For most of my life, I was the classic "shy until you get to know him" kind of guy. I thought that's just how I was. But then ten years ago, I started LARPing, and I decided to play an extrovert - someone who could walk up to a stranger and strike up a conversation.
So I did. And even though I was nervous as hell, I did it during the game, in the guise of my character. For a couple years, I was really into the game. It was my life every weekend. I probably spent more social time pretending to be someone else than I did being myself.
And a funny thing happened... I became that guy for real. It's not just that I'm no longer nervous, I genuinely enjoy talking to new people. I barely recognize my old introverted self.
So I believe this. Who we are is just a snapshot in time.
How you talk changes how you think. That's why propaganda works. In fact, most people don't even realize they've changed.
I've purposefully changed my personality (behavior?) twice, about to start my thrice effort.
The first time, nor longer wanting to be angry, and having run out of ideas, I decided to pretend to be happy. I had read that you can't unlearn a habit, only replace it. So I played chipper all the time. When asked how I was, I'd say something like "Phenomenal!" Initially, it was sarcastic.
Then one day I woke up and I felt phenomenal. I was gobsmacked. I didn't even know the change was taking place. The transition took about three years.
The second time, I ran for office. Deluding oneself is part of the job. A bit like how sales people can convince themselves the next customer will say "Yes!"
This book came out after my first change. It jives with my experience.
How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work
https://amzn.com/078796378X
When I started to learn Japanese I was given the advice to pick a persona from a movie or something to copy. This makes it much easier to mold your speech and become fluent faster. The strange thing was that I started to develop that personality in Japanese and before I knew it I had a completely different character when speaking Japanese than when speaking English. Even stranger, I liked myself a lot better in Japanese. It's one of the reasons I chose to stay in Japan.
Because I now have an English speaking job I'm slowly trying to learn how to be my Japanese self in English, but I find it difficult :-)
This is interesting. When I try to speak my second language (my parents' native language) as my regular self, I struggle. But when I am impersonating characters it flows so quickly I surprise myself.
I still remember one of my highschool English teacher's quoting Chaucer: "The mind is its own place, and in itself, Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven"
I've found this quote, and the generalization to personality traits in general, to be quite accurate. I've changed dramatically over the years.
It's important to note, though, that the biggest changes I've experienced occurred when I didn't have anyone around who knew the old me. Only then was I really free to explore who I could become. I think this is one of the beautiful things about anonymous online forums. They allow us to explore different mindsets in a way that wasn't possible prior to the internet.
That's John Milton's Paradise Lost, from the point of view of Lucifer:
Farewell happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
I did something similar. I was going through a hard time personally and I found myself being negative about everything. I decided to start a "negativity jar" into which I put 20c everytime I said something negative. I promised my suffering work colleagues I would spend the proceeds taking out to dinner at the end of the year. It really work well and a few hundred dollars later I was out of my reflexive negativity rut. The only downside was the resident junkie at work stole all the money - at least everyone was understanding on why they missed out on dinner.
Whoah hold on, are you saying you had an actual known heroin addict at your place of work long enough for you to deposit hundreds of dollars in quarter increments? The casual delivery of this left turn is comedy gold.
Yes. When I started he was on methadone, but I guess like a lot of addicts he relapsed. The temptation of all that easy money must have been too great.
I have in my mind him paying his dealer in 20c pieces (I live in Australia so we don't have quarters). 20c pieces are actually quite large (11.2g) so a couple hundred dollars in 20c pieces is 11.2 x 5 x 200 = ~11kg (25 lbs). This was not some easy theft!
I actually laughter about it at the time due to the irony. He was actually quite a nice person (apart from his drug habit). My problems were minor by comparison.
It's all practice. So if you practice being a new you, you will become good at being that person. And it so happens that's how we become good at our first selves. We just don't remember it, and it was likely unintentional. As we mature, we are given every right to choose the adult we wish to be, and how to behave. But making the leap requires incentive, intention, and some real effort, because practice is labor. Except when it becomes a labor of love, we become empowered by it, not tired by it. That is why passion is paramount, and we should all have a passion for who we are.
> Except when it becomes a labor of love, we become empowered by it, not tired by it. That is why passion is paramount, and we should all have a passion for who we are.
The trick is, and what I learned over time - labour comes first, then comes the passion. Rarely it is the other way around. Waiting for passion to strike is why a lot of people (recent version of myself included!) are stuck.
Passion always comes. It's what you're doing when it comes, whether you can recognize it, and whether you can run with it. Choosing to be gritty first is not a requirement. Chances are, you'd have still found passion elsewhere doing other things. You've just found a way to successfully seek it in labor.
