EDIT: of course it's not all that simple. IMHO a society of pure extroverts would be an unstable network of salespeople with nothing to sell and no one to engineer and manufacture the things needed. I'm joking here, but... :)
Society exists because of those relationships, and so it is good for its survival and success if the number of relationships or connections within society is growing and they are becoming stronger. It is basically the existential need for any society.
(I'm sorry if I'm wrong, I'm not a specialist in this field, it's just a bunch of guesses based on my observations)
It's probably just poor choice of langauge.
Sociability may be a better term. We benefit from relationships and hermits are unlikely to form close relationships. I feel as if the person is suggesting that being sociable and being extraverted are the same thing. They are not.
But also, how silly is the recommendation of how to be more extraverted. "Go to events and meet new people". I stopped reading at that point.
Sociability also sounds… good, right? Extroversion/introversion sounds more neutral to me.
Anyway, whatever we call it, I don’t think the author was trying to call extroversion universally good. Rather, they had identified their level of introversion as a problem, so the correction they wanted to apply was in the direction of extroversion. They just wanted to move closer to the middle, from an extreme.
She’s offered her strategy and provided some measurements. It is fair to question the results, but what specifically are you questioning?
> Why is being extraverted so highly praised, anyways?
In general I think introversion is a fine trait to have, but some of her descriptions in the text made it seem like she was introverted to the point where it was causing her problems. Everything’s a spectrum, I wouldn’t want to be an extrovert, but it is nice to be able to strike up a conversation in a social setting instead of playing with one’s phone.
I see it as almost no different than "why would someone want to be more physically attractive". And, not exactly the same as but close to "charisma" which having more of makes someone more admired, liked, attractive etc.
Having said all that, regardless of other people's perception of you, It seems like being naturally extroverted makes social interactions come easier, effortless, while being introverted and still having to interact socially requires much more effort and is less enjoyable. So having fun and being at ease doing something is better than not.
This is the main problem with talk of being able to "change your personality". It is almost self evident this isn't possible to any significant degree because the thing about extroverts doing something that introverts want to be able to do is, for extroverts or those with social charisma, it comes naturally. They don't have to work hard at it. They are not thinking and analyzing and calculating about it. They just do it without thought. Their mental process around these things is much more efficient in other words. It is akin to someone who knows a language well vs someone with limited mastery of a foreign language, having to constantly exert mental effort to translate thoughts words by word in their head. Some people are also naturally funny; someone who is not can not really change their personality to become this, they would be working hard at something that the other one does not really have to "try" to do.
I'm not sure I would frame it as a fixed trait (genetic).
I completely agree one shouldn't neurotically overthink everything. Faking a response using rationality is unhealthy; also people don't respond well to fakeness nor the apparent manipulation.
I believe we can change ourselves somewhat, but I always try to think along the lines of internal encouragement (or even operant conditioning).
I guess my underlying belief is that we are both rational and irrational, and that our rational side can influence our irrational side by self-teaching.
Then again I hate this modern belief that we can do anything if we just believe in ourselves enough. Of course the outcome is that we blame ourselves if we don't make it, or blaming our society (which isn't any more helpful).
Life-goals are a modern weirdness, and there's a lot of adjacent woowoo like manifestation.
Or maybe that's just my personality speaking, being stoic and content.
there's a quite a few benefits to it. Neurotic people tend to be more self aware, more attuned to danger, more open to recognizing risks than most people. It also often correlates with high conscientiousness.
The very thing you're arguing for, being willing to practice different ways that is to say be unstable, is a feature of neuroticism. With neurotic people in particular in our age the fault often isn't so much the person as it is that they don't fit in environments that demand compliance, reliability and a kind of industrial standardized behavior.
The thing is, I was content to just ignore these problems as they didn’t affect me MOST of the time. I only got a few cockroaches on me while I was sleeping, and the government won’t bother you for a few years. In retrospect I’m disgusted by the former especially, and annoyed about the latter, but when you’re living in that situation it’s hard to get yourself out of it. To be clear, I wasn’t particularly depressed, I just would get annoyed when I thought of doing anything other than exactly what I wanted to do at any given time.
I guess you can argue there’s no right or wrong when your life is in relative order but I think it’s naive to use this as general advice.
Can relate strongly to this, especially when it involves other people's whims or need for you to be involved in some such that you just don't care about nor want to be bothered with.
