Post by Hrafn on Dec 10, 2017 20:25:04 GMT -5
I've also noticed (and sort of dislike) when Fi-users define themselves by their preferences. Actually, I high Fe types so a similar thing (decorating their truck in all 49ers paraphernalia). It seems like a shallow identity. One difference is that high Fi users do not like defining themselves by their social affiliations. But they do define themselves in terms of their interests. In the past few years, I've watched how different people define themselves and learned to be okay with it because... I could never find any good criteria by which we should define ourselves.
I have no idea whether or not this is a common pattern among Ti-Fe users, but I have a strong tendency to consider geography as part of identity. I suppose in a roundabout way, geography can be a kinda-sorta social affiliation. For instance, if someone were to ask me who I am, one of the first things I’d be likely to say is where I live and where I’m from. Those are also some of the first things I might ask someone I’ve just met and am trying to get to know. Geography doesn’t tell me anything at all about a person in terms of their personality or anything like that, but it’s more that helps give me a sense of their background: what were the experiences that led them to become the person they are? In other words, it's part of the narrative I construct about my impressions of who a person is.
Yet as with other ways of identifying oneself, I think geographic identity tends to be somewhat selective. I grew up in a town that is both on the ocean and in the mountains, but I have a much stronger sense of being a “mountain person” than an “ocean person.” I don’t mind living away from the ocean, but I find flat land very monotonous and uninspiring. I sometimes identify as being “part Canadian” because part of my family is from western Canada and I lived there for a few years. But I don’t much identify with Seattle, even though I technically spent the first six months of my life there, and both my parents lived there for some time. But unlike with western Canada, I have no particularly fond memories of Seattle or love toward it, so I don’t feel any draw toward it or affiliation with it.
I wonder if for Fe users there’s a stronger sense that identity is negotiated socially—you might still seek to understand things like preferences & sensibilities as part of identity, but in doing so you are also more likely to consider and respond to external social input. I know some Fe users who’ve fussed around quite a bit over how to identify themselves ethnically; not totally unlike how I’ve fussed around about identifying myself geographically. I’m sure this isn’t altogether unique to Fe users…but it’s interesting that by their very nature, ethnic and familial identities are defined more collectively than are some other forms of identity. Perhaps geographic identity is also this way, in the sense that it’s defined by history of relations you have with landscapes and the people that inhabit them. For instance, I identify strongly as someone from the North, and if someone challenged me on this I would be comfortable asserting my life history & experience here. However, I see myself as much less intimately interwoven with this region than someone whose livelihood depends directly on interaction with these landscapes, sustained over a history of many generations.
Edit: thinking about it some more, I realized a lot of the stuff I wrote here is probably more related to Ne-Si than to Fe-Ti.