Speaking of work stress, I recently posted about the way I update this website when things are stressful, because this is one of my interests. It energizes me in its own way, and I need that kind of energy. I wanted to follow that up by giving examples of some other values-related (and you can say “interests”-related as the two words are very similar in meaning) activities that I use to rebound.

I find that too much work stress and just too much work, no matter how much my job is related to my own interests, will leave me with a dry, empty feeling. As a young INTJ I didn’t know what this meant, and I don’t really recall sensing it before others would point out that I seemed “down.”

Yesterday you may have noticed that my Youtube Music links section practically exploded with new links as I found good tunes to celebrate the completion of a big project for a client. That was a lot of fun and I think I’m a new Judas Priest fan, after listening to Turbo Lover about 50 times in a row. The monolithic, dominant voice quality of the chorus just kills me. “Turbo Lover.” What a funny concept. But there’s something applicable to INTJs here, and I will speak to that in a bit.

At the end of the day, I walked into the house thinking, “I was going to program that new ham radio,” a gadget I had bought off of AliExpress. But without much reflection, I decided, “Oh well, I’ll do it tomorrow.” This is one regret: Even just putting a little work toward something you value, or a personal interest, can feel like a great reward at the end of the day. I was tired, sure, but this would have been hobby-energy, and that can bring its own sense of rejuvenation.

I also had a nagging feeling—you know that feeling you sometimes get from your intuition, that something’s not right and you just can’t enjoy the situation no matter how hard you try? Well, I had just left the house to go on a long walk and talk to some friends on the radio when I felt that. So I turned on my phone’s voice recorder and talked it out. I kept going back to my mind’s eye for more imagery, which I interpreted as metaphor. Mostly what came back was a sort of icky, dark feeling. Shortly thereafter, my intuition figured it out and tipped me off that I was unsettled because I had no plan for the following day. As soon as I addressed that and developed an idea of preparing for the next day as soon as I got home, I was able to enjoy the walk again. That nagging gut feeling disappeared.

Today, after completing some more big steps at work, I walked into the house feeling really dry, worn out, and empty. And just kind of down. I thought, I’m probably not giving my own sense of value and my interests enough of a share of this day. So I went and found the USB cable for the new radio, installed the software interface, programmed in the local channels, and got on the air. It felt great, and that empty feeling completely vanished, leaving me feeling still a bit tired from work, but also fulfilled and upbeat.

Sometimes you have to force in the things that rejuvenate you, even if you feel too tired to do “optional” stuff. When you give a lot of work energy, the answer is not necessarily only physical rest. Focusing on new interests and personal pursuits is a fantastic way of reconnecting with a sense of being alive, and during these times you may find that your mind lets you come around and plan the next steps for a work project you’ve been putting off, or another long-term goal.

In which we learn a lesson from a Judas Priest song

In a metaphorical way, this “personal interests” side wants to be your Turbo Lover. There’s this really effeminate “more play, less work” side to all of us INTJs which needs clear and frequent attention.

In the absence of that kind of child-like attention to your interests and values, you might find that this effeminate spectre pops up quite randomly and forces you into an “I don’t wanna do anything” mood; you start to feel symptoms resembling those of a neglected love interest.

Under these conditions you may find yourself increasingly and inexplicably craving the effeminate in life (literally or metaphorically) and slip into a defenseless state. What you might have prevented by a little bit of productive “me-time” and some gentle attention to your well-being turns into a craving for activities that make you feel worthless inside, and it can be a reckless and selfish craving at that.

You won’t hear me, But you’ll feel me
Without warning, something’s dawning, listen.
Then within your senses,
You’ll know you’re defenseless
How your heart beats, when you run for cover
You can’t retreat – I spy like no other.
—Judas Priest, Turbo Lover

If you want more control over your life, don’t run from the Turbo Lover. She is different from your inner hard-worker, your wise and mature masculine side. She’s young, vibrant, she wants you to feel that kind of energy. And she is still an important part of you. She needs your attention, and she will reward you for it with a deep sense of self-connection, foundation, and identity.

Filed in: Anxiety /32/ | Fi /35/ | Energy /121/ | Therapeutic Practice /147/ | Interests /112/ | Control /112/ | Feeling /64/ | Procrastination /23/

A. wrote some things that I want to send out to you guys in case they’re familiar and maybe even troubling to some of you.

My therapist tried to convince me to be less “moral”, re:making moves on engaged women. I’m not a “nice guy”. By a long shot. But I just think it’s a truly unholy thing to do.

Reviewing my notes in this case, it’s funny because A.‘s most recent “engaged woman” was making moves on him!

In the general case, I think it’s at least a good idea to say something like, “I know you’re engaged and I totally respect that, it’s awesome for you and I wouldn’t ever want to misread you and overstep that boundary. But here’s what I’m getting from you lately…I feel like I’m getting signs that you’re maybe a bit more seriously interested in me, and I wanted to just put that out there and ask if you’d share your thoughts? I’d really appreciate it—again, if I have misunderstood I apologize.”

Right? It’s totally OK to do that no matter how much you have misread that person. AND it will probably make you feel about 200% better to get if off your chest, out of your system, and acknowledge that it’s really a shared burden of judgment.

Also note that in this case, A’s tendency to find comfort in rather severe perceptions of morality has “mysteriously” upgraded the problem from “therapist thinks I should respond in kind to a rather open-relationship-oriented person” to “therapist thinks I should make a move on an engaged woman.”

The fact is, these two already went out together several times without her “other man” around, there was a certain mutual attraction; she invited him for some rather physical shared activities between her and the other guy.

So: this is not quite as A. describes it, right? As easy as it would be to suspect that the therapist is somehow undermining his morality.