The problem is:
1) We hate to admit it sometimes. If you're reading a comic book or playing video games, we make it not count. Parents are guilty of this with their children also. Passion is not a choice between school subjects or job titles. There are kids with a passion for picking their nose. It won't get them anywhere, but they toyed around, discovered it, and found it. It's passion. It's what turns you on.
2) It can be passion against. If you hate your job, it isn't because you don't have passion for it, and no, no amount of waiting will grant it. What you have is passion against it. And this is where most of the anti-passion sentiment comes from. They find passion too illusive and metaphysical, all not knowing it came and passed already. It was the loathing they had for their job. Sadly, they overcame it. They overcame their passion.
3) We don't act on it. Unless you're still picking your nose, we need to act on our passion more. There are youtube millionaires that play video games all day. Someone has to draw comic books, and they're all adults. Not all passions will lead to professions, but it should still be your goal.
Of course, passion does not equal happiness nor success. It's what you do with it.
Anecdotally, the parallels between love is uncanny. 1) We often hate to admit who we fell for, 2) we can be passionate against someone (opposite side of the same coin, just see 90% of romantic comedies), and 3) if we don't act on it, it never flourishes.
And love does not equal happiness nor success. It's what you do with it.
And we always fall in love. Maybe it's just who you're staring at when it happens...
I am unconvinced by the idea that passion comes only after labour.
Passion feels to me like a gift from the universe, you never know when or where it will strike. It feels intuitive to me that no amount of struggle will make me have a passion for cleaning toilets.
Of course, cleaning enough toilets could create a passion in me for not cleaning toilets, but I'm hopeful that there's easier ways to achieve it.
Also it feels like when I'm engaged in an activity as unpleasant as cleaning toilets, that expense of energy is actively preventing me from thinking about things that I am passionate about.
Well if that's the case, then whether we will undergo a personality change is not necessarily entirely in our control, because we may not develop the passion for the labor of personality change. It just might not "strike".
> So if you practice being a new you, you will become good at being that person.
Yes and no. According to my subjective perception of life you only know in hindsight whether you were practicing or not. Sometimes you feel really enthusiastic about something and decide to work very disciplined at it (and really do it) but you get no results and are no wiser as to why that is. Other times you don't even intend to do anything about something you want to change but your subconsciousness practices "for you" so to speak and all of a sudden you do the right things in the right moment without understanding why you're able to do it.
In fact, for many areas of my life I feel like I improve most when I can afford to do nothing for weeks and all of a sudden I get hit by one or two massive insights. It's sort of like all the information required for a change is already there but my brain needs massive amounts of thinking capacity to compute and suggest the right actions.
> you only know in hindsight whether you were practicing or not
You are always practicing. It's only in hindsight whether you know you were doing it right.
If you're late for work, you've just practiced being late for work. If you made an excuse, you just practiced making an excuse. If you lie, you just practiced lying. And that's why we're screwed. The notion that practice only happens when we decide we're practicing is nonsense. If you lie 90% of the time, you will become a great liar. That's the nature of practice.
Take an aspiring athlete. They all practice hard. The advantage isn't in practice. If your shooting form is bad, every shot you take with that form is reinforcing a bad practice. That's why getting it right and only doing it right is so important. Taking it slow and being intentional with every action is the only way to do this. What we must practice is mindful control of every action, because it's all practice.
This is also why "pretend" is just another word for practice. To pretend requires being mindfully in control of your actions.
In a related way, I was almost pathologically shy as a teenager, and even into my college years. What may have helped me break out of my shell was becoming a performing jazz musician, and discovering that I could make glaring mistakes with practically no consequences. I also did a bunch of teaching.
Today, I'm capable of, and enjoy, stereotypically introverted activities such as math and programming, and those things have helped me advance my career, but I don't need them as an escape from society.
When asked, I tell people that I'm mildly extroverted. My main reason is simply that there's a stigma against introverts in our society.
But is there any side to your old self that you miss, or was a good thing that is not there any more?
E.g., I feel once you get used to 'increased social stimulation' it becomes harder to spend solid chunks of time by yourself doing deep/creative mental work.
Similar thing happened to me (for promoting my business at networking events, not LARPing), but I never lost the deep creative mental work habit. I just went to networking events constantly, but kept on coding when I wasn't doing that sort of thing.
Now I can do either, without even thinking about it. It's like a lightswitch, when I'm in a group I can just start chattering away, but when I get up a code editor I don't even think about getting down to it, itjust happens.
I have had a similar experience. There is a weird notion in our culture that introversion vs extroversion is a choice between "creative vs outgoing", with the unstated implication being it's really "creative vs not creative". I spent way too long not taking care of myself because I thought I was an introvert. No, I was depressed and I needed help. But some people seem to wear their introversion like some kind of badge of honor. And then, under some perverse guise of being supportive, we don't call people out on it and tell them they are wrong.
