Ennui

My mother told me she's going to retire in a few months. While this is hardly surprising, it was unexpected, if that makes any sense at all. Her boss is horrible, and what was once a nice job has since become a little bit of a nightmare. But I just had no idea that this was coming, that's all. She didn't either.

And, to a certain extent, this annoys me. I want to quit. Not all of it, mind you, but a good deal of the everyday boring uselessness that goes into getting an education these days. I want to scale it down to the basics, and actually get something of value out at a reasonable time use rate. But I Can't. I'm not in control. And that doesn't make me happy. It never has.

Bear in mind, however, that mother dear has endured this for a good deal longer than I have. She's earned it, if you will. Thrice my age and certainly a good deal more suffering in that time. She's finally going to call it quits, because she wants to and has decided she can get away with it. I don't get that.

And that's the annoyance in life: that we don't get what we want, and we don't have control, and it's all so damned unnecessary. We suffer, surviving our lives, until we finally die, having survived our lives, and not lived it.

Good luck, Mom. Good luck, everyone. May you find in retirement what you should have found in work.

Visualizing Personality Type

A lot of my meatspace and Facebook friends have been subjected to my recent interest in personality type, but I make no apologies. Personality type can tell you a great deal about a person, and knowing yours can improve your life immensely.

To begin, every person has four different indicators, running in a spectrum. You are either introverted or extroverted, sensing or intuiting, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. From these, you get a four-letter code. An extroverted, sensing, feeling, perceiving person would be an ESFP. An introverted, intuiting, thinking, judging person (such as myself) would be an INTJ.

You can find plenty of tests floating around the Internet to test your personality type, and learn more about the results. I won't bother you with much in the way of analysis, I trust that you can do that on your own (or are just another bot, in which case you hardly matter). The important thing is that you do it--it could save you life, it will definitely improve it.

The vital part of my argument, however, is that personality type can be visualized as a tesseract (a 4th dimensional cube, for the poor souls out there). Similar to a Nolan Chart--an entirely different topic--each edge represents one of the indicators. If we assume the cube has an corner at the origin, the x-axis runs out 200 units from extroversion to introversion, the y-axis from sensing to intuiting, the z-axis from feeling to thinking, and the w-axis (the one we have trouble visualizing, being 3D creatures) from perceiving to judging.

In this notation, a "perfect" ENFP would be at the corner (0, 200, 0, 0), for example. However, a very small percentage of the population has a "perfect" score on any one indicator, let alone all four. I'm an exception: the last time I took the Humanmetrics test, I score 100% Introversion. Altogether, I'm I(100%) N(75%) T(88%) J(22%). As you can see, I'm a strong INT, just slightly J--an this is the highest I've ever scored on J. Using our notation, I would be at (200, 175, 188, 122).

Notice, of course, that I've tipped the mathematical scales in my favor. For fairness, I'll do another example: E(45%) S(67%) T (14%) P (73%). They would be (55, 33, 114, 27).

Very few people are near a corner. This is the big takeaway. Most people people are near an edge, but not on it. Some are in the center, or only close to two edges. If this is true for you, read up on both side of that indicator. I found that everything I wasn't as an INTJ I was as an INTP, and the converse.

So, you visual-learners out there, and even you non-visual ones: think about it. Every person is somewhere in that 4D cube, and it can tell you a lot about them. Where are you?

Welcome to 2013

It's a new year, and no one thinks anything of it.

Oh, they know it's happening, for sure. They may even talk themselves into feeling they're a part of something significant. But they're not.

All around, there's noise, the sounds of "celebration"--but nothing of any value. That's all it is--noise--devoid of any significance or value. It's a New Year, and opportunity to wipe the slate clean and say, "This time, we'll do it better!" but they've no interest in that. They're out there, partying, ignoring the problems, the world, ready and eager to repeat the same mistakes that got us into this mess. Why don't people think?

Well, why should they? It's not their strong suit.

Here I am, trying to think something profound, drowning in a sea of the mundane, and I feel all alone.

You laugh, think I'm over-inflating myself. Sure. But consider what happens when you try to think a coherent thought in the sea of the not-precise.

Then get back to me.