I do not particularly care about the Briggs Meyer test, but there was one question that struck me when I took it online 1, which was something like: "The first thing I think about when meeting someone new is how long it will take for them to be disappointed in me". That definitely hit home, because that is absolutely how I feel around others. It feels like disappointment is inevitable and my body is preparing itself for when it will happen, and tries to minimize the damage when it does.
I was going to make the previous post on the fear of getting into trouble into a 2 part post about being afraid of disappointing others, but then I remembered the importance of having a single intention for each piece and decided to split it into two, because this issue in my life has some different characteristics.
Now that I think about it, it's not clear to me that the two are part of the same dynamic, though I think I could make the case that they are. Being afraid of authority mainly characterized itself as being afraid of what my parents would think of me, and as a result, I was more so afraid of disappointing them, as a proxy, than afraid of teachers or whatnot, though the latter fear definitely exists in me as well. And I think that the fear of disappointing others, not just my parents, started at some point when I was a teenager, the age range where people are typically very sensitive to what others think of them.
Being afraid of disappointing unsurprisingly leads to a lot of avoidant behaviors, and you would probably not be surprised to hear that I wasn't very good at maintaining relationships. I wasn't terrible at starting them, but then I would typically take people for granted, and not really do a whole lot to stay in contact and show interest, and we would usually drift apart from one another.
I think this is also an issue which strikes men more than women, since men define themselves in terms of what they accomplish and what they can do, rather than simply who they are, but I am not sure and I don't think this is super important for my personal introspection. It's just that what I notice, while thinking about others who might have had the same issue, is that some people do everything to deflect problems and weaknesses onto others, while others like myself try to run away from the situation.
Just like the previous problem, I am not exactly sure on how to "resolve" it. Human lives are the results of complex parts, and trying to make changes haphazardly disturbs the balance which might have also brought good results. I don't like the fact that I tend to be hard on myself and am so afraid of what others think of me, but at the same time, it has given me higher standards and has made me more competent than someone who is totally lax about everything and has never applied themselves at anything. There are more ways to live than those two presented of course, and no one lives on the Pareto frontier, which is to say that people can easily make improvements to their life without sacrificing on other aspects, but still, I think I prefer the type of childhood I've had over others who were left to do absolutely nothing whatsoever and had parents who enabled that laziness.
I think one shift I notice from the me who had recently learned about childhood trauma and just how deep it is in human beings, not just something which affects the ones who had obviously terrible things happen to them, but something which affects basically everyone in the modern world, is that ultimately I am shaped by it, whether I like it or not, and for better or for worse. This is not a fatality, not at all, our job as conscious beings is to live our lives from intention and not programming, but still, no one has a neutral childhood, culture is obviously not neutral, and that is what we have to deal with, and which helps us to see the light for what it is.
Sometimes I wonder if consciousness manifested as a finite being necessarily implies some form of friction, which then manifests as what we call suffering and evil. I had the mental image of a world without any physical friction, as in the resistance to acceleration that you learn in physics, and how you would never be able to influence your trajectory after your initial velocity was set. You would just be at the whim of causality and the specific arrangement of your environment, from birth to death. Obviously I don't think such a weird Universe could be consistent with what we know about Reality, but still, the idea of having no agency whatsoever, precisely because there is no friction, is interesting to think about. I can make turns and change course in my life because there is resistance ... interesting to think about.
But ultimately I also don't think it's too important. This type of thinking is usually done to try to make the current discomfort or confusion more bearable, by trying to arrive at some abstract principle to justify why Reality is the way it currently is, but none of that changes the present does it?
I am afraid of disappointing others because ultimately I am not secure with myself. And to some extent, that might be fine, because the unactualized man strives for a form of unity, and that disatisfaction is why he is so motivated to change himself. Is that the only way? Maybe not, but again, those are abstract considerations. There are stories I would like to write and illustrate, and right now I am not there, and that frustrates me. That is my concern as a human being, and the rest is mostly distraction.
1 The site about the 16 personalities
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2025-07-31