Hehe, maybe people who aren't IN-something find my blog boring to read, so only us IN-somethings are left hanging around here =)

Well, but I'll reply here both to Mr. Polecat and Paul K.

The way I think about it, the value of personality typology is measured by its ability to convey helpful insights for a person navigating his / her life. (And it is the same for horoscope personality descriptions, too.) If a person X gets some clarifying insights or empowering feelings when reading his / her personality test results, then that is what counts. For me, this is seldom the case, but I perfectly do understand that some of my friends see their personality tests or horoscope typologies providing useful insights.

Writing this blog entry was also partly inspired by finally reading a text about Highly Sensitive Personalities. That is one of the things people have been mentioning a lot over the past years, and sometimes also offering it for me, as a clarifying idea which could help me with my own personality. I've been vaguely familiar of the idea, and now I finally read through one text. I found it describing personality traits and stuff which I've been personally familiar with since my early childhood. It didn't help me to better understand myself, but it greatly helped me to understand the others, who have found this HSP-thing as helpful for them. As, nearly half of the text was about how people are relieved when they finally get to read that there is actually a name and a sensible description for their personality traits. That a lot of HSP-people have been internally worried if there is something wrong about them, because they are not like the majority of people and because they quickly get exhausted in situations the others seem to enjoy. Ah, OK, so now this helps me to understand what is the value of HSP-texts for these people. I understand and respect that - good! But, at the same time, I felt that this HSP-stuff has very little to offer for me - I've never been that worried about not being like the others, and right from the beginning I've just navigated my life relying on the guidance of all the HSP-traits. It never came to my mind to question the value of my own sensitivity - on the contrary I've often been surprised to notice how many people seem to be almost completely blind to things which seem vividly self-evident for me. Hehe - years before I knew anything about this HSP-description, I just thought that it is the natural state, and surprisingly many people are somehow defected or under-developed when it comes to sensitivity =)

So, although we all share a lot of things in common, yet each person travels his or hers unique path in life. A lot of people encounter a river to be crossed, and for them it is helpful to read stories about different ways of crossing a river - to find a ford, to build a raft, to swim - any method which happens to suit the unique situation encountered in ones path of life. But then, stories about rafting cross a river might be interesting but not personally helpful for someone who is not facing a river to be crossed. I don't know but it seems that at least in our western cultural sphere we have been somewhat obsessed with the idea that there should be Single Truth for everyone. One Religion which is The True and others are wrong. One Way To Paradise etc. While reading about the Chinese mountain hermits, many of the wise ones said that because people are different, there are different traditions of spiritual practice.

I think it is pretty much the same with stuff like personality typologies, horoscopes, self-help literature, religious movements etc. If I say that I didn't find thing X helpful for me, some people feel that I'm saying "this X is wrong and it is stupid for others to be interested in X." Oh no, no, on the contrary, I always think that it is perfectly OK for other people to find helpful ideas in things which don't touch my soul. We are all different, and that is just great =)