The Defense Mechanisms of Type 5

(IDK if this has been apparent or not but I’ve been having an absolute blast doing this series of posts. Thinking about the whole complex of defenses as a constellation really brings out a 3D image of the psychic machinery of the types, how the juice flows within them for ill or good.It’s all coming together & sparkly inside my head. Hopefully your heads, too.

In particularly think the inner/outer boundary stuff really came out in how 1 and 2 are most focussed on defending against unwanted things from within, whereas 3, as a structure, always tries to kill both birds with one stone and 4 is more focussed on keeping its integrity relative to the outside.

It’s also been so interesting seeing different type ppl jump out of the woodworks & react in all sorts of ways. I keep misspelling ‘Condon’ as ‘Condom’ tho T-T now what could my subconscious be trying to tell me**)

isolation

This is the primary one, in the sense that it has a role in making the others ‘possible’.

In a psychoanalytic context, ‘isolation’ means the creation of a ‘gap’ between oneself and the stimulus so as to limit its influence on oneself.

A classic example often given is making a marked pause in one’s speech or thoughts before then moving on to the next topic, so as not to let what was being discussed before affect one’s other thoughts or the actions and feelings of the rest of the day, as if the difficult conversation were being put in its own little box where it doesn’t touch the other contents of the person’s mind, so that they can carry on as if it never happened.

That ‘gap’ can be created by a variety of means, beginning with the purely mental. Some features of the attention pattern such as looking at things from a bird’s eye perspective or retentive elaboration (by analyzing, for example) or just mental dominance in general easily lend themselves to creation of a certain ‘distance’.

‘I hate everything!’ quickly becomes ‘Sometimes I feel like I am a little frustrated with certain things’ - there’s also a bit of relativizing in this, too, but the component of isolation is how the frustration is limited in its scope – it goes from being in your whole being to just in your feelings, from filling everything up to just this present moment, from existing as an unquantified, non-liniear thing to being compared with other possible degrees of frustration, from affecting ‘everything’ to just some clearly circumscribed ‘some things’.

Even shifting from the viscerally evocative word ‘hate’ to a more clinical ‘frustration’ can be a part of it.

Looks a whole lot more managable now, doesn’t it? Hardly worth smashing something over. Maybe not worth doing anything over, which conveniently saves you the effort. (not for nothing has it been said that less functional 5s have a ‘talent for finding reasons not to do things’)

Freud himself already pointed out that this process is quite similar to that of concentrating something to the exclusion of everything else, as this requires that you focus on the thing without being influenced by all the other stimuli that might be going on, not being influenced by them. So it figures that this would be a tempting defense for an individual who constitutionally has good powers of concentration (which is probably why it’s mostly INxx or ISTx that tend to have this structure of defenses)

Another thing worth noting is how, unlike with some other defense mechanisms, the offending negative stimulus is not ejected from consciousness at all.

One remains fully aware of it, but merely keeps it from affecting oneself to the point that it becomes bearable to look at, to the point that one may sometimes casually talk about stuff without even realizing that others may find it morbid or disturbing, or register it as an eerie under-reaction. (well, the occasional w4 individual may be being edgy on purpose on top of that)

In this you see that 5, like 4 and 8, is an ‘outer boundary’ type where the defenses are mostly focussed outward against the ‘world’ whereas the inner contents are relatively ‘unfiltered’, the person remains aware of harsh realities (or terror-fueled fantasies) that others may not have present most of the time.

There’s probably a reason it’s a common for horror writers to be 5s or have a 5 component, it is conducive to both consider the terrible idea in-depht but also still have the composure left to write it down.

As such, it must be separated from intellectualization (which is rather associated with type 7) where seeing things in theoretical terms is rather supposed to take the edge off and make it less ‘real’, ‘heavy’ or ‘fixed’.

Whereas with isolation, the awful thing remains just as awful at it is, but in viewing it ‘from a distance’ there’s less reason to react to it.

Intellectualization: ‘well, in a way, death is just returning to nature…’ (so it’s not so bad)

Isolation: ‘I guess we were never anything more than atoms anyway’ (so why be upset? It should have been expected.)

