The Enneagram is a personality typology with a fairly long history.
Like the MBTI, it gets a lot of criticism, but I think it has survived this long because it has some usefulness.
In the MBTI, my type is INTJ, and in the Enneagram, it's 5w6.
Incidentally, the Enneagram can define personality types in quite different ways. For example, you can define a type as something like 9-4-7.
There are also several ways of clustering the types in the Enneagram.
The most representative one divides them into the head (5, 6, 7), the heart (1, 2, 3), and the gut (1, 9, 8).
This is a way of dividing them by what motivates their behavior.
For the gut types (the Peacemaker, the Reformer, and the Leader), anger is the main motivation.
Because of experiences and perceptions from childhood in which they felt their survival, territory, or boundaries were threatened, they build up a strong will.
So they endure with their bodies, push forward, and try to control a situation, ignore it, or grit their teeth and get past it.
That disposition makes them leaders, reformers, and peacemakers.
For the heart types (the Helper, the Achiever, and the Artist), shame is the main motivation.
As children, they experienced feelings of shame and lack, along the lines of "I am not loved enough as I am,"
and so they develop a tendency to prove themselves within relationships.
That is why they try to fill the need for love by doing good deeds to win attention, by doing something well to earn praise, or by being special, as in "I'm different from everyone else."
That disposition makes them helpers, achievers, and artists.
For the head types (the Investigator, the Loyalist, and the Enthusiast), fear is the main motivation.
Because of childhood experiences of feeling that the world is unpredictable and that safety can be shattered at any moment, they keep calculating in their heads, "How can I become safe?"
So they manage anxiety by accumulating knowledge or through belonging, rules, and preparation, or else they avoid fear altogether by not knowing it at all.
That disposition makes them investigators, loyalists, and enthusiasts.
5w6 is the Investigator, with a secondary side of the Loyalist.
My parents divorced when I was young, and I grew up in a household with my grandparents, so I think I could hardly help developing into a head type.
The world is dangerous, and my grandmothers and grandfathers knew little about how it worked.
Because of that fear, I must have had to learn everything on my own and build everything up myself.
Because there was no one to teach me.
I think this probably had a strong influence on my working independently.
Live like that, and you come to think of yourself as one of the smartest people around you.
And I don't think that belief was ever really wrong.
It's not arrogance. It's just that I rarely had the experience of being wrong compared to the people around me.
That's how I've lived, with anxiety and fear about the world as my main motivation.
I have to get into a good university, get good grades, get into a good graduate school, raise my salary, do some kind of side business too...
But strangely, right now I feel no fear.
Because everyone in the world is living in a chaotic mess where no one knows what will happen next.
When everyone is screwed, there's nothing left to be afraid of, right?
So maybe that's why I seem to have no will to do anything right now.
But it makes me sad.
That I'm the kind of person who can only do something when I have anxiety and fear.
It reminds me of myself when I did jumps with a big drop at Hanyang University.
I didn't jump with feelings like "I have to do this" or "How great will it feel when I land it?"
I jumped out of disgust and hatred.
I used the hatred that welled up as my fuel, thinking "You can't even jump this?" or thinking of people I didn't like.
What if I'm someone who can only draw my drive from negative emotions?
I don't want to carry those negative feelings anymore.
Is that why everyone starts a family and has kids?
To take something other than negativity as their motivation, something to protect.
To find something to devote themselves to.