That's certainly your prerogative, but I think there are a lot of people who have identified traits in themselves that they believe are negative forces in their lives, and would love to change them if they could. "For better or worse" is the issue; some people do want to better their worse-ness, even if it might change what "me" is to some extent.
But I don't really put much stock in the "it's me" declaration. I'm in my mid-40s, and if I look back on just the last 20 years of my life, I have changed so much over that time. Taking one example from the big five, I would have scored low on the extraversion scale in my 20s, very high in my 30s, and today I'd say I'm somewhere in between. I've changed in other aspects as well.
These changes were for the most part not conscious changes. I don't think I ever set out to change these personality traits, but they changed all the same. How is that better or more "natural" than making deliberate choices and taking specific actions in order to change, instead?
Some time ago, I wrote something about "mood", which can be adapted, or parallels can be found, with "personality", after all, who knows who we really are.
"Recognizing our moods and then changing them is not easy, but neither is it impossible. It requires considerable initial effort to get to know ourselves and constant practice to ensure that this knowledge does not disappear at the first sign of crisis. As always, when we try to change a behavior or habit that we don't like, the first step is to convince ourselves that it is possible, the second is to create the change, and the third is to maintain it.
Unfortunately, more often than we would like, our moods and actions are not aligned, they do not go in the same direction. As has happened to everyone with an Internet connection and a profile on social media, we can be in a bad mood after reading a post on social media written by someone we do not know about an issue that does not concern us. Furthermore, and I have experienced this many times in my life, we can wake up annoyed, angry, unnecessarily combative for any reason or, often, for no particular reason, and carry on with this cloudy state of mind for hours. Sometimes for days. We can, and often do, accept bad moods, irritation, and conflict as inevitable, part of our personality, a healthy reaction to an unfair world that does not reward us, does not gratify us, gives to others what it should give to us.
As I said years ago to a girlfriend of mine when she complained about some of my behavior that she considered wrong—-almost always unfairly, I would say, but I am not my own harshest critic—-we wake up in the morning in a bad mood, perhaps because of hormones that do as they please, the bedroom is too hot or too cold, the sugar in the blood goes up and wakes you up and then goes down and puts you back to sleep. But instead of accepting a bitter awakening as the result of chance or an overly heavy omelet, we often start looking, like a Lagotto Romagnolo would for truffles, for other causes and culprits, real or imagined, for our bad mood.
I suspect that we struggle to change our moods because we see them as part of ourselves or as defining who we are. But is a bad mood that goes away after half an hour of afternoon sleep or melts like snow in the sun when someone, after much intolerable and unfair waiting, finally recognizes how beautiful and charming we are with a smart compliment, really part of us? My personality, which, like everyone else's, derives from a mixture of genes, experiences, chemical and hormonal reactions to food, words spoken and heard and, in my case in particular, humidity, is not what I would describe as tremendously jovial, either by nature or habit. But following these reflections on moods, I began to think that I should not accept this tendency toward ill will: as I read somewhere, pessimists give the impression of being intelligent, but it is optimists who are successful.
As I was saying, I used to wake up in the morning annoyed, wanting to argue with someone, or rather with everyone, wallowing in my tormented thoughts. But I decided, hesitantly at first and then with determination, to change. I began to recognize the movement of my mood toward irritation and distraction, and instead of letting it continue undisturbed, I began to remind myself of the opportunities of the new day, the life ahead, and the hopes and possibilities that come with it. And I realized that this brief act of persuasion was often enough to change my mood, to put me in a more positive frame of mind for the day ahead, whatever difficulties or pleasures it might present.
It's not that being irritated or in an aggressive mood should always be avoided, and even less so the sadness that follows an unfortunate event. It's just that irritation and aggression should be used sparingly: it must be the right mood for the occasion."
A year from now, it'd be interesting to see how hen is doing.
(I'm not asserting that personality is fixed; rather, I'm asserting that 6 weeks is too short a measurement period, and that most of us are not very good at self-assessment)
Many people in Alcoholics Anonymous don't actually do the 12 steps as designed by Bill Wilson. They don't understand that it's a piece of spiritual technology designed to produce a spiritual awakening and a reorganization of personality. I've met many people who have become better people through the 12 steps.
I've rewritten them here to give a basic outline and remove any mention of a theistic god. I am not a professional so please forgive me if I've over-simplified or got something wrong. This is how it worked for me at a basic level.
