The Enneagram is a personality typology with a fair bit of history behind it.
Like MBTI, it takes a lot of criticism, but I think it has survived this long because there's some usefulness to it.
In MBTI my type is INTJ; in the Enneagram I'm a 5w6.
For what it's worth, Enneagram types can be defined in quite different ways — like defining someone as 9-4-7, for instance.
There are also several ways to cluster the Enneagram types.
The most well-known is the division into head (5, 6, 7), heart (1, 2, 3), and gut (1, 9, 8).
This is a way of dividing them by the motive behind their behavior.
For gut types — the Peacemaker, the Reformer, the Leader — anger is the primary motive.
Because of childhood experiences and perceptions in which their survival, their territory, or their boundaries felt threatened, they develop a strong will.
So they endure with their bodies, they push through, and they try to control the situation, or ignore it, or bear it and move on.
That disposition is what makes them Leaders, Reformers, and Peacemakers.
For heart types — the Helper, the Achiever, the Artist — shame is the primary motive.
Having experienced, in childhood, feelings of shame and deficiency along the lines of "as I am, I'm not lovable enough,"
they develop a tendency to prove themselves within relationships.
So they try to fill up on love by doing good deeds to get attention, by being good at something to earn praise, or through specialness — "I'm different from everyone else."
That disposition is what makes them Helpers, Achievers, and Artists.
For head types — the Investigator, the Loyalist, the Enthusiast — fear is the primary motive.
Because of childhood experiences in which the world felt unpredictable and safety felt like it could break at any moment, they keep calculating in their heads: "How do I become safe?"
So they manage their anxiety by accumulating knowledge, or through belonging, rules, and preparation — or else they avoid the fear entirely by pretending not to know it.
That disposition is what makes them Investigators, Loyalists, and Enthusiasts.
A 5w6 is an Investigator with a secondary Loyalist side.
My parents divorced when I was young and I was raised by my grandparents, so I think I had no choice but to develop naturally into a head type.
The world was dangerous, and there were my grandmother and grandfather, who didn't know much about how the world worked.
Because of that fear, I must have had to learn and build up everything myself.
Because there was no one to teach me.
I suspect this is what strongly pushed me toward working independently.
Living that way, you come to think of yourself as one of the smartest people around you.
And I don't think that thought has ever really turned out to be wrong.
It's not arrogance — it's just that I rarely had the experience of being more wrong than the people around me.
So I've lived with anxiety and fear about the world as my primary motive.
Get into a good university, get good grades, get into a good grad school, raise my salary, do something on the side...
But right now, strangely, there's no fear.
Because everyone in the world is living in a mess where nobody knows what's coming next.
If everyone's screwed, there's nothing to be afraid of, right?
So maybe that's also why I have no will to do anything right now.
But it makes me sad.
That I'm the kind of person who can only get things done when there's anxiety and fear.
I think of myself doing drop jumps at Hanyang University.
I wasn't jumping out of a feeling like "I've got to do this" or "how great it'll feel when I land it."
I jumped out of disgust and hatred.
"You can't even jump this?" — or thinking about people I didn't like, and using the hatred welling up in me as the driving force to jump.
What if I'm someone who can only use negative emotions as fuel?
When I don't want to carry those negative feelings anymore.
Is that why everyone starts a family and has kids?
To make their motive something they're protecting, rather than something negative.
To find something to devote themselves to.