save your sanity for later.

Somewhere I picked up the meme that the 2016 election, Facebook and fake news are the crisis points directing us to implement ethics in computer science, just as the atomic bomb was a crisis point for physics and ethics in psychiatry have ...somewhat advanced since phrenology.

I spent age 8-28 on the computer. Not sure it was entirely a waste of time, yet now my day to day life is so dramatically different and I'm so much happier!

I cook. I might spend hours a day walking around, sitting on park benches, hours having conversations with and actually seeing other people face to face. On a technology heavy day, I actually boot up my laptop and might spend 2 hours on the computer. This happens...twice a week maybe.

Before now, before California, before being my own best friend and adulthood and functional living, I lived with my whole family but all I remember is being alone, constantly. I needed to be. Fake-busy chain-smoking cigarettes, up all night mainlining sodas to farm karma, typing furiously, electronic faux-Diogenes looking everywhere for an honest man. If I wasn't asleep, I stared through the Internet window into a life I believed I couldn't lead, from the wreckage I was too scared to leave.

I don't need the Internet to save me anymore. I save me. I keep me Okay. No matter where I am, whether other people like me or not, if I'm broke or flush, if I'm happy or sad, I'm the adult here.

Turns out I'm not that invested in meaningless internet points. When I was sad, when I was denying my own agency, that kind of thing meant more. I didn't see the grey areas where growth could be, too busy soaking up the pictures I could see clearly for the first time in black & white.

Lifestyle's different where I live now. Levels of acceptance in the community at large too—I feel like I fit in. Now, if I need entertainment, I head to the off-leash dog beach. Usually the ocean can NEARLY drown out my beagle running around baying her head off at everyone.

(I walk around not introducing myself but instead my delightful dog.
She bays, bays, runs up and runs away
then I say, 'hello, I see you met my dog Teyla,
you should check your bags if you used to have food in there,
yes she's adorable, she's 12 actually,
oh right well
running around and getting into trouble keeps her young.'

The reaction she gets from other dogs makes me wonder if she has the doggie equivalent of autism like me—universally even other hounds go "wuuuuuuh so loud" and kinda walk away.)

I'm glad I have this journal and the friends I made here and through my online activities, don't get me wrong! Balance is what I'm getting closer to, is the thing, and that's why I'm starting to flourish.

(I'm over ignorance; I don't need to take care of your feelings anymore. Dropped the rope already.)

I wrote this whole thing up about what being an INFJ means to me and lost it, of course.

( Data loss is the norm around here )

I'm a bit pissed, but not strongly so, because realistically, the Meyers Briggs is a scientific crock of shit. I've been in therapy for ten years, and I can tell you that whatever article you can google up, the vast majority of the psychology community doesn't mention the MBTI, comment on it, or place any validity on its merits.

Psychologists love personality tests, but they're scientists, too. The MBTI lacks specificity and reproducibility, the quality and capacity of measuring reliably and getting the same results time after time——those two things don't happen for this "test", like Rorscarch blots and the dubiously brilliant, seemingly-semi-logical intuition-based bullshit of Freud.

That having been said, the MBTI is a great measure of something, alright, the same thing that horoscopes measure, and that is how much we believe in a specific concept about ourselves.

QED, that's why me and half of tumblr are INFJs. (Also, I'm a Scorpio with Scorpio Rising and half my houses in Scorpio, so fuck me, it pisses me off this stuff can seem accurate to the point where I'm even "the type that doesn't like types".)

---

You can probably replace INFJ with "person who thinks INFJ describes them" in all of the below, which is mainly just advice giving regardless. Even though my scientific doubts remain after spending two weeks reading about the MBTI, reading these descriptions and information likewise remain an interesting way of looking at myself from one outside perspective.

( With all of the above in mind, here are my links. )

Facepalming all over the place.

It doesn’t take much time on self-help-oriented web sites before one’s i.p. address is registered and tracked by something as innocuous-sounding as a ‘cookie’, and the person owning the computer is officially tagged as one of THOSE people—someone who is desperate for relief from a horrible condition, who is tired of the failures of modern medicine, and who is starting to wonder if anything will help.  Talk about ripe for the picking—and in no time, the spam e-mails begin to appear.

(from Opioids for Depression? on PsychCentral)

The sheer technical wrongness of this is of such a magnitude I don't even know where to start correcting it.