1 - Take a look and see if you have a problem. Admit you have a problem if you have one. You can't fix a problem you refuse to recognize.
2 - Recognize you've tried to solve it by yourself and have failed. You need help from others.
3 - Humble yourself enough to ask for help and be ready to follow direction
4 - List all the complaints people have about you and analyze what you might be doing wrong
5 - Share your failings, no matter how embarrassing, with a trusted other on the principle that confession is good for the soul and sunlight is the best disinfectant
6 - Ask yourself if you're really willing to change. That's not a given. Maybe you aren't.
7 - If you are then do what it takes to change. This is going to be different for everyone.
8 - Look at step 4 and see who you need to apologize to
9 - When you feel you are ready and sufficiently reformed, apologize and make restitution to those on the list you made in step 8. To those that aren't willing to talk, let it go and don't bother them.
10 - Make it a practice to do steps 4 through 9 as needed. We believe in progress not perfection.
11 - We need to remind ourselves daily that we have a problem that we can't solve alone and that we may need the help of others on any given day. I've heard it called a disease of forgetfulness. We may need to wake up in the morning to read and pray if so inclined. As one person told me, "carve out a little piece of each day for the 12 steps"
12 - Carry this message to others who are still suffering
So, in this light it makes sense to treat it like a sin. And to be fair, it is a sin in modern society as well. We even have “sin taxes” for such vices we determine can be used for tax gain.
I see no real problem with this. I am unaware of any large program that forces you to give yourself up to the Christian God, but most require you to give yourself up to a higher power. This is obviously designed to give you a release from things you can’t control so you can use that mental power to help yourself get better.
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
Some of the medicines and treatments showing the most promise are still too expensive for many. AA programs are accessible and can be helpful. You think they treat alcoholism (or alcohol abuse disorder) as a sin? In the meetings there isn’t a whole lot of judging going on. It’s mostly mutual support and compassion.
Why were the jews unable to handle pork? Didn't their neighbours manage it?
There are many theories that try to tie it specifically to the conditions in the Middle East, but none that I'm aware of are particularly convincing.
That was as true 1000 years ago as it is today.
Cooking and salting the meat both greatly reduce incidence.
It is possible that cultures which avoided pork altogether lacked adaptations against the parasites at the genetic level or simply that somebody among them noticed the relationship with illness whilst missing the link with undercooked meat.
How do you square this against, say, the possibility that the early jews wanted to differentiate themselves from the egyptians? I'm not sure about the specifics of the archaeological record but perhaps it was the case that pork was an upper class thing in Egypt due to it being fat and tasty, and slaves and workers were instead fed beef. Then the rule in Leviticus might reflect this and conserve a part of an older identity. In early judaism at least some of the fat from mutton and so on was burnt as a cultic sacrifice, so maybe the idea was to keep tradition from before the exile to the Sinai.
Purely cultural reasons are plausible but pork is a staple meat in all cultures where it is allowed. It would be an inordinate sacrifice to make for tradition alone.
If differentiation was the motivation, couldn't they make laws against eating peas or some other inconsequential crop?
In context, pork was only one of many forbidden foods. Certain kinds of locusts being allowed while others not, certain kinds of seafood being allowed while others not.
They have been debunked as being good heuristics for food safety with 21st century knowledge but that doesn't mean they didn't stem from observations of poison, parasites, etc.
You could apply the same reasoning to the Jewish culture of cleanliness in general. It certainly differentiated them from many other contemporaneous cultures, but why would they wash themselves in the first place?
You're still defending possibility as such, and not arguing for relative likelihood. I find the lack of anchoring in early judaic society suspicious.
If you read the Torah you'll find that it is not a collection of argumentative texts. To the extent that Leviticus makes an argument it stops at two criteria, cloven hoofs and rumination, without further explanation. This is also how more well-known early judaic legal norms were communicated, e.g. the noahide laws and the decalogue are presented as is without further argument.
The context of early judaism was also quite deadly in itself, people died all the time from a variety of opaque reasons. Figuring out that someone died due to some meat-transmitted parasite rather than a disgruntled shedim wasn't very likely.
The Torah is quite unconcerned with things like health or actions that are supposed to result in a long life, insisting instead that these things are decided by G-d. Dying isn't given a very prominent place in this early theology either, it just kind of shrugs it off with a vague idea about Sheol as a container for souls, in case they just don't stick around like some ancestral ghosts or something.
