Who am I? By the numbers

Posted on May 18, 2003 by Gene

Another web personality test, this time Enneagram. I have no clue what most of the yammering and psychobabble means, but this part is plenty clear:

It seems that I’m just a horrible, horrible person. Well, big deal — I already knew that.
The test results were presented as a bunch of obstruse charts, giving me no real clue whether this is or isn’t a valid method of analysis. But then again, asking someone 126 carefully crafted questions is pretty much guaranteed to give you a blanket description of their personality. Still, these mean nothing at all to me:

Type 4w5. Your mean type, Type 5w4, is who you are, on average, based on the sum influence of all nine type behaviors. Your mean type is a better predictor of how you generally act whereas your main type reflects how you prefer to act. By analogy, if you were a bus with nine different possible drivers, your main type is the most frequently used driver (which suggests you prefer that behavior/driver) but your mean type represents the sum influence of all nine drivers. Another way to look at it is that your mean type reflects where you are overall in the evolutionary race and your main type reflects the direction you are most often choosing to move in (if it’s higher than your mean type you are moving forward, otherwise you are moving backward or nowhere). Most Enneagram books and tests focus on main type and use an additional “variant” classification to account for the influence of the other eight behavior types (drivers). Based on your test results your variant is Sexual. So when reading other Enneagram books or websites refer to the Type 4w5, Sexual variant descriptions.

Everyone utilizes all nine behaviors to some degree, but some overly favor less useful behaviors. The upper behaviors (4,5,6) reflect moving forward (5 behavior is the most progress conducive), the middle behaviors (3 and 7) reflect minimal progress or staying the same, and the lower behaviors reflect going backwards (clinging to the past). People stuck more often on statis quo (3 and 7) and backward behaviors (2, 1, 9, will develop less in life, then again to be too progressive all the time (4,5,6) can burn you out physically (so if you have a really high Vmean be attentive to physical burn out). You can’t usually master higher behaviors without first resolving excessive attachments or deficiencies to lower type behaviors. If you have absolutely no sense of organization (type 1), you are unlikely to succeed at anything. On the other hand if you are obsessed with organization, you won’t accomplish much either.

My comprehension of this is non-existent, so I tend to focus on the fact that my variant is sexual. I find this both amusing and comforting. I don’t know why.