Thus, a big point here: Be super nuanced in your communications (even self-communications like journaling) about moral decisions. Be aware of any tendency to be a severe, black-and-white moralist. It’s a good idea to resist the urge to skim and leave out important details like those I listed above. What will likely result from this kind of generalization is the same old INTJ problem—a very black-and-white judgment process which ends up making the INTJ feel like their relationships are horribly unfair or even deeply damaging.

A. continues:

Re:friends who don’t have your back. Selfishness. I get it, nobody can ever be reproached for caring most about themselves. But as I expressed earlier, I thought the point of a friendship was…to facilitate a certain ease of living. To help out.

This is part of the same family of thoughts / judgments: Introverted feeling, or Fi, also known as Valuing (Linda Berens). Those who aren’t very experienced with Fi are more likely, I find, to make black-and-white judgments that do not echo or overlay well on top of our shared, more objective reality.

So what happens a lot to INTJs in this kind of situation is that they 1) fail to communicate their values and expectations to their relationship partners and then 2) explode or door-slam the partner when their values and expectations are violated.

Here are some tips in this area:

• Do your best to come up with a blend of choices, when you have a decision to make about a relationship. Be nuanced. Such a mindset is generally a sign of education and wisdom. Watch for a tendency to engage in black-and-white perception and judgment.
• Don’t make important relationship decisions when your stress or exhaustion levels are high. Ask for more time to get some rest (like actual sleep or time off), or do your best to make a decision that seems fair to both parties.
• Involve others in your decision-making. Don’t be really general—give them the key details. Listen to their input, and push back gently only when necessary. See if you can try out their advice and be open-minded in this experiment. If what you trust is only what you’ve tried before, you can lose a lot in a new friendship.
• Along similar lines, try not to worry too much about friend gossip. Most of it is background noise that will never come back to bite you, unless you are legitimately causing a friend or associate a lot of pain. If you’re imagining someone gossiping about you, keep in mind that at least some of those involved will probably take your side, or feel sympathetic. ;-) Working in a gossipy organization in the past, I learned that a lot of people who gossip are doing so without any serious values-judgment, because they themselves are practically values-blind! The serial gossips are just hypocrites; they know it and laugh about it. They think that because they need to gossip, everybody’s doing it! There’s a perception filter which rewards them for gossiping. They also may be scared or feel overwhelmed, or simply need to get the information off their shoulders and process it. Again: Most of it is just humanity doing its thing; it’s noise, and that’s OK.
• Talk about the kind of friend you want to be, and listen to feedback! “Listen friend, I have these really high expectations of my friends sometimes, and I want to make sure that I communicate up front—I’m the kind of guy who does his best to watch his friends’ backs. And I just want you to know that if I could use your help, I will do my best to be considerate and communicate my needs while keeping your own situation in mind. But if you see that I’m in trouble, please don’t hesitate to jump in and help.”
• Listen to your friends’ responses. Are they really hyperbolic? “DEFINITELY BUDDY I’VE GOT YOU” can be equally concerning or comforting. But so can a long, twisty, winding set of phrases that leave you feeling confused about how the other person sees the relationship. Ask yourself how you feel after the conversation. And keep in mind—ANY of this is better than no conversation at all.
• If they do something that demonstrates “I SO DON’T GOT YOUR BACK,” let them know! Again, gently. Avoid the urge to freak out. But let them know—“hey, I realize it may be asking a lot, but I really want to trust that my friends have my back in a situation like this. Maybe that’s extreme. Anyway, I’m hurting over here man.” Let them recover, give them another chance. And it’s never a bad idea to temper your expectations a bit, as opposed to just cutting them off completely. Realize that if you need someone who will come through for you no matter what, every time—that’s an extremely rare individual, and those are very special needs.
• While you get this experiment going, keep in mind it’s traditionally a weak area for INTJs. You may have to push yourself further toward “risk” than you have before, in order to learn key lessons that will really help you in the future. We all make mistakes, and if you’re not making any mistakes in your values-related decision-making, ask yourself if you’re even developing in that area at all. Are you stretching those muscles for when they need to be used? Something to think about.
• Keep a sense of humor. You get major bonus points if you can laugh about your own set of “uptight” morals, when there’s a higher risk that others will perceive them as such. You get major bonus points if you can laugh at your past self, who was much more awkward and direct about door-slamming relationship partners.
• Study personality type. As a tool, it will give you a powerful new way to perceive and judge relationships. For example, knowing where Fi is in someone’s stack of cognitive functions, and what that means, can be a huge benefit that helps you navigate new relationships. Generally speaking, close relations with types with Fi in their 5-8th functions can be more difficult for INTJs who are hyper-attentive to black and white Fi / Valuing, because we tend to perceive their general lack of Fi-preference as “superficial” or “values-blind” or even “crafty”. This is also generally unfair, and it’s just one of many models of human relationship psychology. Again, try to be nuanced and ask them how they see things. Learn about your relationship partner and ask yourself what you can do about it.
• Learn about Ti, a still-nuanced, and yet more logical way to think about relationships. Maybe you didn’t get a relationship partner who’s super close this time, in this or that friendship? No sweat, at least you have a friend, and you never know what benefit that might bring! Now: Is there anything they’d love to help you with, that you’d need? Can you give them something in return? In such a situation, it’s clearly less manipulative to ask them for this help than it would be if they gained nothing. INTJs are also very brittle thinkers in this area in general, so it’s good to know about for a challenge once in a while, as well as for your overall development.

If you made it this far—congratulations, I know this can be a really, really touchy area for INTJs. In studying it and getting to know the dynamics, you are setting yourself up for a more satisfied, energetic, and peaceful future.