The 5 is probably going to dwell on the thought of their loved one’s atoms scattering everywhere just as it is, whereas the 7 is simplifying/summarizing into ‘returning to nature’ & abstracting from the details precisely to escape them and the discomfort they would evoke. (next they may activate reframing.exe & think about their loved one becoming part of flowers & grass)

Though in both cases, the focus is shifted away from the immediate raw pain that you’re not going to be able to interact with your loved one again, no matter what may or may not become of their atoms, and therefore serve to ‘buffer’ that somewhat.

If purely mental distancing doesn’t do the trick, one may also interrupt an activity if it’s starting to get you too excited, or physically leave a situation. Maybe you’re reading something that’s kind of bringing stuff up, and before you know it, you’ve opened a new browser tab, or you find yourself pacing around in the living room.

Hence the internal mental organization can bleed over into a literal, physical tendency to isolate oneself under stress, either due to not wanting to introduce extra factors when one has their hands full with the present problem, or wanting to leave and put a ‘gap’ between oneself and a difficult situation, like going outside to cool off & then process what happened in a less heated state.

Even when it’s purely internal there might be a notable ‘shift’ like using more formal language or suddenly finding oneself struck by the absurdity, arbitrariness and strangeness of everything when seen from a more distanced perspective.

Another way to do this might be disengaging or disinvesting (‘Actually, you know what? I just don’t care about this anymore!’)

As this comes from an (usually not conscious) low-level discomfort with too much excitation or stimulus at once, it can even be set off by positive stuff. Hence the commonly described phenomenon in the literature of a passionate lover’s meeting followed by a few days of near total radio silence. Excitement can outright trigger the urge to pull away for a bit.

On a conscious experience level it’s just… hm. You just did a bunch of that, now you want to do something else. You don’t want more cake after you’ve just stuffed yourself with a ginormous slice, it’s enough for now right? Even if it’s the most delicious cake in the world, you gotta sit down & digest it first before having more or you’ll end up puking. It seems perfectly natural.

But to other people this can be rather confusing.

Often this gets tragically misunderstood as playing hard to get or avoiding them because you’re mad at them as a deliberate snubbing.

And often it might not be truly so wrong that there is some anger or reluctance at play that the individual didn’t mean to make your problem and is trying to ignore & not be affected by, but then when othets who haven’t agreed to the same game do respond to it or bring it up, that can feel exposing and chaotic, cause pop, there goes your tenous sense of control.

Or, if there’s not so much self-awareness, they might not own it or even occuse the other of being clingy or dramatic, with predictable counterproductive consequences.

Note however that this is not at all a conscious motivation (indeed if that individual’s w4 they might think of themselves as quite open to messier feelings & protest that you just don’t get them)

As famously mentioned in many books, this tendency also makes many a 5 annoying to work with in therapy. The classic scenario goes something like this: Patient arrives, discusses some stuff relating to their life, seems to come to some insights about it, but then they return next week and nothing’s changed – but of course not, since the entire conversation took place entirely upstairs in neocortex-land, and the limbic system barely noticed that one has gone to therapy at all – which, alas, is often where the relevant knot tends to be in such situation.

Therapist is occasionally beset by sudden urge to seize & shake the patient or privately concludes that this one gives them the creeps, projecting lord knows what in place of the motivations they can’t seem to discern.

You obviously always hear of the extreme case of the person who will describe even the most awful traumas or violent fantasies in a flat and neutral way as if it concerned some stranger rather than themselves, but it doesn’t need to go that far.

You always hear these stories of people who for the longest time couldn’t bear to even talk about what happened to them without immediately crying & shaking & whatnot – but then when they get it out, it’s this huge galvanizing catharsis that changes their life forever and motivates them into all sorts of action.

Meanwhile if you have a 5 (or a person with a substantial 5 component), they could retell it a thousand times, analyze it to death, squeeze every last atom of meaning and implications out of it, even write a thick volume of edgy poems of it… and it doesn’t really do or change anything.

As if some part remains lodged right where it was thrust, untouched since the day it was put there, like a calcified rock between your socks and your shoe, or perhaps a pus-filled cyst.

And it’s a hard habit to kick, when keeping it there and engaging it only at a safe distance is what protected you in the past, not just in ‘keeping the cracks from speading’, because that’s only one half, but also from being unable to look the ugly truth in the eye because of how it might affect you or because of how it might be too difficult to bear. Doing this allows you to actually face & process that, say, your parent is an ass, and so you don’t get hurt from expecting them to be otherwise.

You have to have clarity of what’s going on (as in, there both a carrot of a self-image as objective & insightful and a hefty fear-based stick motivating in that direction), even if you must jettison everything else in order to have that.

