I'm on the short side. But I don't think being short is a disadvantage. If a food crisis hit, I could last longer on the same amount of food. If war broke out, my chances of getting shot would drop, if only slightly. And back in college I was in a dance club, where I realized that the shorter you are, the better you move. Taller people have more potential to look cool, but they're also more likely to flail. Tall people in particular tend to lose control of their hands and feet.
Of course, all that was a joke. If I could choose my height, I'd choose to be tall. After a performance, the person who got asked for their number was never the one who danced well, but the one who was tall. What I meant to say is that a trait that looks good is, in some ways, a weakness, and a trait that looks bad is, in some ways, a strength. Every design has trade-offs.
These days people seem to rank MBTI traits as better or worse, too. For example, T is seen as robotic, like an engineering student, while F is emotional and human, so F is considered superior. There's even a term, "T-bastard." Likewise, the planful J is seen as a better worker than the spontaneous P, so J is thought to be superior. That's why P types say they want to become J. They're joking, of course. Let's not get too absorbed in MBTI.
What I want to talk about here is the ability to plan, the trait associated with J. If you're reading this, you're probably a J, because J types seem likely to enjoy this kind of writing. The stronger your planning skills, the more likely you are to be seen as a good worker in modern society. And that's actually true, since devising strategy and making plans is a powerful ability. I read somewhere that most of the world's top CEOs are J in MBTI.
But as I said, everything has trade-offs. There's something I paid in exchange for the ability to plan: anxiety. Planning means designing the future. Curiously, the brain circuits we use to think about the future are said to be similar to the circuits that produce anxiety and worry.1 Perhaps this is one reason the rate of mental illness is high among the highly educated.
Just as athletes have to take care of the various physical aftereffects of their sport, knowledge workers have to take care of their mental health. This is especially true the more educated you are and the more mentally complicated your work is. Aerobic exercise and meditation are the two best-known actions for mental health. Since the ability to plan is the ability to think about the future, meditation, which brings your awareness back to the present, should be effective.
I've meditated on and off since 2018. In 2018, mindfulness meditation was trendy on the narrative that it reduces mental fatigue. I tried Headspace, Calm, and a few other things back then. But I didn't see any effect in reducing mental fatigue.
It was only recently, five years later, that I understood what meditation does. Meditation doesn't reduce mental fatigue so much as build the habit of noticing the present. At least, that's what it did for me. It lets me see the state of my body when I'm overdoing it, notice my emotions better, and, when thoughts about the future make me worried and anxious, come back to the present and feel reassured.
A habit I've recently adopted successfully is meditating while lying down. It's a really good habit. If you meditate lying down, you might fall asleep. Whether I meditate or fall asleep, I come out ahead either way. You could say it's a game I can't lose.
I've talked about this through MBTI, but the same story also connects to the downside of high conscientiousness in the Big 5.
Footnotes
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If you want to know more about this, see the book 우울할 땐 뇌과학 (When You're Depressed, Try Neuroscience). The Anxiety character in Inside Out 2 may have been designed on this basis, too. ↩