It never occurred to me my feelings were depression until my sister revealed her struggle with it as an attempt to get me to go to therapy. Could have saved many years if someone had just told me, "no, this is not a healthy lifestyle, staying in and reading books and playing games, to the exclusion of making any new relationships".
However here you're using a pathological condition (depression) to make a judgment about a normal one (introversion). That is not necessarily reasonable. Introversion doesn't have to imply asocial; but rather just that the person can't socialize or more generally _absorb external stimulation_, _for an extended enough period_. And the world does need introverted people too who prefer to sit around cooking up ideas in their head as much as it needs extroverted people to put together teams to realize those ideas.
You can practice being more extroverted until you get good at social interaction. I can context switch between the two (introvert / extrovert), but I would tend to think of myself as more innately an introvert in that I am quite happy on my own. The true extroverts seem to find being alone quite hard.
I suppose it's trainable as well. But your past is always a part of you; an extrovert who trained themselves to be comfortable alone may still think of themselves as "more innately an extrovert".
>I was the classic "shy until you get to know him" kind of guy.
[...]
> I barely recognize my old introverted self.
Shyness and introversion aren't the same thing. Sounds like you were shy, but not anymore. Whether you're introverted/ambiverted/extroverted is another matter.
The repressed extroverts wouldn't exist if they weren't miming introverts. That fact won't stop them from discovering themselves and assuming every introvert is actually a repressed extrovert. Also that there is only one innate type of human. I fear introversion will come to be seen as a developmental disability.
Very inspiring account of your own transformation!
I think the concept of the fixed personality has done a lot of damage to people for the sake of predictability. That we're moving closer to embracing freedom of self on such a fundamental level is one of the truly encouraging things about this time.
> That we're moving closer to embracing freedom of self on such a fundamental level is one of the truly encouraging things about this time.
This has been done and done again for as long as there have been societies. The surveillance state will seal this freedom away for good. Then we will have order and we will "like" it.
Are you sure? I assume you mean they can't observe the mind. But they can. We can now identify psychopaths with brain scans. There are also pro-social psychopaths. Do you think they will continue to have total freedom to live as such when everyone knows what they are? We've already decided ADHD is a disorder. If you want to institute industrialized education and 75% of the population adapts to it then what is the other 25%? I would argue ADHD is adaptive in some other context and that is why it exists. I absolutely love the "hyper-focus" aspect as a programmer. That won't stop the powers that be from assuming there's some mistake in the way I'm configured. This is especially scary when you can detect mental "disorders" via behavior on social media. Also when your boss is spying on everything that you do. Which is basically a thing at every major corporation now. Alternative configurations of the self are a risky endeavor and getting riskier. It makes me sad but I don't want false hope. Whatever idealogical awakening seems to be happening, it isn't being translated into the social structures that control us. Of course the former must precede the latter. But the former keeps popping up with increasing frequency and the latter is always further from reality.
Although I don't like all the spying that goes on either, I don't believe that there is a conspiracy to remove ADHD from the population. If ADHD or another personality disorder is helpful for some reason, eg for programmers, then it will remain.
As long as people can do their jobs well enough and better than someone without ADHD, the "powers that be" will allow them to remain.
Bosses aren't giving psychological diagnoses, they are simply monitoring that the battery hens are still laying enough eggs.
I didn't suggest there was a conspiracy to remove ADHD. Only that it was seen as a disorder. That has effects. They've learned to accept it in programmers because it's so common. But what if I were something else? If my boss was able to diagnose me via behavior on corporate monitored hardware he could fire me and I'd have no way of knowing if it was bigoted. He may not even really know. It's hard to control subconscious stuff like that. Employers are already doing these things in other ways. They have people take morality questionnaires that arguably measure nothing at all. Ultimately it won't take an obvious form like conspiring to eliminate ADHD. That actually makes it far scarier. We're going to subject the entire population to an arbitrary and systematic prejudice of correlates. Simply because it's good for the bottom line of each individual business to win the hiring competition.
Some military training is designed to change personalities. The USMC does this deliberately.[1] They use sleep and food deprivation. This is not done to "toughen up" recruits; it's done to change their value system. Gen. Krulak, when Commandant, devised this in the 1990s.[2]
Krulak himself says it best:
"We cannot anticipate and train Marines for each situation they may face. All Marines must, therefore, possess a moral consistency to serve as their compass. Making the right ethical decisions must be a thing of habit. This is why we created the Transformation process where we recruit bold, capable, and intelligent young men and women of character and recast them in the white hot crucible of recruit training. We immerse them in the highest ideals of American society -- the time honored values of our Corps -- honor, courage, and commitment. We place these values on them in a framework of high institutional standards to which they are held strictly accountable. We further foster the acceptance of these values through the unit cohesion and sustainment phases."