Useful Question:

Here it can already be rather useful if you simply try to spot & sense when it’s getting to be ‘too much at once’ so that you can make a conscious choice in what happens next

Might be as simple as telling others present ‘sorry I really need a break right now’ so they don’t just assume whatever they will without your input.

You might also wish to consider if you could benefit from staying with it (mentally or physically) maybe just a wee bit longer than you think you can just to ‘build up your tolerance’ (and/or confidence) a bit.

compartmentalizing

In a sense, this builds on the previous one. If you’re going to be putting stuff in separate ‘boxes’ and having a bunch of them lying around, you might as well get a ‘filing system’ for them, keep the non-touching boxes in separate, non-touching places.

On the most basic level, what this means is separate an experience into manageable chunks or discrete units so that it’s less overwhelming - You know when you’re studying for an exam and it’s all just one big vast ball of confusion, but once you break it down into what the most important sub-topics are with a heading for each one, it’s much more clear what you have to do or keep track of? That’s basically what it is, splitting the forest into the individual trees to get a handle on it.

Of course, usually what’s meant when someone is accused of having something ‘compartementalized away’ in some kind of discourse, what’s meant is usually that they’ve failed to consider how one part of their lives might affect or have implications for another, usually in a way that is awfully convenient for the person. A kind of half-intentional distracting from the forest by focussing on the trees – Some examples might be a person who understands modern science & medicine & relies on it in their job but believes in conspiracy or jurisdiction in their private life, someone working for a weapons company and never bothering to consider, or someone who is ostensibly quite attached to both the wife and the mistress but it never seems to strike them that the ladies would be pretty upset if they learned of each other – and when called out, the answer would probably be something along the lines of “those things have nothing to do with each other!”

It’s not that unusual a flavor of human absurdity (perhaps owing to the relative abundance of 6w5s) but core 5 individuals take it to a whole different level.

This is another point where you see the ‘inner’ organization spilling out into how the external life & actions are organized – activities must be clearly defined and circumscribed, specific questions are answered more readily than open-ended ones, different pseudonyms might be used in different contexts, different pursuits might be done in different places with different people that are usually not introduced to each other or told about the person’s other pursuits.

Some authors have even related it to the tendency found in many individuals to keep notebooks or collections of little keepsakes, and then go through them & the memories & feelings connected to each item or entry of text.

This can also work in tandem with/ as a means of isolation, as with ‘part of me feels this & that’ or wants to do ‘XYZ’ but there’s also another part that doesn’t or understands that acting on it right now wouldn’t make sense, or be counterproductive to other aims.

Note that this is not about being consistently torn between clearly defined ‘sides’ (more of a 6 or 3 thing depending on the specifics) but rather ‘boxing’ & ‘labeling’ something in real time as it comes up to make it more manageable & this being experienced as a welcome sense of control, not uncomfortable dissonance.

Something you see especially in so-instinct havers is compartmentalization via clearly defined roles, like playing the required part for a job or as expected by a difficult family member, so that only that one limited part of them is really involved while most of them is held back, in a sense giving them what they want so they’ll leave you in peace. Sometimes this can be frustrating to them as so doms do, generally speaking, desire to experience as subjective sense of connection & this automatic tendency can get in the way of that. Sometimes they may lowkey wish that the other person would ‘go off script’ and actually engage them.

For non so havers it’s not so much tied to ‘roles’ but you probably recall some situations where it became clear to you that a person wouldn’t be too receptive to some ideas, experiences or interests of yours or probably just wouldn’t understand it without too much of a complicated explanation.

But there’s no way to throw the whole man away (after all, no one will 100% agree about everything or completely understand another when even explaining oneself is quite difficult & the problem of perceptin is a thing)- instead, you simply decide that you just wouldn’t talk about this thing with that particular person, and that way you can still sort of ‘stay’ in their orbit.

So it’s kind of a way to stave off dissapointment or feeling rejected, by deciding you couldn’t expect them to be receptive in the first place.

But it also defends against being truly influenced, as ‘not discussing it with person A’ doesn’t preclude expressing the thing in a different setting or with different people.

Maybe, if you got some sx, you may have fantasized that your ideal lover would be someone whom you could show all the things without their being repulsed while also knowing that such a thing is probably not quite realistic, or be drawn to what it might be that others feel they can’t tell anybody else, & appeal to them by being ‘the one they can do their filthy secret fantasies with’ or the one who can satisfy their ‘undisclosed desires’.