Pork was widely eaten at the time, so the "good heuristics for food safety" thing seems entirely useless to me. People already knew how to prepare pork and did it, and pork isn't particularly insidious, if kept in a warm environment it'll ward off your nose and taste buds in no time. Beef (and mutton) is more likely to trick you into eating it even though it has gone bad, and it also carries a risk of giving you parasitical or bacterial infections.
As for pork as food, it's as old as neolithic societies. Wild boars were a very popular food source, hence why they were eventually domesticated. Now pigs don't produce tasty milk in the same way sheep, goats and cows do, but they produce a lot of meat and offspring without being picky about diet.
Leviticus does not say 'pig meat makes your tummy ill and then you die, so obviously don't eat it', instead it says 'pigs don't chew cud, hence they're impermissible', and frames it as a cultic uncleanliness, similar to contact with menstruating women or somesuch. People don't get parasites and die from a hug with a menstruating woman, but there are still rules in early judaism about it and as far as I know no speculations about it being in any way health related.
If pork wasn't a main meat in Egypt and the Levant in like the bronze age, then it would likely not have been a prominent diet rule in early judaism. G-d has this tendency to make up rules about stuff that people do rather than stuff that they already don't. When it's about things that people don't have to be constrained from doing or encouraged to do that they're already keen on doing, the genre tends to be poetry rather than law.
And yet others were designed to distinguish the ingroup from the outgroup. That distinction is worth keeping in mind.
This is contrary to my understanding of 12 step. Silkworth's framing (which heavily influenced AA) was that alcoholism was the result of an individual's physical reaction to alcohol, not a moral failing.
> rooted in Christian theology
They were absolutely influenced early on by the Oxford Group, too, which did provide some of the context and language.
It's not accurate to say AA treats alcoholism as a sin. The Big Book describes it as "cunning, baffling, and powerful." Something beyond ordinary willpower, which is precisely why Step 1 acknowledges powerlessness. The theological framing isn't about moral failing but about the need for what Carl Jung described a "vital spiritual experience." A psychic reorganization that ordinary self-will couldn't produce.
https://aaforagnostics.com/blog/carl-jung-letter-to-bill-wil...
What makes you define it is a health problem? Does that help?
Maybe calling booze a sin helps people.
Most importantly, you are answering someone who defined the steps without reference to sin or Christianity.
Maybe it's because most people don't just randomly are offered cigarettes or because it went from a "50% of the population" to "10% of the population in this age group".
I'm not saying that sober alcoholics are making a big deal out of it, it just feels different - maybe because it is seen as a lot more problematic than being a smoker? Or harder to quit. Or because it's rarer.
It's also a practice to keep everyone on the same level. Everyone is an alcoholic -- otherwise it'd just be a bunch of old farts telling new guys what to do (then hardly anyone would come back).
In my AA we say that alcoholism is a chronic disease. The same as (some forms) of diabetes, you don’t just get rid if it. Its something you can manage but not cure. It lies dormant inside of you the rest of your life.
My mentor (highly successful and 30 years sober) said it nicely: he has an angry tiger inside of him thats trapped inside a cage. One that will surely eat him if it gets out. His job is to keep the tiger in the cage.
Thats what it feels like. Every day. The cravings go down, the thoughts, etc. Self control improves. But the danger lies dormant for us.
Surprisingly enough, although there seem to be parallels with how people experience 'life after' both things, I find it curious that alcoholics I talk to often use the "caged animal" metaphor, whereas depressives tend to describe it more as walking "a tight rope" or "at the edge of an abyss" metaphor.
And while I find the steps here laid out really admirable, I struggle to see how to translate the steps to my afflictions.
Closest I can come is to see the impact of failing to trust. Failing to trust myself and trust others. And failing to let myself be vulnerable.
I.e. how bad was your drinking before you realized you had a problem?
For an alcoholic, it takes vigilance every day.
I've known people with substance abuse problems, some of them recovered and had healthy relationships with substances. Some of them stopped using for long periods but touching the substance again relit the problem just the same as before.
The latter group even sober for decades are still alcoholics (or whatever other substance). There are people for which the problem never goes away, they just manage not to indulge it.