Filed in: Fi /35/ | Relationships /78/ | Therapeutic Practice /147/

E. writes:

Thank you for writing your blog posts. Lots of them have been practical (eg journal template, music suggestions, media links).

Nice work with the journal! I’m glad the blog has been helpful.

A comment: You appear to be in a 30 day challenge for writing daily on your blog. Am I right?

Not only no, but unfortunately I should probably emphasize that with a “hell no”, E., given the actual circumstances. :-) Sorry to be hyperbolic. Not that I’m against 30-day challenges, but here’s what you’re seeing.

My day-to-day coaching and web development businesses are like this lately:

Just a lot of activity. A lot of stuff to sort out. Problems to solve, deadlines to meet, and people to help. Maybe a few actual aliens to kill, or at least a few big spiders in the house. I wish those guys would stay out!

So the blog is my blowoff valve, and really—and I feel like a lot of you will understand this—my side-productivity gig, the thing that gives me a nice break to talk about whatever feels good and interesting as an INTJ.

As a coach I feel like it’s important for me to see it for what it is. Otherwise I tell my clients, “oh hey, did you read [productivity book]? It’s so freaking great” even though I woke up this morning and procrastinated 3 hours away just like the pre-productivity-book self would.

I’m considering urging most INTJs to treat productivity research as a hobby—that’s another finding. You can’t stop us from kicking our own kind of ass when it’s time, but we do kind of torture ourselves in between those times, thinking of ourselves as lazy, which isn’t true at all. The 3-hour procrastination session is often just one’s own body screaming for rest.

Speaking of 30-day challenges, I’ve tried the X-Effect before, and you know what I found? It was funny. I kept making those damn cards, man. Pretty soon I had this ideal of reaching like 10 x’s a day. I might try it again sometime, but I found it really hard to throw all my money in the “change your clothes daily” pile, or whatever it is I’m lagging at.

E. continues:

Also, I was wondering if you may write about the dynamics of your relationship with your wife? For example, maybe talk about her MBTI type, how you guys communicate, your frustrations and how you cope, etc.

I think I’ve mentioned this before but maybe not! My wife is a beautiful ISFJ. The dynamics seem to get better every year! I like that dynamic. We have gone through a lot of difficult experiences together—the loss of twin girls at birth, a wearying adoption process with a couple of near-adoptions, the traumatic birth of my ISFJ son, and more. So it feels like we have grown together a lot in this sense that transcends type: The shared experience, in which many of our perceptions are intertwined.

We also have a pretty vibrant life lately. Megan is very active. She works with refugees and arranges trips to gather their stories with the storytelling team at TSOS Refugees, an international refugee non-profit which recently published a very impressive book.

Even more undeservedly on my part, Megan is a REALLY good cook. She learned how to make pasta and pizza from a gracious Italian mamma while living in Italy. And she will try making my favorite Japanese food even though it’s not really part of her own past, but then she wont stop—she’ll theorize how to make it better next time, and the time after that! It’s awesome.

Plus she runs marathons, she’s really into helping with local school and community efforts, and she actually likes taking day-to-day productivity stuff off my plate, which is very helpful.

I am not sure what I give in return, but she likes that I’m a coach and refers clients my way all the time. She’s way more socially adept than I am in the “somehow remembers to maintain friendships” way.

My kids: ISTP son, 9, ISFJ son, 8, and ENFP daughter, 6. I watch Doctor Who nightly with my sons before bed. They remember stuff about that show wayyyy better than I do. And they tell me some seriously funny stuff sometimes. One of my favorite things is hearing them laugh about something they read in a book, or something somebody said at school.

My daughter, well, she’s just a cutie. She likes to write sweet cards with those little ENFP-Fi caveats, like “Dear Mom and Dad, I love you both, even when you get mad at me.” In that way I’m glad I know about personality type, or I’d probably be like, “CAN YOU NOT JUST WRITE A CARD THAT’S 100% NICE.” We laugh about it though.

The kids come out to my office and play every couple of days, when I leave my office door open. We’ll play a few rounds of golf on the computer, or have a dance party, or talk about their friends at school.

Our most recent family purchase is a putter, some golf balls, and an indoor putting hole. We are attempting to get ISTP trying some more introvert friendly sports because he’s really introverted and yet athletically gifted. He’s also amazing at video games. Fortunately I helped a client’s son get a full-ride e-sports scholarship, so ISFJ trusts me with the job of making sure his video game play doesn’t just mean lazy stuff. Which is what it totally looks like, but his brain is whirring the entire time.

Communication

We communicate really well just hanging out and chatting. It’s fun to send articles and memes back and forth. It’s a little bit harder to communicate on projects together when there’s something on the line, like an important deadline. In those cases we both have our “own way” of doing a thing, so it’s really important to watch that we don’t exclude the other by snapping back to only our own way. A quirk of the Je (extraverted judgment; Te-Fi/Fe-Ti) personality combination. We each have to be patient with the other’s dominant process sometimes as well.

Frustrations

OK, an example. With an ISFJ, part of the game of life can be something like “schedule Tetris.” I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen the way ISFJs naturally do this Tetris thing with their Ti, but not only can they be REALLY good at the video game, they are (I should really say they can be because I don’t mean to paint every ISFJ with that brush) good at things like loading moving trucks, packing up boxes, etc. Like, amazingly good—no space wasted. The same goes for a schedule, or a block of time to fill.

So when you go on vacation as an INTJ and you’re thinking “ahhh, relaxation,” you better run that by the ISFJ because vacation often means doing things together and “gosh I sure hope you’re OK if we visit friends A, B, and C while we tour this distant and foreign continent? I promise we will do things you want to do in between.” When actually, watching entire days float by is probably one of my favorite vacation activities, period.