Because of this the person may sometimes be perceived by others as having different ‘modes’ or acting differently in different settings, but that would probably come as a great surprise to the person themselves.

Unlike 3s or 9s who might experience themselves as actually becoming different in different settings, as far as the 5 is concerned they’re always the same self at all times and places, it’s just that different bits of that unchanging self may be held back where they’re unlikely to be welcome, which certainly can sometimes lead to a sense that no one really knows them or would fully accept them. (perhaps partially self-inflicted, if they’re too quick to assume what others don’t want to hear about)

Very often though, there’s no conscious choice involved at all – it just doesn’t even occur to them to bring up stuff from one area of their lives in another because of how they mentally separate it, indeed they might assume the other person wouldn’t want to hear them, until suddenly their mom is like ‘wait, you never told me about that one boyfriend’ or a partner makes a remark about how they always discuss the same things & don’t say much about their life beyond that – & when you ask why they might say something like ‘It just didn’t come up’, ‘you never asked’, or ‘It didn’t concern you’. Or inquiries like ‘where did you go?’ being answered with ‘to town’or ‘outside’ etc.

Until I saw this described this way in various books, it didn’t even occur to me that others might find this odd or interpret it as intentional secretiveness, suspicious behavior or pushing them away as deliberate disrespect.

I probably would have gotten quite defensive, too, like why can’t this person mind their own business? Are they a control freak that they must know where I am at all times? What are they gonna want next, a pound of my flesh perhaps?

But of course I probably wouldn’t have expressed this to them directly but rather decided that they can only be engaged with on a superficial level and then quietly plotted my exit.

Underneath that there might be a lowkey (or sometimes quite explicit) panic that things are moving what’s clearly circumscribed or manageable or a sense of feeling pressured, cause if your friend or partner thinks they should have been informed about XYZ, how do you anticipate what else they might wish to be informed about? Is there gonna be a big, unpredictable blow up every time you guess wrong?

And of course, the more moving parts and variables that you throw together,

You may just plain not want to deal with different ppl’s reactions to each other or to different things you are doing. To an extent, there can definitely be an aspect of not wanting to be accountable to others & wanting their prying eyes out of your decisions. (‘what they don’t know doesn’t make them hot’, as a common german proverb goes) Which is absolutely self-serving when you really think about it (unflattering as it may be to admit), but there’s also a real fear and tender rawness when it comes to the prospect of being exposed to people’s meddling.

You could say that the 5 structure in general has a tendency of yeeting the whole via overfocus on the parts, or overzealous desire to keep all the parts in view, in that sense it could be seen as a mirror image of 9 which also tries to ‘keep it all’ but in the reverse way of losing all differentiation & fine distinction to keep the holistic picture. The other 7 types all broadly yeet some types of stuff but not others.

Though I’d say 9 is probably overall closer to ‘keeping it all’ (at the cost of lacking tiebreaker features) due to the 5’s tendency of the level of focus being either zero or eleven with nothing in between.

Useful Question:

While you may trust your judgement in a technical matter, if it’s an interpersonal conflict situation and you’re tempted to tell someone that ‘those things have nothing to do with each other’, maybe be a bit more sceptical about that and consider if it might be connected, or at least, why the person you’re talking to could have gotten that impression.

Same with ‘its my decision cause doesn’t affect them’ – maybe it really doesn’t, but be wary of a tendency to conclude that it doesn’t because it would be convenient, & keep in mind that they might still have some kinda feelings about it.

And ovsly, while this only applies to ppl you feel relatively safe with and would actually desire a subjective sense of closeness with, make sure you don’t shoot yourself & the relationship in the foot by preemtively concluding that they don’t want to hear or that you couldn’t expect them to get it.

ego-splitting

This refers to the simultaneous holding of contradictory viewpoints without the perception of dissonance or contradiction, or rather having the perception of contradiction inactivated so those different viewpoints can persist without cancelling out.

Evidently this would be facilitated & made possible by the previously mentioned mechanisms that would keep the perceptions separate (compartmentalization) and prevented from affecting each other (isolation).

Some examples may be holding both a positive and negative opinion towards a person at the same time, having feelings of both superiority and inferiority, being simultaneously invested and indiffferent about the outcome of something, having both a longing for others and a desire to be left alone, or lusting for and yet fearing at the same time.

