#auxiliiary ne

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: Dear mbti-notes, Thank you for your blog 💜 I hope you enjoyed your holidays. I'm infp, 16 years old and female, who has low-self esteem and feels dissatisfied with life.

My main problem is that I've been skipping school for multiple days because I stay up late, worried if I'm missing out on social media or how I'm going to mask myself the next day. I'm constantly chasing after the satisfaction of completing personal projects online. The 'high' of it and validation from social media is what attaches me to it. Only sharing art I'm proud of. Only sharing idealized surface level tidbits about myself to my classmates. I'm basically pretending to be someone I'm not both online and offline, and so I dig myself into a hole of preventing myself from relaxing or experimenting with my self-expression. I want to grow and learn to be myself, but I'm afraid of feeling exposed.

I crave meaning in my life instead of chasing after something out of my control. I want to finally feel at ease and sleep for my own health. Maybe there's a healthier way to share my artwork and collaborate with other artists? What guidance or advice would you have? I'd like to learn from your wisdom. Best regards, Anon.

-------------------

Wasting mental resources on social media has become a rather widespread problem, so you're not alone. Sharing of yourself in a public forum often means you're socializing in a chaotic and indiscriminate manner, which unfortunately sets you up to live at the mercy of external stimuli. Your social behaviors become more and more automatic as you keep reinforcing the same validating reward patterns over time. Eventually, your attention, energy, time, self-esteem, and self-worth slip out of your hands. It's hard to feel good about yourself once you've crossed the line from enjoyment into powerlessness.

I use terms like "stimuli", "reinforce", and "automatic" for a reason; they come from a particular branch of psychology called behaviorism. Many people still don't know that tech companies spend money on behavioral science, even recruiting psychologists to their projects. Behavioralists approach human behavior as "programmable", in the same vein that Pavlov trained his dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. Social media companies invented "bells" to make you feel good (engaged), to make you feel bad (reactive), and to keep you running back to them regularly for instant gratification (addicted).

The difference between Pavlov's dog and you is that the dog begins and ends under the control of its owner and thus has no choice but to learn the automatic behavior, whereas you gave up your free will to become an automaton. When your mind has been reduced to such a primitive state of chasing base desires on an endless loop, your intellectual faculties wither from disuse, and your soul eventually feels starved of meaning. Worst case, one becomes a dull and empty shell of a human being.

"I crave meaning in my life instead of chasing after something out of my control." The word "crave" is significant. Humans need a sense of agency and autonomy. Humans need a sense of social belonging. Humans need intimate and loving relationships. Humans need to occupy themselves with meaningful activities. The issue is whether you know the right methods of fulfilling your needs.

Choosing the wrong methods is one major reason people feel that life lacks meaning. When important human needs go unfulfilled for too long, they morph into desperate and seemingly irrational "longings", "desires", and "cravings" that lead people to choose worse and worse methods in a vicious cycle. Just think of how poorly your rational mind works when you get too hungry; food becomes the only thing you can think about and you're liable to grab anything and put it in your mouth without any regard for its nutritional value. The same goes for psychological, social, and spiritual needs.

A need is legitimate, universal to all humans, and must be satisfied in order to live a healthy and fulfilling life. A want is a method of fulfilling a need, but wants are not always legitimate. A want is legitimate if it is a positive and constructive way of obtaining what you need. A want is illegitimate when it leads you to destruction or to harm yourself/others, which, in the end, actually prevents you from obtaining what you need. Skipping school and sabotaging your own future is a good example of destructive behavior. If a want is determined to be illegitimate, then you must find a better method, if you care about your well-being. People who confuse needs and wants often end up chasing the wrong things in life and/or feeling inexplicably unsatisfied whenever they get what they want.

Why have humans proven so easy to manipulate? Because:

many people lack the self-awareness to understand their own needs and wants, and

they were never taught the right methods of fulfilling them.

Companies wanting to profit off you will try to find the most effective way to trigger a sense of privation in you, to bring up an unmet need, and then manufacture a "desire" or "craving" for a product that supposedly meets that need. The more desperate your feeling of privation is, the faster you'll run and the more you'll pay (not just in money) for whatever they're selling.