So, I find that one really helpful thing is to not get run over by all this. Right? I don’t want to feel really pouty at the end of the day because not only did I let it float by, but all of the stuff we did involved connecting with Facebook friends. So I’ve learned that I need to be a good J-personality and let her know that I’m doing this or that tomorrow, and then asking her to help me figure out how we can each do what we want. She wants me to enjoy the vacation, too.

It’s really a Fi-Ti sort of concern: Figuring out the kind of activity you value, and setting a boundary: OK, we’ll do your stuff too, but I want to do my stuff in there somewhere. So let’s figure it out: Can it work? For a long time I acted as if “being a good husband” meant “just let her do her stuff” but that didn’t help at all. And being a coach, I know how important it is to do stuff that is meaningful to you. As an INTJ-T, always open to change and learning, unfortunately one of the traps is that you get to be so perceptive that you can end up letting people walk over you. Megan never really did that, or wanted to do that, but I didn’t do anything to prevent it from inadvertently happening.

Does that help? That’s one thing. Like I said, there’s a lot. Sometimes even just knowing that while an ISFJ might be echoing your exact sentiments (a gift I envy in some ways!), they don’t necessarily agree—that alone can be really helpful. You might say, “man I hate yellow cars!” and they’re laughing with you, but then a couple days later you might also hear, “when you said you hated yellow cars, honestly that really made me feel angry inside. I’m sorry but I kind of still like them, BUT I also see what you mean.” This can happen—it’s not terribly logical, it’s not how INTJs prefer to operate, but it’s important to understand that it’s also part of being human.

Conclusion

I can always detect a little bit of sensitivity on the part of my INTJ clients when they talk about their family members’ personality types; maybe they’re afraid I’ll tell them they chose the wrong spouse, or whatever. But really, my philosophy is that your spouse reflects a part of you, and often a very aspirational part at that.

Knowing about personality type has overall been really great for our family.

Have a great day E.!

Filed in: Anxiety /32/ | Relationships /78/ | Ti /30/ | Productivity /120/ | ISFJ /6/

One of my recent favorite productivity tools is a graphics driver issue which forces the shutdown of the Chrome browser about 4x daily.

All my tabs freeze up, and I have to kill the browser application and restart. Naturally, harnessing this as an opportunity to make a fresh start in life, I refuse to allow the browser to restore the previous 20-40 tabs.

Should I risk an upgrade? Unsure. I’m seriously considering writing such a script for all my browsers, randomly killing them after, say, an hour has passed.

Maybe Relevant Note: I am generally anti-productivity-pride when it comes to INTJs. In my experience, treating ourselves as productivity warriors is dangerous and needs to be balanced with an understanding that we are also procrastination warriors. Run with it, ride the wave, don’t sweat it. So laughing at my productivity levels has become a favorite activity, even though I’m also most definitely a secret badass like every other INTJ. ;-)

Filed in: Productivity /120/

Working with taxonomies, categorization, and tags a lot in my other, tech-oriented business, I generally find a philosophical taxonomy-thinking split across INTP and INTJ developer personalities, like so:

• INTP developers don’t generally enjoy the idea of a single taxonomy and categorization system for a given body of information. Instead they prefer to develop those only as needed. In my opinion, the technology we refer to as “tagging” evolved from the Ne-Ti mindset: “Anything can be an anything. Don’t limit me. And, precisely speaking, a “doohickey” is also a word that ends with y, in addition to being a word that starts with d. Tags naturally suggest themselves.”
• INTJ developers don’t generally enjoy using tagging systems without also developing a firm categorization, or a way in which the information ought to be consumed. We can be pretty didactic in that way. However, a typical INTJ has, or likes to think they have, a natural intuitive sense for the type of presentation that would benefit people using the system, and this often involves a firm information hierarchy. The INTJ prepares an interface for the foreseen best-outcome, and if some of the outliers have to look a bit harder to find what they want, so be it.

It has helped me greatly to be able to walk into a meeting with a client and get an idea of the ratio of those preferences, one to the other.

And these days, a lot of developers would say: ¿Por qué no los dos? However, one thought system usually takes priority in the overall scheme.

[Aside: Wading into philosophy a bit deeper, you might say the is-ought problem reflects a key perspective of the INTP psychology, and is related to this blog post’s question of ought information structure vs. is information structure.]

Well, thus & therefore one of my intuitive visions for this blog has always been the integration of a menu system which goes into topic and sub-topic, as opposed to only reverse-chronological content and loose tags. Because dammit, let’s get some structure around here!

I generally hate using blogging software for websites that will need that kind of topic & sub-topic formal taxonomy. But this blog evolved pretty organically on purpose, and one of my outcomes was, “this time I’ll fix it and make adjustments as I go along, for fun, which will get me on the road faster.” So far, it’s worked. The tech is really easy to manage with regard to presentation.

However, this menu system thing—getting that on the road could take a bit of thinking and it’s tempting to make the thinking pretty grandiose. Which is kind of the opposite philosophy, as compared to what got us this far.

There’s quite a breadth to the information I’ve shared here, and also a certain depth, and this (my head is expanding by the second) gets us into some pretty nerdy layout possibilities. I hate to say it, but I’m almost thinking we could really benefit from three columns or more for the wider screens here, guys. :-) We’ll see. In my personal projects I’ve been up to five columns where it made sense.

The important part, I’ve learned, is to keep gardening. Where I used to abandon sensory projects like this after a few weeks or months when form didn’t match vision, I’ve learned to kind of let them take their own shape over time, with adjustments made on an ongoing basis. I started this blog as a humble study blog, just a place to keep myself accountable and enjoy yet another secret blog where I could tool around.

