Lifestyle & Commentary Posts

ISTJs Put Simply

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Guest post by Sylver, ISTP

In my project to make known the good and bad sides of every MBTI type, it’s been suggested that I start with ISTJs. A lot of people, even if they don’t say negative things outright, will ignore or turn up their noses at ISTJs online. Also, as it’s been pointed out, many ISTJs will take and retake the test until they get something other than ISTJ, just because of the stigmas attached to ISTJ-ness.

Part of this has to do with the (mis)conceptions about their type that I will debunk here. Please note, of course, that some of the things I will say may not ring true for every single ISTJ out there. Most are based on knowledge of their functions and personal experience. So do feel free to correct me if I’m wrong; most of this is just stuff that I have observed/experienced when dealing with ISTJs.

ISTJs (USUALLY) are:

  • rooted in the past
  • down to earth
  • planers
  • possessed with incredible follow-through
  • caring
  • dutiful

ISTJs are NOT (usually):

  • stubborn for no reason
  • whiny
  • OCD
  • rule-obsessed
  • socially awkward (any more than other types can be)
  • Or, of course…evil

So without further ado, let me expand on how ISTJs work function-wise. My personal favourite thing about them, for a start, is their rich and vivid memories. I experience life through my Ti and Se (Dom and aux respectively), and though I can often remember things I’ve learned for a long time afterwards I have great difficulty remembering the actual experience because I’m instinctively keyed into the present moment. Always moving on, as it were. As Si-doms, ISTJs often have incredible recall of past events. My Mother, for example, is most likely an ISTJ, and whenever I have trouble recalling an old event I’ll call her up and she’ll readily remind me about what happened.

Si-doms are typically great sources of do’s and don’ts, especially the older ones. Any artist/writer/screenwriter/painter should be able to appreciate the opportunities that come with all those memories and stories. Provided, of course, you’re respectful and the ISTJ in question is willing to chat about things that may or may not bring back intense memories.

The ISTJ’s auxiliary function is, of course, Te. This gives them a natural edge when it comes to managing and coordinating, which I appreciate a lot. When it comes to larger projects ISTJs are pro at making sure they (fairly) divvy up the workload. They also––sorry, Arvid––tend to have an advantage, even over INTJs, when it comes to making sure that no details get overlooked. That’s not to say that INTJs don’t also do everything they can to make sure that their project turns out just the way they visualize it. ISTJs are just more naturally detail-oriented.

Fi is a function that…well, it doesn’t seem to get the right type of love in the MBTI community. By that, I mean that people––especially on tumblr––tend to value/admire Fi for the rebelliousness that ALL Fi users exhibit. /sarcasm/

I really like mature Fi users, don’t get me wrong. They know what they’re feeling and, especially in the case of Fi users who also use Te, will do their best to communicate what they need. That’s a genuinely valuable ability. I always appreciate my Mom’s way of telling me things, for example. I’m not hugely touchy-feely, and she isn’t either, so when she needed alone time she would just say something along the lines of, ‘I’m getting a beer, then I’m going upstairs to read. You need anything?’

That right there is the heart of how an ISTJ cares for their people. Making sure they’re okay by doing what they need to do to help. As an action-oriented person I sure as hell appreciate that.

Finally, there’s that inferior Ne. It bears talking about, as does any other type’s inferior function. We all need to know our weaknesses or we’d all crumble from clay feet, a friend of mine once put it.

An ISTJ’s Ne isn’t going to be all that plain. As with INTJs and Se or ISTPs and Fe, it’ll sorta be in the background, still utilized but typically unnoticed. When it does come to the forefront (so to speak) due to stress, it often trips up the ISTJ in question. They begin to catastrophize and freak out about all the things that could happen; during times like these, they focus almost exclusively on the negative outcomes and need a helping hand/mind to get back on track.

Like any instance where an inferior function crops up in this way, an ISTJ’s inferior Ne can be extremely annoying for both them and for others. Part of the package, though.

Besides, a healthy and mature ISTJ can make the most of their Ne’s idiosyncrasies. My dear friend, for example, will usually be the first person to get on my tuchus about things I’ve been unable to get to (read: procrastinated), yet she’ll also be perfectly willing to tag along with me to get lunch out or go to Half-Price Books together. Provided we’ve got ourselves in order, of course.

Overall, ISTJs can be a little stubborn, but they can also be the wisest, fairest, and most trustworthy people you’ve ever met. They may not be the most popular or ‘romantic’ or ‘trendsetting’ of the MBTI types, yet that’s nothing to be ashamed of. If the entire human race were daredevil ISTPs like me, we wouldn’t have survived till now, I guarantee it.