"Just as we expect a Marine to employ his weapon under combat duress, we must likewise demand that he employ his mind. Marines need to be comfortable with using their intuition under highly stressful circumstances. In short, we must make intuitive decisionmaking an instinct, and this can only be accomplished through repetition. Training programs and curricula should routinely make our Marines decide a course of action under cold, wet, noisy conditions while they are tired and hungry and as an instructor continually asks them "what are you going to do now, Marine?!!"
I can see that. Myself and a number of my friends would probably have been considered to be quite shy and introverted when joining the military. But it really brings out the social aspect in you, you spend so much time just alone talking and joking with your friends (far more than you ever would in civilian life - e.g on guard duty or something, it's often your only source of moral). Often the old sweats called it the art of conversation, we call it the art of "shite talking". It's strange because every military persons friendships with each other that are completely different to civilians and I don't just mean because of the nature of the role. In civilian life, if you don't see a friend for 5 years, the dynamic of meeting them again is often quite distant. In the military it's like they never left and you just pick up from where you left off. I can say that I feel closer to some people who I went through basic training to than people I've known since school - you learn so much more about each other.
Similarly extreme extroverts tend to be toned down a bit in military training, til they reach about the same level.
Myself and any one of those introverts would now probably be regarded as fairly confident extroverts compared to civilians, and so much of that is thanks to military training.
Kind of weaksauce. One review 50 years ago doesn't override all the work done since, particularly on OCEAN, showing high longitudinal stability of personality traits when measurement error is considered. (What's more interesting is the behavioral genetics of that; it seems that this stability is at least in part due to the stability of genetic influences on personality.) It's also kind of silly to point to prisoners as an example: violent crime always declines with age.
Just because personality doesn't frequently change doesn't mean it is impossible, it is just really hard. If it happens with one in a few hundred individuals, most researchers are going to view it as an anomalous outlier and discard or ignore it. I can assure you with complete confidence that your personality is incredibly malleable.
I could go on at length about my personal experience (which is quite dramatic) but since I enjoy my privacy I'll just pass along a funny story about massive personality change induced by brain injury: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2130900/Chris-Birc...
If you have to appeal to rare cases such as traumatic brain injury, then it is indeed 'really hard' and not of much interest theoretically or practically; the mind is what the brain does, so that massive damage can cause changes is exactly what one would have predicted already, just as one would predict that intelligence, memory, happiness, language and other cognitive traits can be changed by massive damage... (Even more massive damage can radically change one's personality through a process called 'death'.) It's not that it's an 'outlier' to be discarded, it's that it's not important if it's that rare.
I used that as an example because it's so radical as to be irrefutable, and pretty amusing. Massive personality change does not require traumatic brain injury.
Just because something is really hard does not mean it is not of much interest theoretically or practically. Everything that is meaningful in human endeavor has been "really hard."
I think that it is actually really important to study and understand personality change. Frankly, a lot of people have negative, (self)destructive personalities, and they would be much better served with positive, constructive personalities. Maybe if we understand how people change, we could come up with a consistent, efficient method to help those people, rather than shrugging and saying "haters gonna hate."
The $6m question is, is willpower itself limited by genetics? What happens then, if the ability to exert the hard effort to change the personality is itself genetically limited?
> Just because personality doesn't frequently change doesn't mean it is impossible, it is just really hard. If it happens with one in a few hundred individuals, most researchers are going to view it as an anomalous outlier and discard or ignore it.
I view this as a failure of modern statistically driven social sciences. Just because it happens to only a few in a hundred people, doesn't mean it's an anomalous behaviour. People are messy. When put in differing circumstances, people show amazing plasticity in their behaviour. And controlling for all those social and biological pressures is very hard to do.
I think researchers have a clear distinction that populations are an altogether different phenomena than individuals. This is something that the public often confuses, as demonstrated when somebody rebuts a statement about population attributes with a personal refutation. This is a failure to argue on the same phenomena.
Researchers are also aware that personality changes population-wise with age, and also that individuals also experience personality changes -- but generally not in a medically interesting way in the sense of a reliable and precise intervention to effect positive changes.
I'm also reminded of studies on the transferability of personality traits with adopted children (no significant correlation! amazing! same correlation with biological parents compared to those children raised by their biological parents), or reared-apart monozygotic twin studies, or reared-apart dizygotic twin studies, and so on. The collective portrait of many data points suggests a set of stable biological factors to personality, as opposed to personal experience.
Think of your personality a barren landscape, which starts out with very, very minor depressions and irregularities. These depressions and irregularities might so so small they're not even be perceptible to the average person walking across it. Over many years, rain will erode these minor features into gullies, and if conditions are right, you can even end up with canyons. The course of a mighty river can be entirely determined by minor irregularities in the starting landscape.