[insert joke about “substance” and abuse here]
The idea is that our sense of identity and image of self shapes our behaviour, subconsciously to a large extent. So if someone offers you a cigarette and you're trying to quit, it can make a difference if you frame it as "No thank you, I'm trying to quit" (I still identify as a smoker, but I'm trying to not do it), vs "no thank you, I'm not a smoker (anymore)".
Applied to defining goals vs parts of identity- not "I want to run every day and compete in a marathon", but "I 'd like to be a marathon runner". Because, in a lot of cases, we want to do something because of the qualities or traits we perceive the people doing it to have.
To me, it sounds good in this context as well - instead "I have to stop drinking" - "I want to be a sober man".
I learned about this from Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind.” I’m sure it’s documented elsewhere.
Do we just not yet understand addiction enough to treat it properly? Are we able to treat addiction (so, for example, someone could successfully limit themselves to low levels of social drinking that don't cause them harm), but doing so is so difficult and hit-or-miss, that we give up and only promote full abstinence as the solution?
I also wonder if abstaining from alcohol can have negative affects on life for some people. Some people use alcohol as a social lubricant; abstaining might mean (detrimentally) less social interaction. In some cultures/environments, not drinking can be career-limiting (I think this is toxic, but fixing that can take generations). I think it's fair to say that, on balance, the pros of not drinking to excess all the time will (nearly?) always outweigh any cons of abstinence, but can we do better than either extreme?
I poked around at some studies, and what I found was interesting. It does seem that 12-step programs tend to outperform things like cognitive behavioral therapy (though there is some disagreement here). But also many of these studies are about whether or not a given treatment achieves abstinence from alcohol, not if it treats the underlying disorder. So I'm not sure what conclusions (if any) can be drawn.
(Ultimately, though, if the 12-step program worked for you, and you're happy with the results and with your life now, that's all that matters! I don't mean to demean what you've accomplished or throw shade on the life you have now. I just think this is a very high-profile societal/health issue that we seem to deal with in a very different way than we deal with others, and that seems strange to me.)
This is where religion reflects cultural technology that gets lost in the secular translation.
Secularists vastly overestimate man’s control over himself and his world. Most people lack the impulse control to partake in their vices responsibly. That’s why most Americans are fat. We have a world surrounded by temptation—snacks available everywhere—and we tell people to partake responsibly but they can’t do that. Most people don’t have that same relationship with alcohol or cigarettes, but for the many people who do it’s unrealistic for them to think they can just drink responsibly.
I'd prefer if you didn't generalize here, especially since there is no "secularist bible" that lays out what "secularists" believe (or do not believe).
“X believes Y ” almost invariably just means “I think most X I’ve come across seem to believe something like Y”. Read it as such.
Most American denominations do not treat food as sinful, so the prevalence of fat religious Americans isn't a rebuttal to my point. If you look at denomations that do, the statistics are quite remarkable. Mormonism, for example, is a remarkable cultural technology: https://www.deseret.com/2010/4/13/20375744/ucla-study-proves....
Another example would be New England congregationalists, who have an ethos that "food is for fuel, not for enjoyment." We have many retirees from that demographic in my town and they're all unusually thin and healthy.
eg. and on the record
* https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/02/child-migran...
* https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/case-studies/ca...
* https://kelsolawyers.com/au/paedophile_offenders/brother-kea...
Still, I concede your point that buggery and physical child abuse at an industrial scale isn't especially creative and just the usual dull grind played out again and again.
That is, I don't believe it is possible that you've had real world experience with alcoholics, because if you had, it would be obvious why it doesn't work the way you are asking about. Some addictions are just too powerful. It is not a matter of having failed to treat the root cause. It's a matter of acknowledging that, for some people, the only solution to alcohol is not to consume any. It doesn't mean they don't also try to treat and understand deeper emotional reasons for their drinking.
[1]: https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2025/08/addiction-sci...
[2]: https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/35742-newly-discovered-brai...
In short, my key takeaway (as an outsider) is that with AA it’s helpful to get people sober and there’s value and comfort in that. Unfortunately that comfort has diminishing return. People (e.g., my ex) put in the time (in a comfortable sorta way), but then don’t put in the work (read: progress to address the root problem).