Joking, of course. I’d like to think that ISTPs do have some modicum of self-control! :P

INTJs and Objective Judging

Arvid Walton 2 Comments

Catgyrl asked: ENFP here! I feel guilty for judging other people and it seems like INTJs don’t feel that way. You probably have some long thought process about this and I’d love to hear it. Sorry if that’s not really a question :)

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First of all, judgement is a necessary action for those of us who have any of intentions of helping or getting to know our friends. It also serves to protect us against people who would hurt or use us, but judgement is more than people make it out to be. The type of judgement that popular culture and religious organizations encourage us to refrain from is what I would like to call unrighteous judgement. And it’s true that type of judgement can be extremely hurtful, so it’s not only wise but important for our ethical well-being.

Judgement is not so narrow a field, however, that it does not also include a spectrum of righteous judgement, and as someone with an INTJ personality, this just so happens to be somewhat of a strong point for me. I shall endeavour my best to explain the concept in such a way as to make it understandable and doable. Continue reading →

Recognizing Unhealthy/Healthy Types

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Grahamcracker asked: How would you identify when someone is unhealthy for their personality type?

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The tell-tale sign of an unhealthy type is that they will embody the stereotypes.

Well-developed thinking types will make decisions based on both logic and emotion and vice versa for feeling types. A healthy individual is well balanced between their four functions, relying on all of them interacting between one another to live their life.

Another classic tell is whether or not the person manipulates people. Unhealthy thinking types often disregard other people’s feelings and use “logic” or “just being honest” as an excuse for bad behaviour. Unfortunately, this means that thinking types can also be extremely good at gaslighting. Meanwhile, unhealthy feeling types often have a tendency to rely on emotional appeals such as guilting, projection, and triangulation, as a way to control other people’s behaviour. This is all stuff that any therapist will tell you is toxic (both for you and for other people).

Grahamcracker asked: And how would you know if someone was well-developed in all four?

Want to know how to find yourself a keeper? While I can’t guarantee you’ll cross paths or have success connecting with said keeper, I’ll offer a modicum of advice on how to identify healthy MBTI types.

First and foremost––this person does not manipulate people, especially not intentionally. Second, you’ll see them making decisions based on more than just logic, or emotion alone. They’ll use a balance of both. You see their better self, a healthy person who knows what is important, plays well with others, and is neither overly insecure or overly self-important. To be balanced, to make good decisions, and to be a good partner in a relationship, you need to be as emotionally healthy as possible, and that means using all your functions.

I’m tired so I will not go into these in-depth, but you can get the general gist by combining the cognitive functions that make up your type.

Healthy Fe-Ti: caring about other people’s feelings and preservation, while also being able to step back and analyze something objectively, to learn how it works so that you can improve your relationships.

Healthy Te-Fi: being motivated to organize things and adhere to logical principles, while being aware that politeness is a useful tool in life and that not everything needs to be said, while holding to a strong set of moral principles.

Healthy Ti-Fe: staying focused on logical objectives, but also softening one’s words to avoid hurting other people’s feelings or alienating others in attempt to work toward a greater purpose that benefits everyone.

Healthy Fi-Te: championing causes and inspiring others to follow your lead, while remaining true to your beliefs but also enabling others to have different values systems from your own, and organizing your time and space effectively to accomplish your goals.

Healthy Si-Ne: bring valuable information to the table through things you have learned and your own experiences, but accept that your memories are subjective interpretations of events and that considering new avenues of possibilities is not a threat to your usual routines.

Healthy Se-Ni: staying open to both participating in new experiences and helping others to see opportunities around them, while realizing that there is more to life than just this moment, and all actions in the present have future consequences.

Healthy Ne-Si: entertaining many possibilities but also remembering past experience, learning from the mistakes of others, and seeking out extensive details, so as to make wise decisions.

Healthy Ni-Se: visualizing goals and discerning how to reach them, while also being unafraid to take opportunities as they appear, thus avoiding staying too much inside the mind and seeing their ideas implemented in the real world.

How to Differentiate Between Judging/Perceiving, Introverted/Extroverted

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Guest post by Mathew T. Griggs,

At the surface level, the MBTI assessment test evaluates test-takers for a functional preference of Introversion/Extroversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving. If we travel a little deeper, we identify 8 cognitive functions that—when combined in different ways—result in the 16 different personality types. Much of the reason the test is often so ineffective, and the reason so many people walk away with absurd conclusions about the MBTI, is that the test is trying to account for so many things in such a short questionnaire. Trying to identify 8 different variables that separate into different cognitive functions and 16 distinct personalities is a lot for any algorithm or approach to really do successfully. The test does fairly well, but it can only really do as well as the test-taker can introspect.

