Anon wrote: Hi, mbti notes! I’m a 27yo ISFP currently going through a career shift. I first graduated in 2020, but couldn’t find jobs in my field ever since. I’ve had some side jobs in this time period, but none of them allowed me to save money. I barely paid my bills with what I made.
My father, a very rational ISTJ, then suggested me to go back to school. He works in engineering and is successful in his career. The idea of being able to live a comfortable life with enough money to travel and visit nice places was enough to convince me to do it. The fact that my father worked with tons of people during these years will also be useful for job and internship hunting.
Thing is, I’m currently on a low Ni crisis. I’m not the type of person who thinks about purpose, but I can’t help but think I failed mine. The fact that now I’m studying something I have zero natural skills on is also making things hard. Math is making me feel pretty dumb lol.
I’m trying to focus on the big picture, my future and what I’ll be able to do once I’m done. During my whole life, I did what I wanted to do and what I felt like doing and it got me nowhere, so trying to “grow up” and ignore the complaints of my Fi seems to be the only option I have left now that the clock is ticking for me. Is there a way to overcome these thoughts without falling into a loop or a grip?
Thank you :))
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Yes, the math is difficult, but it's not representative of the entire profession or what you'll be doing forever. Remember when you had to memorize the multiplication table in elementary school? Kids always ask why they have to memorize it when they can just use a calculator. Similarly, most engineering work is done with computers now, so why learn the math? You still have to struggle through the math because you can't get to a higher level of competency without building the proper foundation of knowledge.
Do you honestly believe that the past few years have been entirely meaningless, that you've gotten absolutely nothing from them? None of those experiences mattered at all? I would argue that the negative tone of your thought process is indication that you're already in tertiary loop. Fi is unhappy and you've built a narrative to reinforce the unhappiness. You're not very far away from firmly believing that there is no other way to be in this world except to keep betraying yourself in the name of "growing up". Is it possible to change the mind of someone who fatalistically believes "this is just how it is"?
Developing Ni is supposed to grant you the power to look at the bigger picture. Why is the bigger picture important? Just like a camera, the ability to zoom in and out is vital for getting the best picture quality. There are times in life where focusing in allows you to grasp important details. There are times in life where zooming out allows you to understand that the fine details can be deceiving when you can't see the forest for the trees.
Big picture thinking allows you to shift your perspective as necessary to capture the right kinds of information for setting the right direction in life. As such, big picture thinking is only going to be helpful to the extent you can admit that your current perspective is too distorted, too limited in scope, or just plain wrong. If you can't admit it, any attempt to change your perspective is just going to feel like "lying to myself".
In other words, the truth cannot get through until you first let go of what is false. There's no point in zooming in and out if, after exploring a million perspectives, you're just going to end up believing that your current view is all there is or all that matters "because Fi said so". One of the most frequent complaints people have of FPs is that they can't be reasoned with, since they take Fi feeling-judgments as gospel.
The good news is you wouldn't be asking me for perspective if yours was already set in stone. It's much easier to get out of tertiary loop when you're able to catch it at the earliest stage. As long as you can maintain an open mind, i.e., be willing to admit that your perspective is incomplete or incorrect, then there is hope for efficient recovery.
One way to identify underdeveloped Ni (in any stack position) is to examine the relationship between belief and reality. The more immature the Ni, the more tenuous the relationship.
Immature Ni works mostly alone and forms beliefs based on very little information and/or very low quality information, such as mere gut feelings or barely conscious emotions. Immature Ni easily believes it has grasped the "essence" of things when it actually just over-simplifies, over-generalizes, or over-abstracts everything. It's actually far away from knowing any truth and somehow even manages to get further and further away with each attempt.
By contrast, mature Ni works in concert with the rest of the functions to take in and generate vast amounts of information from which to formulate valid beliefs. Due to the vast amount of information it works with, mature Ni is in touch with the full complexities of the world and tries to patiently unravel them to get at an underlying truth from which to take prudent action. It knows how to gradually get closer and closer to the truth.
Taking your case as an example, it is a common belief among people that "growing up" entails giving up "childish" dreams. It's one possible view, but is it the most truthful view? If you can manage to think about it more objectively, does it not seem suspiciously simplistic? Perhaps people need to believe "this is just how it is" because, otherwise, they'd feel terribly depressed for having given up on themselves? Which one feels worse for your ego: blaming reality for constraining you, or blaming yourself for failing? The only thing worse? Blaming reality AND blaming yourself, which is the terrible place Ni loop lands you in.
When you're young, what you know about life and how to live life well is mostly learned through secondhand sources. You have parents, teachers, and society dictating simple rules or platitudes, such as, "you reap what you sow" or "treat others the way you want to be treated", etc etc. Not knowing any better (with immature Ni), you just believe whatever you're told.
However, reality is much more complex, isn't it? The person who works the hardest doesn't necessarily get the most success. The bad person isn't always punished. The good person doesn't always get rewarded. Treating others the way you want to be treated doesn't work with people who are very different from you.
Being told secondhand cannot compare with experiencing reality firsthand. With life experience, you get confronted with all kinds of confusing situations, so you should ideally start to realize that the world isn't so simple after all - this is what it actually means to "grow up". When Ni is confronted with so much uncomfortable information, you have a choice to make, for example:
Are you going to passively sit in ignorance and confusion forever, getting shocked every time things don't turn out as you expect?
Are you going to persist in your oversimplified beliefs, always trying to force reality to live up to your childish expectations?