One way of keeping it humble and avoiding a near-certain, raging, late-night design session is to start keeping a simple log regarding my thinking on the blog design. And so I’ve started a simple log, next to all of my other logs on topics from keeping a houseplant to birthday shopping for my wife.

I’ve also looked backward into this blog’s past a bit, and reviewed some old notes. INTJs are generally the type of people to hesitate to look back at the early phases of their projects because it makes them cringe, but after studying SJs for so long, I’ve learned that when you write the story you almost always end up celebrating the history. There’s a lot to that, and it does feel good to be able to stabilize the project in that way. Otherwise it’s simply never good enough—it never just is what it is, and that’s kind of a bummer.

Well: I’m looking forward to my next 100 years of blogging, as various progeny take up the task of keeping the dream alive, family relationships are strained, feuds are started, wars are waged, and incantations listing the hex color values of favorite pixels are chanted in between furious exchanges of laser fire.

[OR: You may see some big changes here, or you may not. This depends on how busy I am—the busier I am, the more procrastinating I do, the more changes you will likely see here.]

Filed in: Ni /42/ | INTP /7/ | Technology /41/ | Intuition /63/ | Ti /30/ | Thinking /70/ | Productivity /120/ | Procrastination /23/ | Therapeutic Practice /147/

One of the things I see happening over and over in the world, and especially in the UFO world, is a hyperbolic sensory-to-intuitive switch which can just about overpower people who have given the bulk of their life’s attention to sensory things.

The way this often plays out in the UFO world is, “hey, I’m just a nuts-and-bolts guy, not really the type to let the imagination run wild, haha…”

“…and by the way, I did see a UFO once.”

Personally, I don’t like to let my thoughts gel too quickly in areas like UFO research, and that is one reason why.

Carl Jung described this kind of condition, a switch from one function to the other, as a sort of “rebalancing act”. For example, lots of sensory work leads to a massive switch to a focus on intuitive perceptions, and vice-versa. This is where we originally got the idea that an extravert needs some introversion time at the end of the day, or an introverted hobby, and introverts need some extraversion—it’s deeper than that, but that’s the gist.

Well, going back to sensation and intuition, the pattern is this “nuts and bolts type of guy” sensory personality description which then gives way to the “yep, saw a UFO” possible-pure-intuition experience.

Personally, this gives me second thoughts about a lot of the UFO-related content that I read. That’s not to say I believe, or don’t believe, but I personally don’t feel pressure to define myself as being in one of those camps.

Example Video

Here is an example of a video which concerns me: Interview with Kevin Day

Noteworthy time stamps:

• 9:17: The guy has spent 18 years on these ships. Wow. That’s extremely sensory work, day in and day out.
• 10:10: He had a secret wish to see a UFO!
• 15:50: But we’re not going to speculate about what we saw—we don’t know if it was military tech or what
• 18:33: Discussion about any lasting “psychic” effects of the experience begins.
• 20:53: This made me cringe as it sounds exactly like a Ni-type experience, wherein Kevin became convinced he could find a gold motherlode. And…
• 21:28: He found the “source of the gold”! Wow!!! But…
• 22:28: “My family never wants me to mine it…” Wait, what?

So I’d guess—and this is just a guess—that he “saw” the gold in his “mind’s eye.” As in, he couldn’t show it to you such that your physical sensory organs could see it, touch it, smell it, etc.

I’ve read this kind of thing many, many times before.

And unfortunately, this is exactly how Ni can be warped into “reality” to get people to believe in telepathy, secret cities under the earth, religion origin stories, etc.

“Look with your ‘spiritual eyes’” was one way this was communicated by religions at least as far back as the 1800s, and it still is today.

Effectively, and I hate to say it, but a lot of this stuff ends up being an exercise of the imagination.

Furthermore, the person who experiences it is sometimes so unfamiliar with the intuition that they firmly believe they have a special power (see the first outcome category below).

Two Concerning Outcome Categories

There are two main outcomes from this “intuition switch” that concern me:

• First, “I believe it all, here’s what I saw, here’s what it means, and the experience went even deeper” (deeper inside my mind, but I’m kind of merging sensation with intuition at this point because I’m convinced of the power of intuition without even knowing what ‘intuition’ is or how it works). I remember checking out a really well-known UFO believer’s book about “who the aliens are and what they’re up to,” and it read exactly like a metaphorical Ni (introverted intuition) / active imagination exercise. I felt pretty embarrassed for the author, to say the least, though more research is needed here. You can always take Ni deeper, and it usually gets weirder and weirder, especially if you don’t realize that you’re most likely encountering subjective metaphor.
• Second, “Here’s what I saw, I don’t know much about it, don’t really care to follow up.” This gets answered by UFO critics as, “WOW, WOULDN’T YOU WANT TO FOLLOW UP?! I SURE WOULD!!” and they just don’t understand how much psychology in this “care to follow up / don’t care to follow up” area can differ among humans. While irritating on one level, it’s also a potential strike against their ability to rationally debunk UFO stories on another. This is unfortunate for their cause, and I see lots of little things like this on debunker sites—again, not claiming they’re wrong in total, but it’s unfortunately not a favorable sign regarding level of education.

Conclusion: But what about the objective aspects?

What about the fact that our ship’s hardware sensors captured this or that? Well, unfortunately for the UFO community and for people of many faith communities, etc.—Ni and Se are ever bound in a grand commingling of psychological information. A great deal of qualitative work is required to begin to separate objectively reliable and subjectively “probably not so reliable” information.

