Life as an INTP

Imagine you are in a world where your mind races, constantly jumping from one idea to another. As soon as you try to capture that idea and form it fully, another one jumps into your head, tempting you and distracting you from your original mission. Telling you your original idea is now old news and not worth pursuing. In fact, it’s not good enough to share with anyone, almost embarrassing.

Now do that every day for your 45 years on earth. What is the net result? A countless array of begun projects, ideas that once seemed life-changing, novel and fun, discarded and forgotten like that pot plant you thought would brighten your desk. That pot plant, now binned to the purgatory of unfinished dreams that is the wasteland of the INTP’s mind.

Even sitting down to write this I am cringing at my writing, constantly self-analysing and judging - is this good enough? Am I worthy of putting pen to paper, or - in this instance, fingers to keyboard? A life of constant comparison to others, masters in their fields, comes from things coming unusually easily to the INTP. Alas, the INTP is only too competent in many things and seemingly a master at none, unless it were being competent at most.

But therein lies the paradox of the INTP. You are stuck in a world where your competence at nearly any task or discussion is always good enough, sometimes even elite - but that competence leads to boredom. Having achieved a rudimentary understanding of the underlying rules and logic of the task and proving to one’s self that you can quite easily do whatever it is that you are learning or doing, all of a sudden, now having proven it to yourself, you lose interest completely. That my friends, is the constant struggle of the INTP.

We abhor sameness. We are nothing if we are not unique. Novelty is the flame we chase, forever fighting an uphill battle, a game where the goalposts not only move once we’ve been satisfied, but seem trivial once the goal has been kicked.

Don’t get me wrong, being an INTP isn’t a life of “woe is me”, we are typically able to eek out a life of relative comfort and success. We are able to enjoy life and have many moments of joy and satisfaction, but that comes at the price of a levity and introspect that means being fully satisfied is never totally achieved. There is always a feeling of “I’m not good enough to do that”, “That person is better at this than me so why bother”, “My project was fun to build but I’m not interested in maintaining it”. And this is happening daily, with every task or project or daily routine even.

When I started writing this post I had the goal of hitting 500 words, and that as an INTP is actually a huge achievement. I feel proud that I’ve made it to my goal on this WORD. But now I’ve hit it I know that I won’t be able to finish it to a level of satisfaction worthy of sharing. I wish I could get it all out and organise my thoughts precisely but I have already lost interest and this is good enough.

Maybe I’ll return to this subject another time…