Finally, as an unrelated / random side note, my theory is that if you evaluated late in life alcoholics (read: 30 yo and up) most would test positive for NPD. In the hands of someone suffering from NPD, alcoholism is one hell of a weapon (e.g., manipulation, avoid accountability, etc). Also, within the context of The Program you will never be encouraged to seek help for your NPD.
NPD = Narcissistic Personality Disorder ?
>> overblown levels of self-importance, arrogance, and selfishness, as well as a lack of empathy for others.
Googled the term, but couldn't exactly see the connection. Fortunately, I currently only interact with a few people I consider alcoholics. AA definitely addressed the lack of empathy, at least.
Life is hard. People fall back on bad habits and many won’t even realize that it’s happening until it their life is in ruins. If that has happened to you there are often no more second chances.
So for some they may be able to recover and have a drink every now and then. However, if your life has become upside down enough to enter a 12-step program, it’s often because there were no other options.
For some people the root problem is simply that their biological reward/motivation system with regards to a substance is just too much. If they drink they can't stop drinking and there's no deeper issue to solve and no cure besides abstinence.
Very few people can get high on heroin or meth and not have it be a permanent problem. When you do it you get addicted and when you get addicted there's no deeper problem than using the substance and needing to stop. The only advice for people is to never touch these things.
Different people have different reactions to different substances. For many, they just need to never do things and that's that. Alcohol is a "never touch" substance for some people.
Why do you think that's true?
Medical literature and talking with people who have done these things and knowing about their usage afterwards. Particularly people who have done lots of different drugs and isolate a few things as just different.
One of the disservices done to young people being taught about drugs is the misrepresentation of the addictive quality of various drugs and lumping everything together.
You say that as if it's obviously true. Not even a hint at an argument for it. Nor a mention of what you consider the actual root issue.
I would imagine that if there was a drug that removed the addictive desire for alcohol (and/or some other drugs, perhaps), all of us would know its name.
We certainly have drugs that can almost immediately terminate the effect of, for example, opiates, but that has nothing to do with ending addiction to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disulfiram
I learned about it on Reddit while clicking the (now removed) "random subreddit" button. I believe it was this subreddit:
That can still be OK, as what it is is a mix of empirical and arbitrary man-made alcoholism recovery program, not a God-given spiritual practice or a scientifically necessary one.
People have succesfully recovered with less, as well as more, as well as different steps taken. And inversely, people have failed even though they followed all 12 for a long time.
> God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.
Every time I think of it, I also think of the Man's Prayer recited at the end of every episode of the Red Green Show:
> I am a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess. Amen!
Personality matters only because it allows health professionals to differentiate what is a problem from what is not.
It's not so hard to change behavior when mental health is not an obstacle or is not involved. Changing personality sounds like a nice luxury for people who don't have mental health problems or personality disorders
And even then, I don't really see the point of changing personality, since a personality is not a real problem, only personality disorders (the medical term) really are problems.
And then there are thought patterns that can be shaped by mental illness that stay even after symptoms go away, those might be changed with CBT.
The first is the gospel of Mark, which unlike the other synoptic gospels starts with Jesus, probably around the age of 30, coming across John the Baptist and being baptized. Subsequently, Jesus went off into the desert where he prayed for 40 days.
Second is the alchemical process of creating the philosophers stone. Jung argued that this was a description of a process akin to individuation. He believed that what was on the surface metallurgical work (transmuting lead to gold) was actually an obscure formula for remaking the psyche, from whatever was pre-programmed by society into what the individual actually wanted. This process was said to take 40 days.
I think a big trap is mistaking who we are from who we appear to be. Some people try to "seem" a particular way, thinking that they can only change their appearance, like changing one's clothes. The alchemical view that Jung put forward was a bit more radical, suggesting that we can fundamentally change ourselves.
Many people in our modern society experiment on themselves to change their physical bodies and to change their minds. I believe it is interesting to consider similar experimentation on how we change our spirit/emotions.
In the same way that we realized that the plants people used to treat pain contained chemicals that are actually effective at treating pain, and in the same way that modern science seems to agree that fasting (a once religious practice) is effective for health, we can gain some insight on personality by looking at how it was addressed in historical contexts.
There was a video posted recently about a Sufi thinker whose ideas are quite close to modern CBT practices [1].
I think it is a good thing when we recognize ideas from the past as being related to modern ideas. I think we can do so without diminishing the modern and also without diminishing the past.