The point, and perhaps the inherent distortion here being that this isn’t experienced as inner conflict or contradiction, but as an oxymoron or superposition (though depending on what’s brought up by a given situation, one of the perceptions may be much more present in mind at a given moment, depending on which ‘box’ pertains to the current experience. In less self-aware individuals, the coexistence of both views might not be noticed.)

(This is a pretty good depiction of what the experience is like – he’s definitely performing character/ telling a story in that song, but probably also pulling on his imagination based on how he figures he’d react in the situations depicted. There’s also Rilke’s famous ‘every angel is terrible’ poem, pervaded as it is by simultaneous longing, hopelessness & fear. Whatever the symbol of the ‘angel’ represents here, he wishes it would come for him, but also doesn’t think it will, but also is terrified that he couldn’t withstand it if it did come.)

You might think that more consistency is always better, but if you perceive uncomfortable dissonance and, as a result, are tempted to shift more towards one direction or the other, than can easily entail a distortion or bias of its own, which, in this case, is felt as more dangerous than getting rid of the sense of contradiction instead. For example if you have a parent who is sometimes good to you but sometimes unreliable. Say you’re still very young and telling the parent to go screw themselves isn’t possible. Or you actually do enjoy their good bits. One thing you could do to have a sense of safety & comfort then is to tuned out what’s negative about them, see them as all good. That is very commonly done. But if you do that, you lose sight of the ‘complete picture’. You have to delete from awareness that they have dissapointed you and might do so again, so you’re exposing yourself to the next dissapointment.

If you kept both views but were aware of the contradiction, you know the caretaker could both satisfy you or dissapoint you, so there’s going to be some anxiety about what side of them you’re going to get next. They could give you what you please but also dissapoint you. The stakes would be high, which could be distressing.

Then there’s the third option, which avoids both the idealistic distortion and the distress (at it’s own peculiar cost.) - which is that whatever happens, you roll with it, without thinking of the other possibility then. If there’s a chance to get what you wanted you’ll take it, and if it there isn’t, well, you didn’t expect much anyways.

So this would produce more ambivalent sort of behavior. Probably nearer to pessimism since you know at all points that there is a possibility of receiving a nothingburger without even temporary moments of complete hopefulness.

The purpose/function of all this is, at first, probably to sustain a defensive view of low expectations at all despite the fact that as a living creature you are obviously going to feel cravings & desires sometimes. So those just gotta go in a different box where they won’t interfere with sober considerations.

Another is, again, having things managable, controllable and having clarity over it, so that rather than just being swept by one response after the other & all of them chaotically reacting together like a bunch of cleaning chemicals until one dominant impression remains, each one just goes in its own granular pocket & then later you might reflect on it & assemble it into some kind of conclusion that features in all the parts.

Hence why an individual may require some processing time before a decision or be unwilling to comment on a situation that’s still actively going on, when they haven’t had a time to sort through their feelings & impressions.

It might not be so great for producing quick decisions, but I’d say this style of processing is great for an artists (as you’d be aware of all the messed up little splinter nuances) and for avoiding certain flavors of self-deception (such as you tell yourself you totally wanted it, then it goes awry & then you discover the unaknowledged bits of you that thought it was a bad idea & blame others for cajoling you into it… if you’re aware of the bits of you that were ambivalent in the first place, you cant act like you didn’t know or couldn’t have expected it.)

Supposedly, a greater capacity for holding dissonant viewpoints in mind is often associated with greater skill at future prediction because you’re not tempted to explain everything with just one self-consistent model or principle that is always gonnabe limited as the incompleteness theorem suggests. I once saw a really thought-provoking art installation that basically argued we should all cultivate a greater capacity for it – such as simultaneously considering the need to preserve stability, but also adapt to new challenges.

(it involved some cool 3D printings and a video tape in which the the humble rotifer is discussed as a metaphor for the challenges of future spacefaring civilizations. I’ve never met the artist but I bet my glasses his exact type is INTJ 5w6. You could just smell the Ni. So cool. I should probably get out more & look at more art.)

It probably helps to make considered decisions that feature in all the factors rather than agreeing with whoever talked last or made the biggest impression.

