As a cohort, Gen Z have championed a move towards breaking out of boxes and ripping off labels; at least that’s what we claim. But from my experience, it seems to me that we’re not simply unboxing, but creating more boxes within, and without, the space left behind.
Maybe it’s in our nature to want to categorize everything to make sense of the world. If it’s not within, then it’s without. But it’s not enough to not be something, we must be something as well. So we stick on a label where there previously was no need for one, or rely far too heavily on pre-made labels to the point of making it our entire identity. Nowhere is this more apparent than on TikTok where most of our generation spends our time.
Think about the many different “aesthetics” that have emerged online, and which burst onto mainstream consciousness during the pandemic. These may have become popular with our generation due to our struggle to find an identity at that point in our lives where it is expected we feel lost or out-of-sorts with ourselves. Add on the pressures of an isolating and world-upending pandemic, and our desire to find someplace we ‘belong’ solidifies into membership and a stalwart belief in such ideas.
All Aboard MBTI
One of the most prominent of these memberships, and probably the most damaging, is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, popularly abbreviated to MBTI. The MBTI has been around for a few years already, but its relevance doesn’t seem to have died down; even though research since has disavowed it of the nearly prophetic powers the company that markets it claims it has. The MBTI, for the uninitiated, is a personality framework developed by Carl Jung in the 1940s.
He isolated 16 distinct personalities that all the people in the world fall into based on untested research, composed of levels of four attributes: Introversion-Extroversion, Feeling-Thinking, Intuitive-Observant, and Prospecting-Judging. The test now claims that people that belong to a certain MBTI personality type will be most successful in a certain career path, or be most compatible with certain other personality types, and achieve their happiness in a certain way. At best these “predictions” can suggest a certain path, at worst they risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Invisible Hand
Think about it. Suppose your MBTI directs you towards a certain career path. You were slightly interested in that career before, but it was nothing you had decided on. Upon seeing it listed as the “perfect” career path for someone of your personality type, you decide to do some research on it. After scrolling down the page to the section detailing the famous people who possess that MBTI, you stumble upon a familiar name who adorned a list of famous Yale alumni. Just your luck, Yale has been your dream school since forever!
And now, you’re ever more certain that that is the career path for you. With such ‘fate’ guiding your hand, how can you now feel doubt about pursuing that career path? Perhaps, without the guidance of the MBTI, you may have decided upon a different path, but the suggestive power of the MBTI and its stalwart claim that it knows better for you than you do for yourself can make you surrender your powers of reasoning to its logic of fate. And such is the pity.
But even if such predictions were true, there’s no guarantee you’ll fall into the same MBTI again. It’s been widely noticed that people can often test different MBTI when taking the test multiple times. It’s something I have experienced myself, having tested INFP, INTP, and ENFP in the few times I’ve done it for both fun and business. With such reliability of the test itself, why should we rely on it to make major life decisions for us?
Thinking Outside the Box
To a lot of us, our MBTI has become a box we put ourselves into to define our likes and our dislikes, our weaknesses and our strengths. And in doing so, we try to mold those parts of us that do not fit to better represent our MBTI. In a way, the MBTI is to Gen Z what horoscopes were to Millennials. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a bit of fun by going through your MBTI or having a late-night laugh or introspection session with your friends about it. Just be careful to not rely too heavily on these ‘insights’ into yourself and forget to accumulate your own.
Similar to the MBTI, there are far more boxes we try to fit people into. These boxes may be based on supposed personality types, on sexuality or gender identity, on academic capabilities or intellectual interests, on athleticism and physical fitness or many, many more. While such categorisations may be useful to describe, to an extent, all of these come with their own preconceived notions or attributes that work to erase the individual for the collective. So when viewing yourself—and others—do remember that no membership or belief in a group or idea can sum up a person.