Of course, if you took a decent sized plow and cut a channel through the landscape early enough, you could direct the development of the river to exactly where you wanted it. If you wait too long, redirecting the river becomes a major engineering task; involved, but still entirely doable.
I mentioned a few studies, but worded them poorly, but I wonder what you think about the fact that there's no significant correlation in personality traits between foster parents and their adopted children (fascinating, no?), and that these children have the same correlation with their biological parents regardless if they are raised in the same household or with foster parents.
Shouldn't the unique experience of an entirely different household have some effect on personality?
Our genes do influence the development of brain structures that strongly influence general happiness level, sociability, and a variety of other traits. Under normal circumstances, the wiring of those neural structures tends to be reinforced. For example, friends and family members might observe a loved one who is not by nature sociable and say "you are an introvert" or "you are shy" which is a reinforcing stimuli. When that person has heard this enough times, whenever they behave in an unsocial manner, they will tend to explain it by thinking "I'm shy/an introvert" thus perpetuating the neural structure. If instead, sociability is treated as a skill, and correct behavior is reinforced while incorrect behavior is punished, over time those neural structures will be re-wired.
This pattern is observed all the time for tastes. We have genetically predetermined preferences, but overwhelmingly what we end up liking is the result of social conditioning.
That doesn't really seem to address the issue of adopted children though. If I understand you correctly, the social environment (and conditioning) of the children should override the biological aspects of their personality. Or at the very least it should have a very significant effect.
It seems to me that certain aspects of a person are very malleable, taste being one of them. But many other things apparently are not (IQ, or various other measures of 'intelligence', if I recall correctly).
From my experience in the social sciences, we tend to underestimate the role of genetics more often than not.
It does address the issue of adopted children - we as a culture have a fixed mindset for things like introversion and intelligence, and genetics do strongly influence our default level of both of those. Thus, adoptive parents observe the child and say "you're an introvert" or "you're not clever" and the default pattern is reinforced.
On the other hand, when a child displays an initial dislike for like Taylor Swift, her friends might say "you're crazy, Taylor Swift is awesome."
It's all just neural networks being reinforced or inhibited, the primary contribution of genetics is the default state of the network. In the case "fixed" personality characteristics, our culture is to reinforce the default networks, while for things we view as mutable, we have no qualms about training away default behavior.
Why should "introversion" be changed or punished, necessarily? Developing intellect is something to be encouraged, but I don't understand the anti-introversion bias in your post.
And I suspect that the genetics does also set a limit as to how far one can bend, too. This too, will vary between persons.
I wonder where this comes from? A lot of our culture is based on stories about people changing personality. [1]
Those stories have so much appeal and longevity exactly because the spectator can see someone like himself changing. The underlying motif is that anyone can go from weakling to hero, under the right circumstances.
I think what complicates this discussion is the meaning of 'personality'. Someone here mentions 'taste', and you talk about weakling/hero. I'd never have considered these part of personality.
I'd consider taste to be a cultural thing and rather changeable. And 'heroism' strikes me as something that I'd call 'character' rather than 'personality'.
Personality is deeply ingrained and hard to change but not impossible. Off the top of my head things that can change personality include going to jail, military service and long term unemployment.
I noticed a shift in my personality pre-military vs post-military. Before the military I was excessively patient, but now I find that I'm more irritable and slightly less forgiving of others.
Hah, I've found this in myself. It feels like I'm a bit more of a jerk in Russian than in English—at least I'm more likely to let irritation show. I'm less visibly irritable in English.
But it might also be a difference in contexts: I mostly speak Russian with my immediate family and English with other people.
Also calls to mind a study which claimed that "thinking in a foreign language makes decisions more rational" by reducing deep-seated biases (that were formed as I grew up?)
Dramatic is a strong word but definitely different. I'm more to the point in German, softer in Czech, but partly because each of those cultures sort of demands those changes. If I acted my German-speaking way in Czech, they'd think I was up-tight, I wouldn't really fit in, and the opposite in the other direction.
Who we are is 20% or more (depending on the person) the country/culture/language we're in at the time, and that's true for everyone.
change is inevitable.
I like to think of the different stages in my life as other people, because those people were so different.
I maintain the same kind of drive I've always had, consuming every piece of data I can get my hands on, but that consumption has changed me.