Continue reading →

INTJ: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Arvid Walton 9 Comments

This post is dedicated to my readers that want to understand INTJs, but are less familiar with Jungian cognitive functions. I understand that the functions are difficult for newbies to navigate, so I’m making your life easier.

Fact #1 People empty us.

When I say this, I don’t mean that we don’t value human companionship. In fact, I would argue to the contrary. However, our introversion causes us to drain our energy as we attempt to socialize. Our energy stems from within ourselves rather than from being with other people. We value solitude, silence and thought.

To us, silence truly is golden.

As a result, parties are definitely not our favourite place to be and when forced to be in such an environment, we tend to stick to the sides of the room rather than gravitating toward the centre. We are extremely conscious of our personal space and absolutely hate being touched (in any way, shape or form) without our permission. Likewise, incessant noise drives us mad, prevents us from thinking and makes us want to scream at everybody to “shut up.”

We find it astounding that some people can manage to say the same thing three times in different words or that someone can fill an hour of time with words that mean nothing. We value conciseness when it comes to speaking, such that we say nothing more than what needs to be said (and sometimes we can’t even say that much).

Continue reading →

A Riddle for an INTJ

Arvid Walton 3 Comments

Once upon a time, I was a seventeen-year-old, bored out of my mind, even in my college-level classes. This boredom morphed into a sort of cosmic angst, anger at the fact that I was sitting in a classroom memorizing facts when I could be problem-solving somewhere else.

One of my siblings tells me I looked like Sherlock pounding around the living room asking for a case.

Boredom is a very dangerous thing in immature INTJs because we’ll do pretty much anything to stop being bored (so long as it doesn’t violate our principles).

In 2014, @Ockham’s Chainsaw linked me to a post they’d written on the topic of intelligence, mentioning that NT types are often reluctant to say, “I can’t do it,” or “I don’t know,” when taking a test because they have firm confidence in their ability to figure the problem out, even if they don’t know the answer.

The following piece of writing consists of the notes I recorded while solving the Einstein Riddle to stop being bored when I was in high school, and it’s a perfect example of Ockham’s idea.

Actually, it is easy. You just have to believe it. The problem with the 98% of people who can’t solve this riddle is that they lack the patience and the solid logic necessary to tell themselves that they can do it. As it turns out, I fall into the 2% that can effectively solve this riddle without googling instructions (since that’s no fun for an INTJ).

Come on, people. If you think you can’t do it, you’ve been watching too much telly.

I started with what I knew for sure.

  • House 1 = Norwegian
  • House 2 = blue (because the house next to the Norwegian is blue)
  • house 3 = Brit/red (because the middle house drinks milk –> green and white have to be next to each other and green drinks coffee, so it couldn’t be them)
  • House 4 = green (because green is on the left of white)
  • House 5 = white

Next, using a graph, I decided to slowly decipher various details about each:

  • House 1 = yellow (since I knew all the other colours) –> The yellow house owner smokes Dunhill
  • House 2 owns a horse (because the horse lives next to Dunhill)

Next, I made a graph of what I knew (in order of houses):

COLOUR Yellow Blue Red Green White
Pet Horse
Cigar Dunhill
Drink Milk Coffee
Nationality Norwegen Brit

I knew then that the water drinker could only belong at the yellow house because:

  1. Yellow doesn’t drink beer (beer is paired with Bluemaster and we know that yellow smokes Dunhill)
  2. He doesn’t drink tea (because the Dane drinks tea, not the Norwegian)
  3. The only option left was water

From this, I determined that the Blue house-owner smokes Blend (because Blend is neighbors with water).

Next, I looked specifically at one clue: the owner who drinks beer smokes Bluemaster

  1. Blue doesn’t drink beer because he smokes Blend
  2. Green drinks coffee and red drinks milk, so neither smoke Bluemaster
  3. Therefore, White drinks beer and smokes blue master
COLOUR Yellow Blue Red Green White
Pet Horse
Cigar Dunhill Blend Bluemaster
Drink Water Milk Coffee Beer
Nationality Norwegen Brit

Well, there was one obvious hole there…looks like blue drinks tea and is a Dane….

I deduce that the German lives in the green house because:

  • he can’t live in the blue house because he smokes Prince, not Blend
  • he doesn’t smoke Bluemaster, so he doesn’t live in the white house

Red must be the bird owner, because the bird owner smokes Paul Mall and all the other cigars are taken

Yellow owns the cat because blend has a neighbor who owns a cat (and we’ve now determined that it’s not red because red owns the bird)

COLOUR Yellow Blue Red Green White
Pet Cat horse Bird
Cigar Dunhill Blend Paul Mall Prince Bluemaster
Drink Water Milk Coffee Beer
Nationality Norwegen Brit German

We can easily see from looking at the graph that the only place left for our tea-drinking Dane is Blue.

