Why Are We So Obsessed With Our Own Personality Types?
Taurus. Ravenclaw. INFJ. True Neutral. Each one represents something different (Zodiac Sun Sign, Hogwarts House, MBTI Type, and Dungeons & Dragons Alignment) and I can list all of these personality signifiers right off of the top of my head. I have long since memorized the results to various personality tests I once took online. And now I can add a new one: 1w9, my enneagram type.
If you have any sort of presence online, I’m sure you already know what the rest are. But enneagrams are maybe a little less known. Enneagrams are a “description of the human psyche.” You can take the test here (I recommend the one with the instinctual variant) and you will be sorted into one of nine categories, as follows:
- The Reformer (or, alternatively, The Perfectionist)
- The Helper
- The Achiever
- The Individualist
- The Investigator
- The Loyalist
- The Enthusiast
- The Challenger
- The Peacemaker
Since no one is a pure 1 or 2 or whatever, you can be furthered divided into wing types (which creates minor adjustments): 1w2, 2w1, 2w3, 3w2, 3w4, 4w3, 4w5, 5w4, 5w6, 6w5, 6w7, 7w6, 7w8, 8w7, 8w9, 9w8, 9w8, 9w1, and finally, my own type 1w9, or the Idealist. If you take the instinctual variant test, you will get one more signifier (self-preservation, sexual, or social). So I am a 1w9 with a social variant.
What’s the point of all this? Well, it gets really specific and really nails down your personality to a T. Don’t all of those tests do that? Yes, exactly! An enneagram is just another variation of the MBTI test or using Co-Star to get your exact natal chart. They all might say different things, but, in a way, they are all the same.
Now, I don’t want to get into a whole “astrology is fake” rabbit hole here (I don’t think that for the record), but all of these personality tests are intentionally a little bit vague. They can’t get everyone’s personality down exactly. For example, other 1w9s are Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, George Harrison, Katharine Hepburn, and Tina Fey. Do I think our personalities share similarities? Yes. But I am not identical to any of them.
So, if these tests are never going to get us exactly, then why are we all so obsessed with them? Why do I have friends who use their sun signs as excuses for their behavior? Why does my mom refer to me as a double bull (Taurus Sun Sign, Born in 1997, The Chinese Year of the Bull) whenever I am particularly stubborn? Why did I feel the need to take a Hogwarts House Test that mixed up the houses to be even more specific than the original test? (I’m a Gryffinclaw, by the way.)
I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I can venture guesses. Maybe it has to do with the rising influence technology has on our lives and the loneliness it can make us feel? Maybe it has to do with a reluctance to go to therapy but a desire to understand oneself? Maybe humanity has always been super narcissistic and obsessed with themselves? That one, it’s probably that one.
NYU Local entertainment writer John DiLillo believes this is a phenomenon exclusive to millennials.
“I definitely think our determination to fit into boxes that are created by cultural iconography is a millennial inclination,” DiLillo said. “Like, my dad loves Lord of the Rings, but he doesn’t identify with hobbits or whatever. Meanwhile, even people I knew in high school who hated Harry Potter knew what house they wanted to be in. We don’t want to be left out of cultural conversations.”
Campus News editor Arimeta Diop shares similar views.
“Perhaps it is a millennial thing to be leaning into [personality tests] because for the most part I feel that previous generations had an easier time just being a part of a group: suburban families, their church, country clubs, etcetera, but those institutions have fallen to the wayside in recent generations so grouping ourselves in fandoms or personality types is a fun, maybe less problematic way, to get to be a part of that great village,” Diop said.
Forbes’ Jordan Shapiro says it has something to do with the displacement that we feel living under a time where Google, Facebook, the NSA, and more hold us under constant surveillance and use algorithms to divide us into categories. So, “rather than focusing on the algorithmic targeting and surveillance that has become so ordinary in our everyday lives, we distract ourselves by focusing on meaningless algorithmic categorization” and pretend like it isn’t happening. That’s fun!
Constance Grady from Vox posits that it has something to do with our inner, animalistic desires to be a part of a group, or tribalism.
“Preference for one group or another…is consistently pleasurable to human brains, even when we know that there is no real reason for it” which explains why I will defend Ravenclaw characters to my dying breath, despite them all being fictional. Even more so “it’s a tribalist fantasy that gives the individual a sense of control.”
“In real life,” Grady continues, “once you belong to a group, your brain will alter the way you see the world in order to make you mesh with the group more easily. But in the fantasy, you pick a group because it already meshes perfectly with your brain. No alteration is required on your part.”
We are living in a vaguely dystopian time, so we might as well just lean into our personality signifiers a la Divergent or the Hunger Games…well not quite like that, but still. Maybe I’ll go all out and get 1w9 tattooed on my body somewhere. (Don’t worry mom. I’m kidding).