Personally, I also use this to weight my own exploration of the UFO topic: I am undergoing a lot of life changes myself, here in my mid-life years, so I would expect imagery of the unknown to be more of a feature—and an attractive one—to my subconscious. That doesn’t mean UFOs do or don’t exist in some form, it just means that I know I need to zoom out from time to time and keep that factor in consideration.

Well: What do you think? UFOs are in the news a lot lately thanks to the U.S. Navy’s decision-making regarding the reporting process. It’s been interesting to follow, and as I mentioned before, a big part of this for me is just the fun of exploring it as a topic.

Filed in: Se /25/ | Intuition /63/ | Ni /42/ | Sensation /40/

To use one of my grandma’s favorite phrases, this video tickles me pink.

The video, in which a young American boy goes solo camping in the snow, is great. It’s fun, adorable, and interesting. And it helped bring its creator over seven million views and 329,000 subscribers.

If I had to guess, I’d put his personality at ESFP. You never know, and am not the kind of guy to tell somebody “you are definitely this or that type based on my watching you on Youtube,” but sometimes it’s fun to guess. He reminds me of a good friend of mine and brought back some great memories of being a kid.

Part of what I like about this video is just the sense of child-like fun. There’s a huge need for that in the INTJ psychology, and it’s very easily ignored when we get sucked into amazing person projection mode or other risky or even dangerous lines of thought/action.

The fun, I think, leads to the charisma—the kid is pumped. He’s excited and he’s ready for action. I’ve coached ESFPs before, and when they’re low on energy, when they’re a workaholic—yeah, you aren’t going to see a fun Youtube video, though you might get one that’s really informational.

An example of someone who I think could be an ESFP who took her career in a very informational direction (not necessarily in an unhealthy way!) is Linda Moulton Howe, former Miss Idaho pageant winner and Miss America contestant, now a standby in the UFO research community and an independent investigative journalist.

Linda Produced the film A Strange Harvest, a documentary on cattle mutilations, which is something of an interesting historical artifact on its own, and which you can view in its entirety on IA. The video does show mutilated cattle, but personally while I’d normally be a bit sensitive to this stuff on my lunch hour, this one didn’t affect me much. The anonymous mutilators made some remarkably clean cuts!

Filed in: ESFP /4/

A belated and huge thanks to blog reader Mike (we have multiple Mikes in our readership, and even multiple Mike C’s, so I will check and see how much credit he’d like) for providing me with a beautiful and easy-on-the-ears recording of When Intuitry Beats Memory, my essay on the power of intuition. The MP3 is available for download at that link.

Isn’t Mike’s voice awesome? I love it.

It’s risky in a sort of “weird information gets out” way, but I think I’ll send the recording to my mom. She’s a very proud ESFP, so the risk is that she tells people that I’m “well…I forget…but it’s something like, Marc is producing audio books for Carl Jung” or something like that, but she also likes to hear really great voices and loves audio books.

Collecting Voices

I have noticed that I enjoy collecting little snippets of on-air recordings from time to time, and “voices I enjoy” are one reason I might do that. Here is a favorite “found” voice from a recent HF net (The Noontime Net) on the 40-meter ham radio frequencies, 7.2835 MHz to be exact: The Noontime Net Recording [MP3, 1.3 MB]

For the non-hams here, a “net” is an on-air meeting. The net control operator there (I don’t know his name yet) is checking people in, an important part of these nets. If you haven’t listened to a net before, there may be one local to your area that’s worth checking out, and the equipment to do so is cheap (recommended quick starter set, despite only four stars worth of reviews) and easy to find. Even if you don’t have a ham radio license yet, you can type in the frequency and listen (not talk, but hey we’re introverts right) without needing a license.

I like the really executive nature of the net control’s voice here. And it goes a bit beyond that. He’s not only executive, he’s fast, he’s friendly, he’s forgiving (for example, forgiving of the operator who used “Germany” in his phoenetics, when “charlie” is so easily confused with Germany, and “Golf” is more common) and he’s a bit humorous. It works well. So I had to capture it.

Another plug for WebSDR which makes it dead simple to start/end/save recordings at the touch of a button.

I also found that when I use Hoopla I tend to bookmark favorite narrators and listen to other books they’ve narrated, even if unrelated to the book to which I first listened. As narrators (and actors) go, Bill Nighy (example at link, headphone warning but funny commentary) is a perennial favorite.

If you haven’t seen The Worricker Trilogy (spy thriller / drama) yet, in which Bill Nighy plays the lead role, be sure to check it out.

Filed in: Sensation /40/ | Se /25/

I just woke up from a nap and wrote down a post-nap “9/10 appraisal” of my day, accompanied by glowing notes like “things are pretty good. I think (crazy hectic project) will turn out well.”

This happens more, the more I learn to take productive naps. And today it was so pleasantly shocking, in its own way (I have traveled many moons from the harsh desert climate of those 3/10 days), that I thought I’d once again point out the importance of periodic naps, and share some of my notes.

Here are some of my most common napping-related practices:

Noticing when I’ve “furrowed out”

My body seems to run in cycles from high energy to sleepiness. I have learned to notice when I’ve hit a furrow, or the bottom of a cycle where I’m relatively sleepy. If I wait too long to fall asleep, I might not be able to get there.

When I’m headed toward that furrow, it’s a great time to think about a nap.

Noticing high-anxiety activities

Some of these activities naturally point to the need for a nap. For example:

• Listening to loud music
• Overeating / stress eating
• Getting into Internet arguments
• Making no headway on important to-do items
• A feeling of being slightly agitated or keyed up in an uncomfortable way
• Surfing too much web

Pre-nap Executive Thinking

Being a J personality (judging – executive / organizational), and yet a Pi-dominant personality (Ni in this case; can be too perceptive-focused and ignore the executive work) at the same time, I have found that some structure and organization is usually or even always helpful to me.