That leaves white to be the dog-owning Swede and the green to own the fish.

COLOUR Yellow Blue Red Green White
Pet Cat Horse Bird Fish Dog
Cigar Dunhill Blend Paul mall Prince Bluemaster
Drink Water Tea Milk Coffee Beer
Nationality Norwegien Dane Brit German Swede

The German owns the fish!

The INTJ’s Depression Battle Plan

Arvid Walton 4 Comments

H Janeway asked: “How does an INTJ know what she needs? I am a bit disconnected from my emotions because of depression, depression medication and being an INTJ. How do I know what I need so that I can make a plan/schedule and hopefully get better?”

I hope the best for you in your journey.

I don’t have depression, but as someone with PTSD, I can speak to your experience of struggling to figure out what you need to do to heal.

Before I was fully aware that I had PTSD, I was very confused, and very, very concerned with how I was supposed to figure out this “trap” that had caught me. At the time, many factors combined to make it so that I was not in a position to seek help. As a result, I had to figure things out on my own.

Here is what I have learned the hard way: Continue reading →

Pursuing Goals: Ni vs Ne

Guest Writer 2 Comments

Guest post by whatisfreethen, INTP

Ni may be able to follow a single idea to completion, it wouldn’t be fair to say that Ne’s can’t. It’s just that Ne ideas tend to be either more short term or fantastical than Ni. Also if an Ne can’t immediately execute an idea, it tends to get overcrowded by a flood of new ideas and never gets reconsidered. Or it tends to build up and become even more implausible than it was.

INTJ friend: So, what have you thought about writing that book together?

Me: How about one of us leans an animating software, and one learns sound effects, get some voice actors, and instead we make an animated movie?

Him: Maybe I’ll just write it myself. Continue reading →

Let’s be Real: One INFJ to the Rest of Mankind

Guest Writer 34 Comments

Guest post by Heather, INFJ

I’d like not only to dispel some of the myth and mist surrounding the INFJ legend today, but to cast some light and provide some entertainment as well. There are some frequently repeated assumptions (aka stereotypes) regarding INFJs that have been circulating internet-land for years. These legends affect non-INFJs, it’s true, but they also have a tendency to inform INFJs’ opinions of themselves. It’s the power of suggestion. Particularly when there is a grain of truth to a stereotype, it is both easy and agreeable to say, “oh yes, that’s me,” so long as the stereotype is positive or comical or gives us an excuse for our bad habits.

One of these assumptions that INFJs love to claim for their own is being psychic, otherworldly narwhalicorns. It’s kind of an attractive idea to have about oneself. Particularly when one has felt like something of an alien amongst other humans for most of one’s life, and when one is actually quite clever at reading people. So, let’s be real: INFJs very often know a substantial amount of information about you that they don’t let on to, because first and foremost, they want you to be comfortable with them. No one feels very comfortable if they think you’re aware of their motivations and inner life. So then, where did this mysterious cache of information come from, you may ask. First, INFJs are simply very attuned to people in general. Se is our inferior function, but it is still a function. Because we are sort of ‘set’ to the people wavelength, that is the information we tend to pick up a lot of. This information is fed into our Ni (dominant function), which recognizes patterns and themes and can extrapolate accurate readings based on very little data. Add to this that I at least (sorry guys, I don’t know any INFJs in real life besides myself) amuse myself by studying personality theory, graphology, and Chinese face reading so that I can know even more about every specimen that crosses my path unsuspectingly. Continue reading →

Defying INTJ Stereotypes: Anon

Guest Writer 17 Comments

Guest post by Anonymous, INTJ

I’m artistic.

To a fault, I admit. Ever since I was a child I’d either be playing mind-games or writing, drawing, or outwardly narrating a story. When I was in first to third grade, we had to keep journals. The teacher would put up a prompt (Ex: Do you have any pets?) and we had to write a few sentences about it. I thought this was boring, so I asked the teacher if I could just write, and she allowed me to. So, for the next three years, I would develop new little stories and illustrations to accompany them.

I was obsessed with drawing, back then, too. I’ve always been told I’m creative and a good artist, even though I’d like to think the comments didn’t affect me, I think they’re why I began to do it more often. That, or boredom. I still think it’s more of boredom. So, now I’m, as far as I’ve seen, the most experienced artist I know. I don’t even really like it. It’s passive. It just happens.

I have a large group of friends.

Continue reading →