Therefore, inoculating yourself against such manipulation involves:

improving your self-awareness so that you fully own your needs instead of ceding control of them to others, and

learning healthy methods to attend to your needs so that you aren't easily taken in by harmful quick-fixes or false remedies.

"Maybe there's a healthier way to share my artwork and collaborate with other artists?" This is the right question to ask. If you develop Ne properly, you'll understand that there's almost always a better way of doing things. You don't have to live life always reaching for the stars, but at the very least, you should know to be proactive and seek a better way when the current way is harming you.

Let's examine two needs at play in your situation:

1) The Need for a Healthy Social Life: Why do you think that, in the age of social media, society is grappling with an epidemic of loneliness? When people feel lonely, their desire for social connection grows louder and louder. Suffer loneliness for too long and people start to get desperate and settle for whatever social contact they can get. Social media makes it very easy to get social contact... but it's like eating leftover scraps when you could be feasting on wagyu.

In terms of personal growth, the easy way isn't usually the right way. Sure, subsisting on scraps helps ease the hunger to socialize, but it's no way to live in the long term. For life to feel meaningful and fulfilling, one cannot only survive, one must also flourish. To flourish includes living up to your potential and living your life with purpose.

While there's nothing inherently wrong with having online friends, people who only have online friends tend to report dissatisfaction with social life. The fact of the matter is that online friends should not be used as a substitute for real-life relationships. Online friends should only be used to complement an existing social support network or used as a convenient gateway into a new real-life friendship. Online friendships are simply missing too many key ingredients that are needed for meaningful relationship.

There are tried-and-true ways of: improving friendships, making new friends, and building a strong social support network. E.g. Spend more quality time with old friends but perhaps in new situations that allow you to get to know each other even better. Extend your network by getting to know friends of family or friends of friends. Take a class or join a group of people with similar interests. Get more involved in your local community or volunteer. Take more initiative to organize get-togethers, invite people out, or lead a group activity.

Socializing is a legitimate need, so you should allot time for it. However, time is a finite resource, which means use it wisely. Do you want to spend most of your time collecting scraps online, socializing with undiscerning people and getting less than satisfying results? Or do you want to socialize in a more purposeful way, setting the right goals, targeting the right people, and getting more satisfying results? The choice is yours.

2) The Need for Personal and/or Professional Development: You are using art as a way to develop your potential and perhaps develop a professional skill. Good learning is something that can only happen under the right conditions, so the issue is whether you have set up the right learning conditions for yourself. Is soliciting (at times ignorant) feedback from people who only care about you to the extent that you can entertain them the best way to learn and improve? As long as you feel like you're being rewarded for putting on a show, won't learning always take a back seat to ego?

Would you be better off embedding yourself in a group of art enthusiasts, devotees, and experts who have real-life knowledge and experience of the art world? Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, even the smallest towns have artsy people floating around, perhaps there are a few you don't yet know in your school. Forming close, real-life friendships with them would be more rewarding and also more likely to get you that safe and nurturing environment you need for freely exploring your talents, wouldn't it? It's just one idea. I'm sure you can come up with more ideas through assessing all the resources available to you.

Sixteen is usually the time when teens start really venturing out into the world to explore their options. You need to get out into the world and challenge yourself more in order to grow your self-esteem. Don't limit yourself by becoming overdependent on social media scraps for cheap validation.

**

Inferior Te means that Fi doms often don't place enough value on goal-oriented behavior, and as a result, their behavior is often inefficient and ineffective. It's fine to want to explore and enjoy some fun moments online, but exploration should eventually be leading you somewhere positive, good, real, and meaningful. And if you already have some idea of where you want to go, the key is to choose the right path for getting there, even if it's the harder path. It sounds like you have a problem of too often choosing the easier path.

If you're like other INFPs, you easily get swept up by your feelings and it causes you to perceive situations in a distorted way, unable to objectively weigh the pros and cons, which leads to miscalculating the consequences of your behavior. If your behavior keeps getting negative consequences, it's an important sign that you're not caring well for yourself - it's a call to change your behavior. Fi can't feel at ease as long as you're acting against your own well-being. It's good that you have some idea about what your needs are and you're trying to respond to them, the crucial step is to put more careful thought into choosing healthy methods.