In our first article of this series, we examined the personality junkie’s thirst for self-knowledge. Today, we will explore another common feature of personality junkies—a desire for growth and authenticity.
At least in America, it is not uncommon to encounter promoters of individuality and authenticity. We hear things like “Just be yourself” or “Stay true to yourself.” One can find similar dicta on the lips of the great philosophers, such as Nietzsche’s “Become who you are” or Kierkegaard’s “the great thing is to be oneself.”
The personality junkie’s notion of “authentic living” can be generally understood in the following way. The first step is to acquire sufficient self-knowledge (see prior post) in order to discover who you are. The next step is to willfully “be who you are” and “become who you are. Here we encounter the interesting juxtaposition of “knowing and being oneself” (present) and “becoming oneself” (future). At first, the idea of simultaneously being and becoming may seem a bit confusing, even contradictory. To better understand how this is possible, consider the following illustration.
Acorns develop into oak trees; not maples, birches, or walnuts, but oak trees. In the early stages of the process, the acorn has yet to become an oak tree, but, assuming all is going well, it is slowly becoming one. In doing so, it is being itself, doing what it was intended to do, while also becoming what it was intended to be; it is reaching for or moving toward its potential.
This leads to the question of why personality junkies are captivated by notions of authenticity and authentic living. In my view, it is not merely personality junkies, but people of all types who are interested in living authentically. Why? Because it is inherently satisfying to be oneself. Trying to be someone we’re not or to doing things that don’t come naturally can be both exhausting and frustrating. So it’s not that other non-personality junkies are unconcerned with authentic living, but only that, for one reason or another, they haven’t framed the issue according to the abstract terms of personality typology. This, again, is why we see greater numbers of Intuitive types heralding the value of authentic living.
Having now established personality junkies’ concerned for authenticity, we must now consider how authenticity links up with typology. With regard to the above process of knowing and becoming ourselves, typology can help considerably. At risk of stating the obvious, typology tells us what type of person we are, from which mold we were cast. Similar to the acorn that is destined to become an oak, there is a sense in which each personality type is designed to follow a certain path (even if there is a great deal of individual freedom within boundaries of that path). Thus, by understanding our type, as well as its prospective course of growth and development, we can grow more consciously aware of what it means to “be” and “become” ourselves.
With that said, personality typology can never tell us the whole story of the individual. While telling us a lot about the “nature” side of things (i.e., about the innate preferences and dispositions of the various types), it has less to contribute with regard to nurture-related issues (i.e., the effects of the current and past environment/ conditioning on the individual). It would be foolish for us to deny the role of our past experiences with respect to who we are or what we aspire to be. This is partly why some individuals may reject typology in favor of nurture-oriented theories of personality. Similarly, students of typology can be prone to ignoring or downplaying the effects of nurture. While the truth certainly lies somewhere in between, most of us seem to gravitate toward one side more than the other. Regardless of which side we prefer, we personality junkies are alike in our thirst for self-knowledge, authenticity, and personal growth.
Related Posts:
The Makings of a Personality Junkie: Part 1: Self-Knowledge