Tell me a story of a man

Personality tests are like ice cream: even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. It’s fun to eat sugar, and it’s fun to dip into the wellspring of narcissism under the guise of self-improvement. 

Some personality tests are helpful. Others are puerile to the point of inciting dark amusement or pain by fact of their existence. Almost everyone I know has taken the Myers-Briggs and Enneagram tests, which make fine fodder for brief conversations where neither person is interested in the other. Wharton makes its students take the Clifford Strengths and Hogan Reputation Assessments. 538 has a personality test. David Kibbe classified women’s bodies. And everyone knows their astrological sign, but we’re being facetious about that one, right?

Then there are colloquial ranking scales. She’s a 1, but he’s a 10. She’s a high value woman (HVW), and he’s an alpha / beta / sigma / blah. 

The point isn’t that quantifying humans is bad. The point also isn’t that it’s not funny. It’s funny! It's just a joke! (Never mind that nothing is “just” anything. Never mind that having reduced our social interactions to a game of musical chairs means that everything’s funny until nothing is.) The point is that the limits of our words are the limits of our world. We should be curious. We should want more.

Much of who we are lies outside of our awareness. Jung and Freud and Buddha and the Oracle of Delphi have all been warning us. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” OK thanks. Now how exactly am I supposed to make the unconscious conscious? 

In high school I had a brief (lie) small (lie) crush (sigh) on a boy who asked all of his friends to tell him everything that they thought was wrong with him, in brutal specificity. That’s one way to figure out your blind spots. (But your feelings might get hurt!) But who’s to say your friends don’t share your blind spots? It was a small school in a small town. None of us had the childhood we wanted, and all of us thought it made us special. 

Here’s my strategy for now. First, try to find your place in every hierarchy that you’re a part of. Social, economic, physical, academic, and so on. Maybe you disagree with my use of the word ‘hierarchy’ because you’re more optimistic or kind than me. Maybe your life is not triangles. Maybe your life is more readily characterized by groups or bubbles or graphs. I’m not taunting you. It’s plausible. All my friends are better than I am. It’s very humbling, and also a point of pride. 

Next, you can try to flip the hierarchy/group exactly upside down. Or flip your position upside down. This often happens unintentionally in college: think small-fish achievers who find themselves swimming to survive in CIS 160: Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (sigh). 

But you can still gain a more complete understanding of yourself even if you don’t want to wait for a new home, new job, or a spiritual crisis. Find someone who occupies the exact opposite position as you, and watch them. Without comparing, without condemning or coveting, without any sort of judgement whatsoever, watch them. Not to teach them. Not to learn from them either. But to look at the map of their life. And to see how they drew it. 

The difference between smart rich children and smart poor children is not in their grades, their style, or how they spend their money. The difference is that the rich child believes that life is a door that is open. Every career is in reach. A smart rich child believes he can become an astronaut. If he chooses not to become an astronaut, he doesn’t make that choice because going to the moon was a silly idea, or because he hears the clock tick-ticking from the hallway. He chooses not to become an astronaut because just around the corner is something even more strange and fun and fascinating than outer space. It is a peculiar kind of arrogance and innocence which I (sigh) find infuriating, impossible, and intensely charming. Meanwhile when smart poor children talk about their ambitions, there’s a hopeless desperation, or desperate hopefulness - in their voices that makes my throat tighten from pride. They think I will deny them. If not me, you. And simultaneously they are imagining, many years into the future, turning back towards us and saying: you didn’t think I could do it, but I did. 

As we get older, however, it seems that the vast majority of us pay for financial security with our hope and our sense of imagination. Fast forward several decades, and maybe the boys have enjoyed long careers in finance. How is it possible to gain an intimate knowledge of international markets, and to be immersed in a world where tremendous amounts of harm is incurred onto tremendous numbers of people - not because men in power are stupid, but because they don’t care -  and remain optimistic about human life on earth? There is little change. There is little accountability. There is a $5T tax break for the American rich in 2019 that promised to add $1.8T in ‘trickle down’ revenue but instead added $2.3T to the national debt and did nothing to raise GDP. How can we work in that world and resist or change or escape its power? 

I can feel Ray Huang shaking his head at me so I’ll stop here. What about a blind spot of my own? Well, my friend and her boyfriend are in NYC for the summer. I like sitting on their couch, listening to them summarize their weekends, watching them touch each other on the neck and the upper thigh. It’s all such a pleasure. And I’ve never talked about my dating life with them, or asked them for advice. But in their company I’ve realized, very easily, that a relationship is - or can be - things that I had never, never imagined. Maybe being with a person can be the removal of barriers rather than the collecting of them. You can go and go and stop at the same time and go again. 

“You can’t prove to me that everybody’s been in love. If people had been in love, they would treat their children differently. They’d treat each other differently.” James Baldwin. 

Letting go of old beliefs is difficult. For a while the cognitive dissonance is necessarily disorienting. But it can be done. 

And my personality may be “INFJ” or “Type 4” or whatever but ultimately the fact is that there are healthy, average, and unhealthy examples of that personality. Unfortunately it’s rare for any of these tests to offer advice on how I can form better habits and be more patient and good and blah blah blah.  

People, once categorized, begin to think in categories. This is helpful but also limiting. I want to believe that my personality is not fixed. I am not the “type” of person who needs coffee in the morning. I can change myself at any time. It’s important to be many “types” of people. And since I’m young, I will explore now, since I know it will be harder, and I will be less fluid, when I’m older. 

As a counterpoint, however: our lives are stories. Fiction and nonfiction and history and math and dance and painting and music are precious in part because they endow us with a vast and deep reservoir of characters and stories (“data”) from which we can pull when creating the narrative of our own lives. Living well and doing good requires practice and awareness of context, imagination, self-knowledge, mutual awareness of one’s partners, and a broad familiarity with stories. The salience of different stories and themes in the consciousness of a society shapes which character roles its constituent people will take on. And of course the distribution of salience changes over time even if there are few really new stories told.

The first line of the Odyssey introduces Odysseus. “ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ”.

Ἄνδρα : andra : a man. Not “the” man. One of many. A guy. Albeit one of extraordinary ability.

πολύτροπον : polytropon : many turns. Was he the turner, or was he what was turned? The question betrays my naïveté. What’s important is how he spent the hours, days, months, years. He did not receive an extraordinary quest. He did not save the world. He is a liar and a cheat and a thief who wanted very badly to go home, even if he wasn’t sure what ‘home’ meant: some obscure combination of people, bed, land, rivers, and rocks. Is that love? If it’s not love, what is it? It’s what people do. And blah blah blah and good luck with it and get it while you can.

Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey begins, “Tell me about a complicated man.”