Be Yourself. (No, really.)
At what point in an individual’s life do they become curious about the way they are perceived? The foundation of it has been laid in earlier years, and things might have shifted following that, through first formative experiences. But it is not until entering the social world as an individual, untethered to notions of self dependent on family, that this act of self-identification really begins to take shape. Philosopher Charles Taylor argues, in his book The Ethics of Authenticity, that “We define [our identity] always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the identities our significant others want to recognize in us.”
It is not uncommon to spend time reckoning with the fact that one’s self-assessment has been centered around the notion of oneself as a wholly singular individual, which then proves to be incorrect when faced with other, similar people. During this transitional period one goes from being confident in a false sense of self, to brutally facing the fact of one’s own unoriginality. I believe that personality tests, and other SSSIs, or “Secular/ Statistical Self Identifiers” serve as a kind of band-aid for this stage of development.
The funny logic in this idea, though, is that the very thing that seeks to usher you from a false sense of originality to a more grounded perspective, gives you a false sense of originality. This is especially true in the case of tests like the Myers-Briggs personality test, or the Moral Alignment test, which opt for a sliding scale metric instead of multiple choice. However, the sliding scale is really just a deceptive way to present what is really a multiple choice question. The test taker may only choose one of maybe four or five fixed points on the scale, but because of the way it looks, the answer feels totally and distinctly your own. When the choice of point on the scale is tallied, it is still scored the way a multiple choice test would, as: “mostly strongly agrees”, or “mostly neutrals” etc.
Another deceptive element of these tests is the way the answer is presented to you. In the days of Seventeen magazine quizzes, you saw not only your own results, but all possible other results. This transparency does not allow for any false illusions of singularity-- you are still just one of a fixed number of types, exactly the same as all the other people who tested like you. But now with the way results are presented digitally you see only your own results. This allows a test-taker to feel like they are the only person receiving, or who has ever received these results. You get to have a kind of one-on-one experience with your results– it’s almost intimate. This intimacy gives the pretense of friendship between the test-taker and their results: a kind friend giving you sage counsel on the innermost workings of your psyche.
And this is kind of the crux of these things: they are set up as though teaching you something about yourself, when in fact you already know the answer to every question. So then what you are finding out is not about self-discovery. It is about a far more important thing-- what other people think of you. These tests don’t help you to better understand yourself, they help you to better understand the way you are perceived, which is often desirable to a young person finding their place in the world.
The way these tests begin is always the same: “Be yourself.” As if this were an action, that could be performed. Or perhaps what it really implies is true, of the test-taker and test-maker. We are hardly ever really being ourselves, so in order to do so we must actively decide to drop the more palatable facade we have developed for a second.
This sets up two different desires of the test-taker. On the one hand there is the need to truly be perceived, and have the test see through your contrived identity and pinpoint the real one. On the other, there is an itching to know if your contrivance is effective, and more importantly, likeable. This also implies that there are two basic kinds of test-takers. The honest, and the dishonest. Even more specifically, there are four kinds of test-takers: the honestly good, honestly bad, dishonestly good and dishonestly bad. I’ve made a test to determine which you are, below, it only takes a few minutes to complete. Be yourself.
1.) You are in a class, a bit disinterested, when you notice a person you had previously not found attractive is looking at you. It goes on, and when you look over, they hold eye contact for a split second to let you know that they are looking at you.
Do you—
A.) Start thinking about what they’ve said in class before. Was it ever of interest? Start re-examining their face, maybe they are kind of attractive, in an off-beaten-path kind of way, at least. Do you start to consider talking to them after class? Start planning what you will say, taking into account what you can remember of what they’ve said in class to shape what you are planning on saying to them? Do you suddenly become self-conscious, thinking about what they’ve been looking at? Are you dressed attractively? Have you been holding yourself in a grotesque way? Is that why they’ve been looking at you? When class ends, you don’t go up to them, you don’t strike up conversation. You go home. You think about it for the rest of the evening. You’re sure that the person will not look at you again the same way tomorrow.
B.) You suddenly realize you like them. You begin to picture the wonderful relationship you could potentially have in little vignettes. You start subtly correcting your posture and little facial movements to appear more attractive. You try to operatically lock eyes with them. You approach them after class, make a comment on some inane little detail of what they’re wearing, or a laptop sticker. Walking outside, they take off their mask. You are slightly disappointed, but now you’ve thought about the whole thing too much. You proceed.
C.) You do nothing, change nothing. You weren’t attracted to them in the first place– why would you suddenly change your mind?
D.) You don’t change the way you are acting, and you don’t start looking at them. But, after class, you make an innocuous friendly comment to put them at ease. Maybe you will be friends?
2.) You are walking around your neighborhood when you see a little bird that can’t fly. People are just walking past the thing as it tries pathetically to spring itself off the ground, to no avail.
Do You--
A.) Pass the bird by, noticing it, feeling for it, but ultimately knowing you have too much on your plate to do anything about it.