It helps me to do some executive thinking before a nap. That is, instead of just taking in information, like “oh yeah, a nap feels like a great idea”; directly address the question of tiredness, what you’ll do about it, and how it will affect your work or other plans.

I find that if I don’t do this, concerns can pile up in the back of my head and make the nap difficult, if not impossible. Or, I may just wake up early and feel agitated.

It helps if I can somehow both justify and rationally explain how the nap will coexist with and support my other tasks, in other words.

This is best done in speech or in writing. Today, I talked it out with my wife casually as we ate lunch.

It’s important to get some thinking done regarding my post-nap work, as well. I don’t usually plan my immediate post-nap sequence in detail ahead of time, but I do like to have a basic written idea (not in my head! Too easy to forget) of what I will need to do in order to get started on my post-nap work.

In other words, I want a handle on my work so that I can more easily pick it up. Otherwise I have to rely on my innate memory, and my mind is great at blanking that stuff out unless I work to trick it somehow.

Pre-nap preparations

• I send a message to my wife and let her know I’ll be laying down for a while.
• Lights off
  • In my office there’s a skylight, so having something like a hat to place over the peripheral vision helps
• Relaxing music on – Example
• All phone notifications off
• Computer notifications off
• Attention paid to comfort level of body
• Shoes off, maybe socks off
• Items taken out of pockets
• Blanket, hoodie, or both available as needed
• Drool-proof pillow (kidding, just clean the pillow. But man, one of my least favorite parts of having a beard is naptime drool beard)
• Alarm only if absolutely necessary because an alarm can prevent sleep

When laying down, attempting to sleep

Sometimes I’ll read just before sleep, and I have to tell you that Sherlock Holmes books are fantastic for this. :-) Also helpful are biographies and other calming titles, for example Michael Crichton’s Travels is another favorite here, as is The Andromeda Strain, which I find incredibly calming for a thriller.

Putting the book down, I usually try to find a mental image that calms me into a meditative state. I can’t often predict the imagery that will work. Today I imagined my middle son growing into a healthy adult. The mental image of him standing healthy and happy in his athletic clothes and preparing to play some sports on a warm summer day calmed me down and I drifted into sleep for a few seconds. When I woke up I thought, “that’s cool, I like that image, I’m proud of my son” and then I was out.

I do find it common to fall asleep, wake up, and then repeat this a few times before finally falling into deeper sleep. I do my best to persist through it.

Back when I spent a lot of time building models out of paper, imagining the process of building a MiG-21 model out of paper seemed to put me to sleep within a minute or two every time.

When the imagery isn’t working for any reason, I find that focusing on my breathing can help.

After waking up

While I’m still in a drowsy post-nap mode, I try to take a quick glance at a clock to see if more sleep is either needed or appropriate.

Sometimes I’m able to capture the relaxed mode of my brain immediately after a nap and use it to get really good answers to hard questions (“I’m locked up in situation X, what do I do?”), or do silly things like rapping for a few minutes in a way that I’d never be able to repeat outside of such a mode, or cracking funny jokes. Try it sometime—it’s kind of fun.

After a bit of that though, it’s common to feel a need for an executive-type “break out” and a way to take the nap energy forward into a productive day.

During this time I tend to grab my phone and make a quick to-do list. As a productivity hack, my to-do lists never include general descriptions of things (everything must be broken down into max 2-5 minute tasks), so today’s list was:

• Take supplements (100mg caffeine, 200mg L-Theanine, Gingko & Phosphatidylserine). I like to take some caffeine after a nap to capitalize on the productive circumstances. L-Theanine seems to reduce my natural anxiety floor just a little bit. And the G&P, IDK what those do. Oh yeah! They support good memory, or something like that. (Still in the prospective phase with this one)
• Transcribe meeting notes from yellow note pad
• Print out PDF document
• Hydrate
• Put a movie I’ve already seen, or a podcast, on in the background

After I’ve written “enough” to get going I’ll know it because one of the tasks feels easily doable and even motivating to think about, or I’ll think an anxiety-inducing thought (if I go into the house right now, so-and-so my wife’s friend might not be there yet) and find myself instantly getting up.

Back at Work

After doing that simple post-wakeup stuff, I inevitably find myself back at the office desk. At these times I try to keep up the executive tempo by filling out my journaling template, and otherwise getting the thoughts out of my head and onto paper, or the computer, etc.

When a Nap Can’t Happen

If the nap simply can’t happen, simply getting into a relaxed position (I prefer to lay down) and listening to energizing music while e.g. doing some light reading or closing the eyes is very helpful. In addition, if I can do some active imagination, this is also helpful. In order to accomplish active imagination in a productive way, I try to imagine a healing area from my memory. One of these is a favorite park I visited as a child. I then let my intuition change my experience and I stay open to various interpretations.

There are so many specific forms of meditation that I hesitate to call such an activity “meditation,” but I find that the resulting feeling of re-balancing is similar.

Summary

Phew, I can’t believe how much information that was, yet I just do that all naturally at this point. So keep that in mind—it took me a while to learn, and it may take you some time to get yourself into a comfortable state where you do this kind of therapeutic napping in an improved way.

Good luck with your naps!

Filed in: Productivity /120/ | Energy /121/ | Therapeutic Practice /147/ | Anxiety /32/ | Sleep /10/ | Rest /22/ | Te /36/ | Thinking /70/

So it was, indeed, a fun UFO weekend. I listened to a few podcasts, did a lot of UFO-related web surfing, and spent some time on Simeon Hein’s Youtube Channel. After watching an hour of his videos, I’m comfortable saying that Simeon strikes me as an ENFP personality type, and ENFPs are often found in journalism (journalism being the role he’s naturally playing in the community).