I remember clearly the first major change to another person I ever experienced. it was after reading the giver when I was a child. I can't even recall who I was before I read that book, but I know he was a lesser mortal than I.
the next major change was after my parents split and I got a new abusive step mother. before that I would cry at a whim, every time I watched fern gully I cried, but after that woman I rarely showed emotion. I was hard and thought hard thoughts, I was a total gangsta, a white suburban gangsta but after a long time trying I finally got street cred. spent time in the kiddie can and all that.
my next major change was actually in military school after gaining too much street cred. something changed in me on the long drive through the desert of Nevada to a large training camp called rite of passage.
I kicked ass there, no idea why, but I changed, and became a leader. moved up the ranks and got posted to the cross country cycling team.
and that's where we come to the change that stuck for so many years. In ROP I became captain of my cycling team and we got the opportunity to ride across America. that ride changed me in so many ways. I used to think I couldn't attain my dreams, now I was in a dream.
the next time I changed fundamentally was when I became a father. not in your usual lets get married and have a family way, no, it was as unplanned and crazy as you can get, but I still changed, stepped up to the plate and reflected on my past lives and Knew I could do it.
now I'm an older man, and I am changing at a more observable pace, I can see my views solidifying and it's a little scary, I don't want to be stuck in my ways. but I am comforted by the fact that any day, I can change, at least for now.
Personality is influenced by hormone levels, and hormone levels are an aspect of health. Here's a specific example [1] which may be of particular interest to those of a nervous disposition.
What should one do if they have long suspected their hormone levels are quite low due to heredity and it adversely limits their energy levels and outlook?
1) make a list of all your chronic symptoms over time
2) speak to a doctor about your particular concerns re: hormone levels, and get blood tests taken
3) if your doctor reckons, based on the results, that treatment is justified, I guess you're on your way; if not:
4) study the literature - if you disagree with your doctor about your results, you should be able to find literature that quantitatively supports your position based on your test results and symptoms
5) if you can find supporting literature, ask your doctor for treatment (don't be confrontational when dealing with your doctor, treat them as a resource and a partner, and respect their opinion even if you disagree with them based on what you've learned)
6) find another doctor if your doctor won't agree with a reasoned opinion
If you need help with this stuff, there may be practitioners out there more in tune with chronic illness than your bog-standard GP. I'm partial to the ancestral health movement and paleo diet therefore I'd look here: [1].
Finally, I'd recommend the work of Paul Jaminet - I found his book [2] and his Retreat (which includes personalised health coaching based on blood test results) [3] both to be incredibly helpful in dealing with my own long-term health issues.
Thank you for taking the time to write this response, I appreciate it. I don't want to write too much publicly for privacy reasons, but I did have a blood/hormone test today, and I do have prior experience w/ this issue. I think my issue is more with low neurotransmitter levels making me susceptible to depression, although, there's a lot of psuedoscience on this topic.
Does it go the other way? Are there people who spend their life as good (a more or less model citizen) becoming bad? Perhaps not, because it seems more natural for humans to want to contribute, so even criminals may have a voice in them urging them to do better. But humans do have thoughts of envy, lust, self-righteousness and unfairness that can whittle away the self control and cause them to cross over and, let's say, murder someone in the first degree.
I'd propose that a complete set of research would learn that there are some personality traits that are malleable and there are some that are not. Moreover, those two sets would not be the same for everyone, and there is likely a great deal of diversity.
Our minds bias towards telling ourselves that we're okay, most of the time, and we rationalize constantly in order to get through the day, imposing our storytelling techniques on capricious events.
That means that we behave "good" just to the extent that we're aware that we might feel guilty and not much farther - and in that sense, we can train ourselves into greater moral fortitude with deliberate practice in empathy, exposure to diverse views, and development of a personal ethical philosophy. I don't see "personality" as crucial to that - it can differ - and changes in environment and status have a huge impact on what we perceive as acceptable, as well as medically diagnosed conditions that literally disable our ethical senses. Across a population, what is probably most important is to have a little bit of wisdom distributed among everyone so that we aren't burdening each other constantly. "Crossing the line" into violence happens after a huge, huge number of other failures have already taken place.
Systemically, we aren't even to the point where we might discuss this as a problem, though. We don't yet see wisdom as something everyone needs in the same way that we think that everyone should be fed, housed, and clothed: If you have those things and you're unhappy, the systemic recourse is to engage in consumer activities marketed around your perceptions of unhappiness.
>Are there people who spend their life as good (a more or less model citizen) becoming bad?
Of course. You think all of the Nazi officials were rotten from their childhood, teenage years, early career, etc?
Some were -- most not. They were "model citizens" as you say. It was the circumstances and belief in Fuhrer etc. that led them to become bad, but after some threshold we can say they were bad.
