I am my own personality type
Yesterday, I stumbled upon the "Enneagram" personality test via another Bear Blog post. It's truly fascinating how many of these "personality quizzes for adults" are out there. But it's not exactly hard to see why they're so successful. It seems like humans are just hard-wired to try and categorize everything, including themselves.
At first I thought "another one of these, huh" but before I knew it, I was taking the test. I was just curious. Didn't really have anything better to do, anyway. The site I did the test on turned out to be an absolute sham1, so I just did some general reading on their personality types and came to the conclusion that I was probably a "4w5" or a "9w1." By then, I was already completely wrapped up in their categories. "But what am I?", I found asking myself. "Am I a 4, or am I a 9? They're not next to each other on the thingie and aren't directly connected by any lines or arrows, I can't be both!"
Luckily, managed to come to my senses not soon after. Yes, I can definitely "be both." In fact, I'm probably a bit of all of them. It's not like these tests are describing natural laws. They just sound plausible enough to convince you of their logic. And in some contexts, they can be a guiding tool of sorts, for introspection. But at the end of the day, I am me, not a category monolith described by some test.2
Footnotes
They say it's a "free test" and that the free version gives "basic info", but it turned out that the free results I got are just some numbers that are completely meaningless outside of the context of the "full report" - which they want you to pay $29 for. Pfft.↩
However, I did come to the conclusion that - from the perspective of the test - this kind of individualistic thinking probably makes me "a 4."↩