater how much I fought for it, since apparently me wanting to decide what I ate or wore or whatever was a neurosis now, although I still had success fighting for these things sometimes despite how young I was, and mostly I was just secretive about them since I knew I had a 95% chance of not being able to get what I want if she knew what I wanted) and I typed myself as a 4 because "no one understands me" and "I'm unique and creative and emotionally intense". I didn't even know what instincts were so I have nothing on that, but I also wrote down a long, long list of "All the reasons I'm an F type in MBTI" and the last thing I got before coming to socionics was INFJ, and I rejected socionics EII primarily on it not being a Decisive or Negativist type even when it came up on my top 4 on the socionics.com quiz. I thought Rational was MBTI J = pragmatic, organized, disciplined, serious, so I was dead-set on Rational types starting out as well, but all the dichotomies did (and largely still do) confuse me to some extent.
So, type Verby, and also think about how this relates to what I said about typology: this is a lot of my context for my posting here, but is it really me or just some (admittedly rather important) aspect of me that something else can replace in due time? In any case, here's your case study.
I've largely been holding back anything like this because frankly I feel embarrassed to even use this forum even if I like a lot of specific people here and I don't want to put out identifying information about myself (you can often identify people in other contexts just from posting styles, subject matter, etc. I had a teacher once that could identify her students on Internet sites. So I post basically in-character, to try to convey myself but not be myself. I can change my language usage so it's legitimately at least not obviously identifiable as me, which is fun, but the point is to keep the character and content similar enough, so it's hard to balance compared to just character-alts). But now I feel like posting this is really the only way to drive all of my points home, and also people can attempt to type me. I've got actual detailed records of my thoughts and actions with and without regard to various typologies over the years and I can make a case study on typology as a concept rather than just a specific typology or aspect of it.
Anyways, here's Schildmaid's ancient questionnaire: http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin...re-(Schildmaid) I always feel like re-reading this would make me cringe, but then I re-read it and don't, although it's not really good either, just meh. I made this based on my records trying not to frame it in terms of socionics (which is difficult once you've been primed to) but I entirely left out the context for the reason I posted, feeling embarrassed to post on a site like this.
The context: This summer, way before I knew about this site at all, I had basically a crisis of values (and a lot of my posts revolve around this). The reason I had a crisis of values is because before, I was completely nihilistic, but I didn't really act it. How I was fairly certain the world was was summarized by this Bertrand Russell quotation:
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.
Basically, I was sort of sucked up into some egotistical idea of my own mental strength, and anyone who wasn't strong enough to face despair and nihilism was self-deluded and mentally weak, including, and even especially, all the sort of optimistic "humanist" atheist types, since they couldn't see through to the end of their own ideals. But then later I started relating these beliefs to every single detail of my life, including attempting to fall asleep at night and get out of bed when I woke up. I couldn't find a reason to, and I couldn't find a reason not to (and I mentioned this offhand in a random post that I won't dig up right now, "If you don't have values, you can't find a reason to stay in bed, or to get out of bed, or to do anything at all!"). So to do anything at all, I resorted to using probabilities: You don't know for sure, so you should do X in case you could find a reason to fall asleep, get out of bed, etc. This bothered me rather extremely, because I used to just be super decisive and opinionated all the time and that was well-known (From Schildmaid's Questionnaire: "I tend to be quite opinionated about things and that can cause a lot of fights,") and now I felt like I knew absolutely nothing and simply couldn't hold onto a strong opinion like I used to. I even got to the point where I was thinking of the blow-everything-up kind of nihilism, and felt like I had no information to hold an opinion on that either and felt like I had to earnestly wonder whether it was wrong or right, and it also seemed like such an extreme thing that it should be incredibly easy to form an opinion on whether it's wrong or right (and it should be obviously wrong, since I just like life, as do most people, but on the off-chance that life is bad like people misinterpret Schopenhauer as saying, and there's some irresolvable flaw in it that no one realizes that's causing my paralysis, that should also be obvious).
So I felt utterly powerless, unable to choose even my thoughts on what seemed like the most obvious things, and was largely settling into a state of actual paralysis due to my perception that I knew nothing (hence all the focus on values on the questionnaire, and this peculiar sentence in particular: "I'd rather someone take the wrong side on something that matters than just be indifferent"). So I just ended up isolating myself and reading and thinking like a lunatic for a while, like someone on some sort of vision-quest or something (and this also spawned my Closed-Eye Hallucinations thread, since I had a lot of those during this time period from trying to induce them and generally succeeding) just to see if I could find an excuse to claim I knew anything at all again. I talked myself out of my old beliefs very easily by beating myself up over "your beliefs aren't driven by a desire to know the truth, which no one knows, but by some vain idea of your own mental strength. Now take yourself out of the picture and try again", but although I found all the things I didn't know (basically anything), I couldn't find a single thing I did know. And after a while, I had some actual experiences that showed me some few things I knew that I could use to go back to being normally super decisive and opinionated again and not paralyzed, which started as "how would I know I knew something?" (which was the first thing I knew, although it took some work) and then went on to some very vague actual things I knew gradually. But swinging too far the other way like on my questionnaire and some other posts feels mildly embarrassing and dumb, although I see the cause of my problems as a generalized external problem in the world that just paradoxically manifested a certain way for me despite my constant referring to myself as having been "drawn away" from everything (what the specific cause is I'm keeping to myself since how I discuss it is far more identifying than anything I've said here, which is generic enough, but still a sort of stereotypical heavy-duty existential crisis) and am just trying to lead people out of it really (my best bet is just to write a lot of well-written fiction books since that's how people are won over to new ideas and ideals again and again, although debating people still makes for good practice to scope out how various other people think and what I should do with that. Writing philosophy books or whatever seems utterly useless to me at this point).
I've had exposure to enneagram years before this actually, but didn't take it seriously and forgot it after a week or two. My mother made everyone do a quiz, IIRC, and she typed me as an 8 because of the description "strive to be in control" (and used this as an excuse not to give me pretty much any control no mater how much I fought for it, since apparently me wanting to decide what I ate or wore or whatever was a neurosis now, although I still had success fighting for these things sometimes despite how young I was, and mostly I was just secretive about them since I knew I had a 95% chance of not being able to get what I want if she knew what I wanted) and I typed myself as a 4 because "no one understands me" and "I'm unique and creative and emotionally intense". I didn't even know what instincts were so I have nothing on that, but I also wrote down a long, long list of "All the reasons I'm an F type in MBTI" and the last thing I got before coming to socionics was INFJ, and I rejected socionics EII primarily on it not being a Decisive or Negativist type even when it came up on my top 4 on the socionics.com quiz. I thought Rational was MBTI J = pragmatic, organized, disciplined, serious, so I was dead-set on Rational types starting out as well, but all the dichotomies did (and largely still do) confuse me to some extent.
So, type Verby, and also think about how this relates to what I said about typology: this is a lot of my context for my posting here, but is it really me or just some (admittedly rather important) aspect of me that something else can replace in due time? In any case, here's your case study.