There are some people who simply become bitter, angry at everything and that gives them difficulty making new friends... I can't recover my faith in women since being dumped in my 20ies in bad conditions - it gave me an entirely new perspective on how society treats women (and I say "women" as the category fixed by the laws which gives those women rights because of their gender). And even if I keep trying to do the things of the good guy (thousands of donations, work for gender equality, church, volunteering...), I now rather identify with the bad person in the movies or in the political discourse. I've gotten used to defending a point-of-view that is slightly less inclusive because it relies on slightly more responsibility from citizen, and immediately get conflated with extreme-right opinions, so why bother?
The main argument of the article, supported by quite a bit of evidence, is that a lot of what we take as "personality" is not fixed at all and instead tends to change with situations.
There are plenty of stories of model citizens going bad. Businessmen trying to prop up their company by all means, including criminal ones, or respected citizens kill their spouses. I think Bernie Madoff was a serious and successful businessman before he started his scam.
I think the personality you see in others depends highly on the situation. Shy people may become extroverted under right circumstances, or stingy people generous.
I would argue that it's easier from someone 'good' to become 'bad', as many of the things people believe that make them good can be incited by novelty, which naturally wears down over time. Kind of like how something can seem amazing the first time you know of it, but after it's been in your head for 20 years it just seems rote.
How do you define "personality"? Does the fact that you're capable of changing not get included in that? Is the "new" personality the true you? Or the old one?
This is similar to the alternate reality counter proof: If alternate realities exist, and we can get to them from this reality, then they are no longer an alternate reality. If we cannot get to them, then they cannot "exist" as our reality is a prerequisite for existence.
>If alternate realities exist, and we can get to them from this reality, then they are no longer an alternate reality.
All that means is that they are somehow connected.
They are still 2 different environments, which different rules -- which is what people actually mean when they say "alternate reality", and not "complete isolated reality space".
So the counter-proof is more like saying "If there's Canada, and we get to there from here, the they are no longer Canada".
It the hypothetical example described it could be anything -- in fact it could be exactly like the "borders of Canada", some stretch of land with guards and fences. Or it could be some "portal", a mirror you can go through, a black hole, whatever.
That place would just have to comply with a different set of rules compared to anywhere else to be justified to call it an "alternate reality" (e.g. no gravity, fire is cold, etc).
Heck, we even call experiences like living with the Amish an "alternative reality", and those are on our very same universe/world, and with all the known laws of physics and basics intact.
That argument is getting hung up on semantics. It's like saying north and south America are the same continent because they are connected. It is implicitly choosing a very specific definition of reality amongst many possible definitions.
The thing is that "personality" is a genuinely contested concept in the field (assuming that you go beyond the DSM "axes" and look at the broader debate). The semantic mess isn't merely obfuscation of established knowledge, it's also a reflection of the state of the art. From what I understand, the Big Five model [1] has the strongest empirical validation, but there are also many experts in personality psychology who regard that model as an oversimplification or even perversion of more sophisticated ideas (cf. the conflict between adherents of insight-oriented/psychodynamic versus cognitive-behavioral modes of therapy). See also [2] to get a sense of how varied the concepts are.
So screw that concept and talk about ones that are useful - ones that can allow us to make predictions. Can a person who is now bigoted and prone to violence become a Gandhi? I'd say yes, I've seen similar thing happen. Call it "personality change" or call it something else, but the phenomenon seems to be real.
“Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity and movement and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow. The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds.” - Louis L'Amour
For the most part we are all unabstractable, and if anything, we should strive to be.
What I means is, we can give ourselves names, but who we are is mostly a black box. Any black swan event can change our definition, and the shock doctrine also applies here, in that we are affected by spikes of greatest impressions, not ongoing consistency.
For the most part, we are remembered for our best or worst, but are judged by our last. So in the case of this article, if you commit a horrific crime, that will be what people remember and define you by. And we can do everything in our power to be judged with forgiveness based on our latest actions. But for the most part, it's not until we do something more extreme (shocking) than what has defined us so far that most of us will feel naturally inclined to update our definitions.
But the key takeaway is that even if this is how we define one another, none of it truly predicts what anyone will do next, good or evil, brilliant or lame. Ultimately, we are all much like computer programs that must run their course to know precisely if any of us will halt or not, which leaves personality a mere impossible analysis, much in the spirit of Gödel's incompleteness theorem. We are incomputable, and our inconsistency is what is consistent. The only option is execution -- to let life run its course.
Of course, until you know about the brain plasticity and how it decreases with age. So it becomes more "fixed" with the years.
It's true, there is no such thing as personality. But then, why do recruiters want to know about the "profile" of a candidate? What do they talk about when they want someone who is "at harmony with the group"?
If we could really change as we liked, we would not talk about personality. People will always carry a baggage of learned behaviors with them. The sum of this is called personality. It can change of course, but in the "brave new world" that we live in, the incentives to do so never appear.