Back then I felt jealous of that trait. I said to myself I want to be like that, just be able to do smaltalk with strangers.
And I simply tried, within weeks I was able to do just that, even with people much prettier or confident than me, and I never looked back.
Over time a feel i need to hold myself back even. Often I have to say to myself: there's no point starting a talk now other than my own feeling good about it, so I hold it in.
As he sat on the train to Cambridge, it dawned on him that since none of his classmates would be joining him at university, he would be able to transform himself into a new person: an extrovert! He wasn’t sure it would work. He worried that his introversion might be too entrenched, but he decided to try. He would be boisterous and witty, he would tell funny stories at parties, he would laugh at himself – that was key.
“Roughly speaking,” he recalled, “I was going to become the kind of person you see now. It was a free decision.”
But, open neurotics are the funnest people.
You don't become more extroverted, but you can improve your social skills.
You don't become less neurotic, but you can learn to manage stress, or just avoid stressful situations altogether with proper planning.
You don't become more agreeable, but you can learn to become more considerate.
You don't become more conscientious, but you can make a framework to complete your tasks: schedules, checklists, etc...
You don't become more open, but you can educate yourself on opposing viewpoints.
Also understand that the "big 5" are not stats to maximize, while some traits are linked to success, they all have downsides. Extroverts and people high in agreeableness tend to follow the group even when it is wrong, lacking personal judgment. People low in neuroticism can get themselves into trouble because they didn't consider the negative consequences of their choices. Conscientious people can be rigid and obsessive, and there is such a thing as being too open (are you open to murder?).
The idea is: don't change your personality, you will probably fail anyways, but make the best of what you have, by making small adjustments. Ultimately, I think it is what the article suggests, once you take away the "big 5 scoring" bit.
> You don't become more extroverted, but you can improve your social skills.
What's the difference, though? Having well-developed social skills is an aspect of extraversion.
> You don't become less neurotic, but you can learn to manage stress, or just avoid stressful situations altogether with proper planning.
Isn't this the same thing as being less neurotic? If the overall effect is lower stress when confronted with the same situations and stimuli, then hasn't your personality changed?
> You don't become more agreeable, but you can learn to become more considerate.
Being considerate is just an aspect of agreeableness. If you become more considerate, then you do become more agreeable.
> You don't become more conscientious, but you can make a framework to complete your tasks: schedules, checklists, etc...
I would argue that the act of making those schedules and checklists in order to ensure you get your tasks done is, in and of itself, an act of being conscientious, so teaching yourself to do those things does indeed make you a more conscientious person.
> You don't become more open, but you can educate yourself on opposing viewpoints.
What is the goal of educating yourself on opposing viewpoints if not to understand different people better? You may still disagree with those viewpoints just as strongly, but the simple fact of a newfound willingness to educate yourself is an increase in openness.
To me, you are focusing on the mechanism here, and not on the outcome. After reading this article I found and took a big-five test[0] and found that some questions did try to assess how you feel about aspects of yourself, but many (most?) are about outcomes in your life. That is, "do you feel like it's easy to complete tasks?" is a different question from "do you tend to complete tasks?" The first one is about how it feels: even if you do tend to complete your tasks, you may feel like it's only because you've created your task-completion framework, but it takes concerted, difficult effort to stick with the framework. The second is about the outcome: you do complete your tasks, and the mechanism behind it isn't relevant. I think both things (the feelings and the outcome) are important to assessing the personality traits, to be sure, but changing the outcome (even if the feelings have not changed at all) is a material change. And I'd suspect that, if you do succeed in changing the outcome, the feelings will change over time, at least to some extent.
[0] https://bigfive-test.com/ (doesn't require some bullshit registration to see your results)
Many people are good at their job while not particularly enjoying it, they like the money, status, recognition, etc... they learned the skills to make it easy for them, but the job itself is just a mean to an end. This is like these programmers who may be skilled, but during their time off, they won't do so much as touching a computer.
This is the idea behind a "social introvert", they socialize for the benefits of socializing, like for their career, or simply maintaining friendships, because even introverts want friends. They can be good at it, they can do it with little effort, but they don't enjoy it. Extroverts will socialize just for the sake of it, even if it is detrimental, as in partying all night when there is work to do.