By the way, the thing I like most about ENFPs in journalism is that they value the story and are willing to just listen for long periods of time. This lets the rest of us into the research with what I’d call “minimal filtering based on subjective informational construct”. Speaking of ENFPs as a group of course, their subjective filtering would tend to circle around relationship-values, so in areas like UFO research which are fairly devoid of human relationship drama, this saves us information guys a lot of time in having to weed out “here’s my own grand idea and personal agenda” from “here’s what people are actually reporting.”

In between videos I reflected on the psychology of it all: What are the implications, what can be done, what theories can be tested. And, can other models be applied or developed; if so, how, and to what end? After all, us NTs love to think of ways to “address and adjust the system” when we observe unwanted, human-psychology-based, emergent effects. As an ENTP friend once said to me regarding a sticky human problem, “we can solve it with software.”

I also did a bunch of ham radio hobbyist stuff, and coordinated with a friend to set up a WebSDR server for our local area. If you haven’t used a WebSDR before, let me just warn you: It can be really fun AND you can get into a UFOs, crypto, & Black Ops area of this hobby pretty quickly. The SIGIDWIKI.com HF database has been very helpful to me in identifying what I’m hearing in the past. And also, sometimes it’s nice to just sit back and listen to a couple of ham radio operators chat about this or that.

Finally, I also made a personal record, a low-power simplex wide-band FM contact of 15 miles, using my Yaesu FT-65 handheld transceiver, a speaker mic, and a 42 inch telescoping whip antenna. Longer distances than this are definitely possible, but it was a lot of fun for a casual on-air chat with a new friend. Where I live it’s also helpful; in this case the friend let me know about a wildfire (it turned out to be a controlled burn in this case) that was approaching his area, which is the kind of information which in an emergency can buy you valuable time.

In between ham radio and UFOs—I never fill you guys in on this stuff, but: I watched my three beautiful children play and swim in a creek, catching tadpoles and finding heart-shaped rocks. My wife and I shared an absolute monster of a chocolate ice cream cone at a local burger joint, and I played almost an hour and a half of ping pong with an ESFP friend who’s a medical doctor; we exchanged theory and discussed experiences and I don’t think I’ve ever kept a rally going so long in my life (not the full hour and a half, but really consistently long rallies while we talked about all kinds of things at the same time). At one point I had to ask him: “Do you think our keeping this ball in play for so long could be something psychological?” Certainly there’s a lot of cognitive similarity to consider in this opposite-type, similar functions-balance relationship.

While at UFO-play, I also reflected on the fact that a lot of this hobby is just pure, speculative fun, and it can be just as healthy as any other hobby or sport. Along those lines, I imagined myself throwing a UFO party and thought I’d talk to some friends and try to get something scheduled. This is just personal health-level stuff—it’s about taking care of yourself.

But having been out of the action for a while, I was surprised to hear someone in the UFO research community nearly echoing my own psychology-based coverup theory, be it somewhat less dramatic than the usual coverup theory.

I happened to be listening to a Phenomenon Radio podcast interview with Black Vault’s John Greenwald, and John spoke to this directly.

The real meat of John’s findings starts at about 35 minutes in when he says the following:

“…not only is there a UFO coverup, but they [government / miltary] simply have no idea what they are. They really don’t.”

And…

“…I think the national security threat is not only the existence of the phenomena […] but more than anything else, that they may just end up being clueless.”

Wow. To me, this is also perhaps the most frustrating and concerning part of what I’m learning so far, if you remember what Colonel Halt, USAF said himself — “I think this is beyond us. So quit worrying about it.” This perception and accompanying shallow judgment is a maddening echo of the overall military psychology.

John and I may differ a little bit in that John seems to think that the motive for the coverup is “we don’t understand it, therefore let’s keep this under wraps,” while I tend to think the prevailing psychology effectively transforms information of this kind into the proverbial water off a duck’s back: Lack of applicable perception tools (intuition zone of conceptual awareness) leads to a shallow judgment process, which leads to the information effectively being discarded as “likely worth nothing to us or even worse if pursued institutionally” and tremendously undervalued.

I do also see a “heads up” risk as perceived by the ISTJ organizational psychology. That is, in an ISTJ organization, you keep your head down. If you start talking about the unknown, this creates chaos and attention. Attention is the last thing you want; to be seen as an attention-seeker generally runs counter to the organizational values except in cases involving institutionally-approved attention-seeking; the war-hero general, etc. But going “heads up” regarding UFOs—that’s crazy. You just don’t know what they are, and you don’t know what will happen to you if you raise the topic. So your psychology effectively blocks it.

But coming back to John’s conclusion—where he and I both really seem to synchronize: “they may just end up being clueless.” That’s the disaster, right there.

It’s the kind of thinking which is not just an offense against our NT theorist values, blocking out potentially helpful information because of a fear that it’s “beyond us;” it’s also an existential threat to our world.

It may seem to be dramatically oversimplifying things to say that “ISTJ-style organizational values are subverting human progress” but such an abstract viewpoint does seem to promise some leverage in this case. It could also potentially help define new approaches to the problem of coverups, detecting them, freeing important information, and let’s not forget the big one: Advancing human progress, technology, and awareness.

[While we’re at it, spare some good thoughts for our ISTJ friends who are actually keeping the government running. Every weakness comes with an accompanying set of huge strengths…]

Filed in: Openness /49/ | Interests /112/ | Therapeutic Practice /147/