I used to be really bad about time/punctuality. Since doing a startup where the tides were relevant, and missing a rendezvous by 10 minutes could mean a 12h wait (not just for me, but for a lot of other people), I made a serious effort to be punctual -- the big change being focusing in advance on "we must leave no later than X to be there on time" vs. "we need to be there at X+Y" is 90% of it.
I have a scholar/hermit/coder persona and a leader/teacher/social persona. I feel like I can switch pretty easily from one into the other depending on the situation.
If I spend too many months pretty exclusively within one of those personas I will start to feel the need to express the other.
"It has to do with Mischel's most famous experiment, called the marshmallow test, which he first conducted in 1960. You can still find videos of it on YouTube".
Doesn't it sound like they were put on YouTube in the 60s? :)
Looks like people here haven't examined MBTI. Your personality may not be fixed but it takes up to 2 years to change it. 16personalities.com is a good way to test your personality as being one of the 16 types. It takes 10 mins.
The tests are wildly inaccurate, and MBTI itself is not the full story of cognition and personality, but I think there is enough evidence suggesting that the cognitive functions as described by Jung[0] are very real.
The article you linked to uses lack of MBTI in psychology journals as an argument against its validity, but its applications in the field are very limited. You're more likely to find MBTI references in neuroscience journals as there are appears to be clear correlations between type preferences and brain activity patterns[1].
Even so, knowledge of a persons cognitive preferences just isn't very useful. So the main application of MBTI is indeed "just for fun".
The way I would use this test: See each dualism as a continuous dimension. Reflect where I probably fall on each dimension at this time. Think and point out where I would like to fall. Personally I'd prefer to fall on the middle of each dualism. This gives me some hints what in my personality needs to change first if I greedyly want to optimize.
The supposition that the personality is completely fixed or completely mutable is simply false. There are fundamental constraints to how the personality can be manifested. Histrionic personalities are perhaps those most inclined to believe that their personality is truly self-determined, but they'd also be mistaken.
The author can believe whatever is fashionable. I dare you to consider the body of all psychological literature on the subject of the personality. It is so apparent and obvious that the personality is neither fixed nor completely mutable that I find the article to be essentially nonsensical.
Who here supposes anyone is a tabula rasa? Who here supposes anyone emerges in this life fully formed and actualized? This is a spurious dichotomy that is erected time to time based on cultural norms and stipulations - much of it propagandising to suit others desires and ends.
It seems you are interpreting what is said in black and white terms. He (she?) said that personality is _neither_ completely _fixed_ _nor_ completely _mutable_. Things are not either/XOR.
The same goes with IQ. I don't think any average person could ever train their intelligence to be, say, John von Neumann. Thus it is not _completely_ mutable. He was a genetically superior specimen by every account and evidenced such from a very young age. But a good 15-20 point boost, especially if we did not train ourselves to our fullest before? Maybe. I used to process more slowly, now I process faster, because I pushed to think quicker. Thus it is not completely _fixed_, either. Definitely we can eradicate racial IQ gaps, I believe (average Black-White IQ gap in the US is 15 points favoring Whites, by the way.), Rushton et. al. be damned. If I remember right, in some places it was actually done, thus proving its possibility. (Interesting tidbit the racists seem not to address: Bhutan's and China's people are both “Mongoloid Asian" race by racist theory – but Bhutan has IQ 85, China at 105, at least using racists' own data sets. I wonder also what the IQ for rural China vs. urban wealthy China looks like. I suspect the 105 number comes from having a large proportion of the latter in the sample.)
Let me guess, you probably make a lot of presumptive statements that have no basis in reality about what a lot of people say. Or perhaps that is just in this instance. I can, nevertheless, point out to you that that isn't going to get you very far in rational discourse.
Yes, actually, it is, in the context of there being two, spuriously postulated dichotomous outcomes, whereas it is clearly the case that neither is true. What would it mean for a personality to be fixed? Such a thing doesn't even begin to make any sense, given that persons develop over their lifetimes, for instance. What would it mean that you could change who you are? That also doesn't make much sense, since it is like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.
The personality is a constellation of aspects that we all show to varying degrees, many of which are in fact out of our control, but some of which nevertheless are capable of being adjusted in accordance with various forms of conditioning. It is in that constellation that we find what the personality is. Emphasizing minute aspects and exaggerating them doesn't constitute the whole personality. This is remarkably uninformative as an article.
So I did. And even though I was nervous as hell, I did it during the game, in the guise of my character. For a couple years, I was really into the game. It was my life every weekend. I probably spent more social time pretending to be someone else than I did being myself.
And a funny thing happened... I became that guy for real. It's not just that I'm no longer nervous, I genuinely enjoy talking to new people. I barely recognize my old introverted self.
So I believe this. Who we are is just a snapshot in time.