Same idea for all the other traits, you can go against your personality, but it will cost you. Do it too much, and you will burn out. That's why I think you should be honest with yourself. For example, if you are low on openness, it is good reading on opposing viewpoints, it may help you understand customer needs at work, hold more interesting conversations, etc... so it is worth the effort. However, it doesn't mean you should force yourself to spend a week in a hippie festival if you can't stand drugs just because you pretend you are open. Actually open people will not force themselves to go, in fact, they are more likely to force themselves to be reasonable and not go.
You have a choice of how to respond to your feelings - if you feel introverted, so you never talk to people, it dominates your life and personality. If you feel introverted, but you frequently talk to people anyway, you can make friends, participate in activities, and reduce the impact of those feelings on your life.
"I have a tendency (diagnosis), therefore I'm excused" or "I have a tendency, so I've created habits to create good results in spite of it."
And with practice, it gets easier, though it may always take work, and much more effort than for people to whom it comes naturally.
Maybe this doesn't change your personality to "I naturally socialize with others", but maybe it lets you change to "I can enjoy socializing with others".
The way I did it is: I learned to _pretend_ to be extroverted. It works!
For some reason, and especially on HN, extroversion is seen as a simple meaningless choice at best or sociopathic and manipulative at worst. It's really about finding new ideas, updating your mental models, and making rational decisions. So many things in life depend on your surroundings. if you're not interacting with the humans in it, you are just avoiding change. If you only socialize on the internet and with groups of like-minded people you find in real life, you are being manipulated.
I'm pretty good at socializing when I need to. I'll still most likely be wishing throughout that I was out eating dinner or having a beer at a brewery by myself with a good book or HN on my eInk tablet. Being by myself is extremely restorative and makes me happy.
I think this is what having an introverted personality is like.
Shifting from a Freudian paradigm to an Adlerian one has been massive. I’d rather be an accountable self-determining adult than an adult who attributes my flaws to traumas long gone.
If you’re serious about self-directed change, Adler is a good place to start.
I do believe that we can change our internal responses by slowly teaching ourselves to respond differently.
However I also believe that thinking about thinking is a dangerous activity. The risks are training yourself to be neurotic, and a habit of overthinking.
We can use our rational minds to change our irrational responses.
However how many people are skilled at teaching themselves? We could look at how good they are at teaching others (especially emotional kids).
To tired to pick a apart this article now. But this is feel good nonsense... Just one example, mindfulness is not even a fraction as effective as most people claim. It always fall apart when you do a proper study with actual measurable effects on life and happiness as outcome.
Also, 6 weeks is nothing. When I worked at inpatient unit we sometimes needed 6 weeks before patient reverted to baseline personality after admittance. This is just as silly as saying that you changed your lifestyle permanently with regard exercises after just a few weeks into your new year's resolution. You MIGHT have, but lets wait untill next year and see if the permanent claim is true.
This is interesting.
Is it also the case for those seeking bliss in the name of "jhana" (cf. Jhourney)?
reprom•17h ago
My bet is loads of people would have shot way up on the neuroticism scale.
jbreckmckye•17h ago
wincy•16h ago
Our daughter is seven now, she does use a wheelchair, but is normal intelligence and just went in her cute little electric car she got for Christmas with her big sister to a friend’s house down the street. I’m so proud of her, and my wife.
So sometimes these traumatic events improve your personality in the sense that they give you a more realistic way of how the world actually works, and how to achieve your goals (especially when those goals are dearly held, like “I want my child to survive and have the best quality of life possible).
Also, with COVID I’d imagine a lot of the neuroticism going up or down depended on where you were and your philosophy. For me, and a lot of people leaning conservative, living in the Midwest, I think it is less neurotic, perhaps to our detriment. Totally disregarding health warnings, and being insubordinately against precautions rather than becoming more neurotic. Many of these people got covid. One died. Most were fine. There is likely a “correct” amount of neuroticism, although that obviously changes depending on your circumstances.
Extremely high neuroticism would help someone who was Jewish in 1930s Europe decide to get themselves and their family out of there at any cost, but extremely high neuroticism might not be great during the Pax Americana of the last 60 years.
thisoneisreal•16h ago
fragmede•16h ago
Talanes•15h ago
It's not such a clean map between neuroticism and reaction there. My father was very against the precautions in a clearly neurotic manner. To the point where he was just sitting at home ranting about how he couldn't go anywhere or do anything without the vaccine, months after anywhere except a few voluntarily strict venues had stopped checking.