B.) Performatively try and help the bird, making a big fuss the whole time to attract attention. You take the bird to an animal hospital you’ve walked past before, where they inform you that the bird is young, and what happened was totally normal, but now you have effectively taken the bird away from its nest, ruining the natural progression of its life. They take it from you,
begrudgingly but make it obvious that they think you have done an obnoxious thing. Maybe they could also tell you expected praise for what you did. You leave feeling bad for a bit, and think you will feel bad for the rest of the day. You don’t.
C.) You google what to do. A young bird should not be removed from the vicinity of its nest, and this bird looks quite young. You leave it alone.
D.) You google what to do. A young bird should not be removed from the vicinity of its nest, and this bird looks quite young. You consult pictures on google to make sure that the bird really is young. You sit with it for a bit, watching it. It is eventually joined by a larger, more capable looking bird. It seems the situation has resolved itself. You leave.
3.) You see an old book on a stoop. It has a charming cover, and the way that it’s propped up makes it hard to ignore.
Do you--
A.) Stop and pick it up. On the inside of the jacket there’s a little inscription. It doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s pretty impersonal. You wish there had been something written inside that was somehow applicable to your life. But there isn’t. You take the book anyways, it’s pretty, and it’s old enough that it feels special.
B.) You stop and pick it up. The inscription on the inside reads: Happy Birthday Nick, lots of love Jessica. You are somehow able to convince yourself this means something, that you were meant to find this book for some reason. If you read it, maybe it’ll correspond perfectly with something going on in your life right now. The universe has you in mind. You take it, but you never end up reading it. A friend will notice it in your apartment, and you’ll tell them you read it, and that the inscription means something to you because of x reason.
C.) You look at it, but only while walking. You don’t stop, or pick it up. You don’t see the point.
D.) You stop and look at it, and the inscription on the inside of the jacket is moving to you, even without any personal connection to it. You take the book and read it.
If you got mostly A’s: You are GOOD BAD. You are the kind of person who is somehow both sympathetic and mostly wrong. You know when you do wrong, and it is this self-awareness that makes people like you, despite the fact that you do very little to endear yourself to them. You are neurotic, but the world is an anxiety-inducing place. People will not always like you; you are an acquired taste. Yet, you also grow on people. You might just be in their lives for years and sneak up on them, without them even noticing it. You take a test to find out what other people think of you, but you answer honestly, you want to know the truth.
If you got mostly B’s: You are BAD BAD. You are the kind of person who others might occasionally describe as “toxic” or “negative.” This is a hard lot in life, because it might just happen to be your nature. And there is really no way to escape such permanent labels, is there? You do wrong, but you think you’re a pretty decent person, making you all the more unlikeable. You take a test to find out what people think of you, but you don’t answer honestly. You want to know what they think of the affectations you have developed.
If you got mostly C’s: You are BAD GOOD. You are the kind of person who learned and internalized the unsaid rules of social conduct at a very young age. Now you have managed to live by that code for so long that it is indiscernible from your true self. Or maybe that distinction doesn’t matter at a certain point. You take a test to find out about yourself, but you don’t really answer all that honestly. But you think you do, so what’s the difference anyways?
If you got mostly D’s: You are GOOD GOOD. You are the kind of person who, for whatever reason, is genuinely decent. You are honest with people, but not to the point of being hurtful. You are considerate, in essence. And you wouldn’t even consider yourself all that moral, because you are hopeful enough to believe there are many people out there more decent than you, which there probably are not. Everyone you meet will be jealous of this quality, to the extent of resentment at times. Your life might be difficult. You take a test to find out about yourself, and you answer honestly. You are genuinely curious about the kind of person you are, and you are even curious about discovering flaws you might have previously been blind to.
This might be a more practical way for these tests to function– but it’s a lot less fun than the pithy vagueness of standard personality test results, isn't it? Those results never leave a sour taste in your mouth, and they don’t seek to. All they want to express is that you are a person, and you are perceived in a certain way. They don’t actually tell you just what that way is so much as they let you know there’s something about you that is distinct. To quote Joan Didion in The White Album: “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”1 All that these tests can do, while still being as inoffensive as possible, is give you the suggestion of a place. If you can make something of that suggestion, and claim it the hardest, a kind of identity can be found in that. It just might not be sustainable. Any sense of security in one’s identity the test’s might give you is ephemeral– a band aid for a larger yearning. The desire to unpack and pin-point the self is unfortunately a life-long one, and it cannot be quelled by any questionnaire. What the test appeals to in adolescents, is the false confidence in themselves. Young people have, for a brief window of time, a blustering confidence in who they think they are. This lends itself incredibly to these quizzes, in which there is an endless game of hot-potato going being played. A self-identifier is only applicable for so long, but what the tests rely on is a contradiction: they want test-takers to feel that the answer they are given is permanent, and fixed. What the continued popularity of these tests shows us, is that we always seem to find ourselves back at that tragically cliched question, the one that should have long since lost all philosophical potency, yet somehow irrationally hasn’t: Who am I?