That said, I wrote ‘certain flavors’ or self-deception up there cause there’s other flavors of it that you might tap right into. In the worst case, you can say you kinda want something but also profess that you don’t care, and never quite letting yourself want it completely without caveats may keep you acting like you don’t care & then of course it all goes to shit, and you may not even be fully protected from dissapointment cause theres that part of you that did want it.

Or you may be superficially getting along with someone but there’s always that side of you that’s gonna have its reservations and that’s just gonna be there, unacknowledged, between you, as something that can’t be said, and because of that, can’t be resolved, either.

You may not want to bother the other person with your doubts, or you may feel like you can’t possibly say it. How would you tell someone that, for example, you really really hate it when they talk at you sometimes, every time they phone you you wanna throw the damn phone across the room and sometimes, when they’re ostensibly happily snuggled against you, you just want them gone so bad? You need not think too hard to see how that would go, or how they would feel about that. They must not ever know, you cannot ever say it or risk having it bleed through.

But then the reasonable part of you makes you actually pick up the darn phone & then you hear their voice, and you’re like, “Aw, it’s great to hear from you! I’m glad you thought of me!” - and that is also true, it’s not pretense.

And you’re very aware that if someone had seen the whole scene from a hole the wall or could hear what you were thinking, they would assume you’re utterly stark raving bananas.

It’s probably the only way or be remotely functional or be able to retain any kind of even partially positive attitude towards anything outside yourself when you’re hypersensitive to the point that most things are some degree of intrinsically unpleasant. You’ve gotta tune it out, somewhat, and then you can more or less exist just fine.

Though of course once you got in that habit & started out with that basic reality, it’s tempting to swallow & never bring up & see as unspeakable perfectly legitimate & solvable grievances the resulution of which would probably make your life easier & bring you closer together.

Useful Question:

Consider that, in some situations -especially where motivation to act is required – you may have less torment and more subjective experience of congruence if you ‘picked one’. Eg. go all in on the thing (& then you can’t say you don’t care about the outcome) or give it up all the way and deal with the dissapointment.

And I know that’s scary – that’s take a deep breath right now level scary – and I can’t say I’m there yet, but it’s probably what is going to need to be done.

Also, if it’s a person you know you’re semi-safe with and actually desire a subjective sense of connection with, it might be worth bringing up the gripes you’re filing away. Not little stuff like ‘don’t talk at me’ of course (unless its a recurring issue), - otherwise it’s just gonna get to the point where you’re not gonna be able to forgive them anymore, and, uh, when you say it and they’re not repulsed or they’re like ‘fair nuff’ and then its no longer between you, that can be a great experience, if it does happen.

relativizing/contextualizing

This one was ‘discovered’ by Tom Condon, (though he doesn’t use the word) and ever since I read his writeup, I catch myself doing it all the bloody time, which is so very annoying. So I shan’t be stingy and share so ya’ll can be annoyed too.

What is meant by this is to respond to an unpleasant stimulus by thinking of things on a broader, more general scale, ‘zooming out’ as it were.

The unpleasant thing happens, and what you do is you tell yourself that it won’t matter next week, that ‘this, too, shall pass’, that you couldn’t really expect anything else from the people and situations involved, that it’s just a small blip in the grand scheme of things etc.

Or you think about whether the event even really matter, of it really means what it seems to mean or really is what it seems to be. Did that person really slight you, or are they just having a bad day?

In some ways its not so different from what’s sometimes taught to ppl as mindfulness or reactivity management techniques, but of course that’s ppl who don’t naturally do it deliberately chosing to do it when deemed appropiate, not defaulting to it on automatic to the point where it would take deliberate effort to stop.

This can ‘sneak in’ pretty easily when you’re already used to seeing things from a neutral/ bird’s eye perspective, and serves as defense in two ways:

The first is just a simple buffering function, which, as such is often perfectly helpful.

It can make your problem look like a storm in a teacup, which is a relief in and of itself, plus keeping the larger context in mind can keep you from doing something dumb, impulsive or actionistic which you will later regret.

But it doesn’t always work completely as in, knowing it doesn’t make sense to be upset or that it doesn’t really matter doesn’t always make the upset go away.

Yeah they ‘haven’t really figured out how to keep paralyzed patients from getting pneumonia’ so the whole thing wasn’t preventable, but your unfortunate elderly family member is still dead.

It may no matter in the grand scheme of things but for a lot of intents and purposes you are going to exist as a localized individual with a subjectivity that, while it doesn’t matter objectively, still matters in the sense that it affects you in your life.