Are you going to blame the world for lying to you and then throw your life away out of disillusionment?
Are you going to adjust and adapt your worldview to properly account for the complexities you encounter?
Applying this to your case, one of the simple childhood lessons we often hear in western countries is something along the lines of "your work should be your calling", that is, if you hope to be a happy person. The implications of this message are enormous. It blows the concept of work way out of proportion, doesn't it? Work becomes your mental preoccupation. Work becomes your main source of meaning. Work becomes necessary for happiness. Work becomes your social status. Work becomes the means to measure your self-worth. Work becomes your identity. Work becomes your legacy.
Have you ever stopped to ask whether it is healthy for work to take on such an outsized role in your life? Do you want to live a life that is primarily defined by what you do to make money? Have you ever wondered who in a capitalist society benefits most from having the entire population become "passionate" workaholics, more devoted to work than anything else in life?
You are not your work. If you don't understand the truth of this statement, then I'm afraid the problem lies in how you see yourself. If you are able to find work you're passionate about, great. If you can't, then you're a "failure"? Please explain to me the logic behind this conclusion, because I'm not seeing it.
Your case speaks to me personally because I come from a family full of engineers and have been surrounded by them my whole life. My best friend from high school, ENFJ and an enormously gifted fiction writer, also went into engineering. Not one of them dreamed of becoming an engineer. Yet, they are all content today. Why? One reason is that none of them define themselves by their work.
My father grew up poor and started fixing cars as a teenager to make some cash. Being SP like you, he was good with his hands and enjoyed the work and could've made a living from it. In the end, he decided to go into engineering because he wanted to provide me with a better life than he had. A cousin went into engineering because his mom sacrificed a lot to raise him and he wanted to repay her with a house of her own. Another cousin wanted to become a singer (the talent was indeed there) but chose a white collar job instead, for its benefits, bonuses, and freedom to pursue hobbies.
If you were to tell me that any of these people are "failures" because they didn't end up doing the job they originally wanted, I'd laugh in your face. Whether or not someone is a success or failure doesn't depend on what work they do but, rather, what kind of person they become. They are all great people, living meaningfully, making contributions in their own way, and worthy of respect and love. One point you seem to be missing is this: Had they gone with their first choice, their lives wouldn't necessarily have turned out better.
An obvious sign that one's big picture thinking isn't working well enough is that the view always seems imbalanced. E.g. When you think of your current circumstances, your perspective skews too negative. When you think of what might've/could've/should've been, your perspective skews too positive (similar to grass is greener syndrome). People do this to reinforce whatever it is they're feeling in the moment. It's called emotional reasoning and it can lead to bad decision making.
There are a lot of people in this world who take jobs they aren't passionate about, not because they have given up or "failed", but because, like the examples above, they have their priorities straight. Is your main priority in life to define and express your identity through your work? If it is, you've dug your own grave with your Fi extremes. If not, then what is more important to you? What is most important to you? Is it really called "self-betrayal" to get your priorities straight? I would call it intelligent.
You call it self-betrayal because it goes against what you really want. Do wants never change? Is it a crime to admit that you want something else now? People's wants often change as they mature and gain a deeper understanding of what they really NEED. Do you know the difference between needs and wants? Children think mainly in terms of wants because they are motivated by superficial instant gratification. Mature people think more in terms of needs because they are more concerned with the deeper notion of fulfillment.
You are no longer the same person you were 5 or 10 years ago, are you? If you believe you are or must continue to be, then there's the real problem. It means you're (unconsciously) interfering with the growth process. The biggest danger of Ni loop is getting trapped in a mental dead end. On one hand, you want change, progression, or growth because that's what healthy Ni needs. On the other hand, the ego can't give up what it "wants", so you don't allow yourself to grow, even misusing Ni to self-sabotage. It's a form of self-torture, as your needs continually go unacknowledged and unmet.
People in tertiary loop consider growth to be a "self-betrayal" when they don't want to admit the extent to which they lack and thus need auxiliary development. In your case, that would be Se. The purpose of Se is to help you adapt well to reality, which is conveniently exactly what you're struggling with. Adaptation is not the same as resignation. Adaptation is about mental flexibility, whereas resignation comes out of mental inflexibility.
You don't want to face up to reality, do you? It would mean admitting that your view of things was naive, rigid, limited, distorted, or wrong. And now your wants and needs are colliding in painful fashion. If you hope to live life well, you must have the patience to reconcile wants and needs and pull them closer together.
When you understand your needs better, what ends up happening is that you start to recognize the many ways YOU have been standing in the way of your own fulfillment. Yes, reality can sometimes constrain you, which you can't control. But you can control whether you constrain yourself with your own small-mindedness. Life is full of possibility, truly. Just because one path didn't work out, do not go on to automatically assume that alternative paths are necessarily "lesser" or "inferior".
You want to think BIG picture? First, you have to recognize just how SMALL your view of things has been. It's not about calling yourself a "failure", implying moral failing. It's about respecting and loving yourself enough to let go of whatever isn't working for you, for the sake of your well-being. In this case, one thing you need to let go of is old ways of thinking that hold you back and keep you stuck.
I'm not here to tell you what career to choose; it's for you to make that determination for yourself. If you genuinely believe you can still make your original choice work, then you owe it to yourself to give it one more shot. But if the truth is you can't, then let yourself move on.
The main purpose of this post is to let you know: 1) your way of looking at the situation is problematic, and 2) you always have the power to change your perspective and get closer to the truth of what's really happening. Proper Se+Ni development should help on both counts.