You Are Not Your Type: Escaping the Cult of Self-Discovery

Credits: Rene Magritte, The False Mirror via Wikiart.

I wake up and look around at the posters on my wall. Sport, music, art: all carefully chosen to represent me. I take in the air, appreciating the faint scent of sandalwood from my reed diffuser. Sandalwood, I think, aligns quite aptly with my male, but not hyper-masculine, proclivities.

I browse my wardrobe, debating what outfit to choose. I’d love to wear that, but it’s not me — I wouldn’t feel comfortable, and my friends would wonder who I was trying to fool. Too flamboyant for someone with my level of panache, as much as I appreciate its place on the hanger. Strange, to want to do something that someone like you wouldn’t want to do.

Next up, food. "Four per cent Italian," I recall, pinching the air between my thumb and forefinger in tribute to my ancestors. Best avoid the rice: it might violate my Mediterranean micro-heritage. I settle for bruschetta.

My mum calls: “Your dad’s worried about you — he says you’re too busy, too much like me.” Not, apparently, in a good way. I retort: "I’m not just like you. I may share your industry, ambition, perhaps a sliver of ego, but I also have Dad’s emotionality, his sense of humour, his habit of losing focus. Come to think of it, I might even have my grandmother’s methodicalness, my grandfather’s obsessiveness, and my other grandfather’s golf swing." Funny the things you can inherit.

This is, of course, an exaggeration (I am zero per cent Italian), but it contains real questions I’ve asked myself. Does this poster reflect me? Could I pull off this jacket? Am I more like my mum or my dad? And what if the answer’s neither? What am I supposed to do with that?

As I’ve grown older, I find this constant self-cataloguing exhausting. Perhaps it’s an inherited trait, but I have an implacable urge to categorise, which clashes with that nebulous thing we call identity.

My tendency isn’t helped by a world promising self-discovery at every turn. Ancestry kits explain our heritage, offering a simulacrum of community in a society yearning for belonging. Personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Enneagram sort us into neat acronyms (I’m apparently an INTP 4w5 Sx/Sp, if you must know, though it depends on the day and the test). Self-help books and mindfulness apps offer self-actualisation and authenticity for just a small monthly subscription.

I tried these supposed shortcuts in my teenage years, and I can’t say they brought me any closer to self-knowledge. Later, I attempted a more empirical approach — you can’t read the label from inside the jar, after all — by noting what other people said about me, hoping their comments might coalesce into a coherent picture. Obviously, that didn’t work either. What use is it to learn that I’m methodical? I already knew that: I do things methodically. And what if I don’t want to be methodical? What if I want to slam my fingers into the keyboard and see what emerges, like I’m doing right now?

We define ourselves in such ways because we fear the unknown. As psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued in The Fear of Freedom (1942), we have an inherent desire for security: to escape the boundlessness of freedom and seek comfort in authority, whether through powerful people or restrictive categories. Michel Foucault, in Madness and Civilization (1961), described our tendency to shift responsibility away from ourselves by turning to institutions, psychiatrists, and social norms. These systems of self-knowledge are seductive because, through their structure and definition, they offer a handle on the messy reality of being human.

Such structures will always be simplifications. 

You could amass a million adjectives and facts about yourself, but it’s never going to be you. The identity these tools promise is an illusion, a neatly packaged commodity in the spiritual marketplace.

Our search for answers is hardly new: philosophers have long grappled with the nature of the self. The ancient Stoics believed it could be discovered through quiet introspection. The Cynics thought facing hardship and danger was the path to self-discovery. Socrates affirmed the importance of debate and critical inquiry. I believe Foucault came closest to the truth, in his suggestion that subjectivity is not a fixed state but an ongoing process. The self is constituted and constructed by the activities we engage in to uncover it. Hardship, for instance, does not reveal the true self, but creates a certain version of it.

Jean-Paul Sartre claimed in Existentialism is a Humanism (1946) that "existence precedes essence". There is no blueprint for who we are or what we are supposed to be — we are simply flung into the world, and define ourselves through the choices we make. Some find this idea terrifying — for Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), it implied that "everything is permitted" — whereas others see it as the basis of our freedom. Of course, we are not blank slates. We arrive in the world with bodies, histories, and social contexts (our "facticity," as Sartre called it). But identity lies in what we make of these facts, not in the facts themselves.

So where does this leave the weary self-categoriser? If labels confine, and introspection leads us in circles, then how do we learn to live? Perhaps the most intuitive and complex notion of identity emerges when we stop trying to force ourselves into categories and simply feel the existence we inhabit. Once we connect with ourselves in this way, we begin to see that there is no overarching personality, just a collection of values (likely inconsistent), a host of habits, and a stream of desires. These thoughts, feelings, and inclinations are what we should look to. When you stop trying to be a certain way, where does your attention naturally drift? To the rustling leaves, the bustling shopping centre, the intricacies of an engine, the elegance of code, the face of another person? These are the raw materials of the self.

Self-discovery is not about locating a fixed essence, but about cutting through the noise of social expectation, habit, and insecurity that obscures what we truly care about. It is about figuring out our values, and acting accordingly. We will never achieve this through ancestry kits, personality tests, or any other approach that merely gives us another fact to pin against our name. What do these tests tell you that you don’t already know?

We might do well to ditch nouns altogether. Instead of saying "I am a painter," why not "I paint"? The "I" remains undefined, open. "I paint, I play squash, I read" — these describe activities, not essences, leaving space for the multifaceted, ever-evolving self. By focusing less on who we are and more on what we do, we can act freely, without constantly worrying if our choices fit the identity we have assigned ourselves. And perhaps, looking back, we will find that a self has been quietly, authentically, taking shape all along.