But even if it works as intended it’s not always without a catch.

The Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows defines ‘khairosclerosis’ as ‘That feel when you become consciously aware that you’re happy & thereby cause that happiness to fizzle out’. Because after all, this too shall pass.

Few things really last, or really matter in the grand scheme of things, or are truly certain.

For example, if someone tells you they love you, you might wonder a lot about why they’re saying it – maybe it’s all just based on a mistaken impression, a misunderstanding, or a kind of idealization or hope that you cannot actually fulfill. There probably exists some point at which they would be repulsed… or, if that’s not the case, then would that not also prove their profession isn’t based on anything but blind idiocy, and therefore not really about you either?

And you could probably poke holes at this ad infinitum until you’ve completely talked yourself about of any kind of hapiness or positive expectation, unless you don’t make a conscious decision to say it’s enough now and that you’re just going to have to see what happens.

Note that this would not be angry suspicion/speculation that they’re duping you (or well, there might be a bit of that, if there’s a 6 wing) but rather come from a place of resigned, fatalistic bleakness – ‘I should’ve known, that’s what I get.’ You can’t be mad that someone is acting according to their nature any more than it makes sense to be mad at the weather for bringinging storms. It is what it is, and painful as it may be there’s nothing to be done.

If you woke up tomorrow transformed into a monstrous vermin, there would probably be a point where even your beloved little sister would be sick of you. It’s just how it is, everything has limits, especially people, especially you.

Plopp a 6 in ole Gregor’s place and they’d have been salty as an achovy: You worked so hard to support your family & now they turn on you when you’re no longer useful?

Because it wouldn’t be expected that you can’t really expect anything. So while picking apart a happy moment into nothing doesn’t seem much like a ‘defense’ at first, it very much is: It’s a defense from expecting or getting invested in things, and how that may leave you open to unbearable pain when it’s inevitably ripped away.

The second potential issue or defense function is that you can pick apart stuff until it becomes impossible to hold any kind of consistent, solid viewpoint at all. Yes, maybe this could be a counterargument to your position but does it really necessarily imply that? Can you say for sure? Doesn’t it depend on other stuff?

Doesn’t it just depend on one’s viewpoint?

And of course once you’ve completely dissassembled the counterargument into oblivion and ended up ‘no one really knows’ or ‘it’s all just relative’, you go with the option/position that you wanted to begin with, because since there’s no clear answer one way or another in rational terms, it would be up to personal preference, right?

This may be related to how 5 (like 7) doesn’t get stuck in analysis paralysis or indecision nearly as much as 6 because they can fall back onto their secondary center as a tiebreaker, but that may also create a temptation towards reading a situation this way when it’s convenient, leading the resulting thinking to be less rational or at least less grounded in realism.

It’s especially high need-for-closure, high linearity types like 1, 6 and xxTJ 8s that can get very annoyed with this or have incentive to call out what they (sometimes quite rightfully) see as just making everything vague & complex until the desired result can be justified (which is often predictably ‘doing nothing’), or just wish that darn 5 were capable of spitting out a straight yes/no answer that they can rely on, work with or base further plans on.

There’s no clear line of where ‘not being bogged down in arbitrary parochial nonsense’ ends and ‘self-serving moral relativism’ begins, but most of us, if we’re honest, can probably think of some situation where we simply didn’t wanna hear no counterarguments because being dead wrong in public is embarrassing, or because action was demanded from us that we didn’t feel capable of or plain didn’t want.

Maybe you’ve spotted yourself increasingly doing this when you were losing an argument and the more you ran out of solid counter arguments, the more you fell back on stuff like ‘well it doesn’t really matter in the big picture’ or ‘they’re saying that but that doesn’t mean that’s what really happened’ until you maybe ended up no further than ‘well no one really knows and it doesn’t matter anyway’ & then later when you were in an unguarded situation outside of an immediate confrontation, you gave it a think & realized the other person was, in fact, correct, and that pulling everything apart or calling into doubt what you can really discern from it was just kind of your kneejerk response to being caught off guard.

Useful Question:

If you find yourself ‘zooming out’ in a situation of distress or conflict, consider if there’s something going on on the subjectivity side of things that is challenging & if maybe you should be ‘zooming in’ or ‘stepping into’ the situation instead lest you miss something crucial.

See if you can ‘see’ both the small & the big picture at the same time, forming a connected whole.