It's a Mad, Mad World

The Challenges We Navigate Daily

One day this week, I sat down at my laptop intending to write a short email to a client, something that should have taken about 2 minutes in this case, before dashing off to run a few errands. Three times I sat down with intent to write the email but got up from my computer some minutes later, ready to dash out the door, only to realize that, oh, yeah, I hadn’t actually written that email. Frustrated, each time I sat back down.

What was I doing instead of writing that email? Going down rabbit holes reading articles that caught my attention before I could actually open my email application. What was so intriguing? Who knows? The topics could range from the latest ‘discovery’ on the cause of Alzheimer’s disease, how much money on average people in each age bracket should have saved for retirement and how we can save more or hot takes on the unhinged testimony of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on the Epstein files (Look up a few clips on YouTube. I promise you we’re not all that crazy in America.). Could be on anything really.

For those of you who find the study of personality and human behavior as intriguing as I do, you may be familiar with the Enneagram personality scale. According to author Ian Morgan Cron of “The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery” (a good read), the best and worst thing that ever happened to Type 5’s (“The Investigator”) of which I consider myself one and which many, certainly not all, HSPs and/or INFJs are, was the advent of the internet. Anything we’d want to learn or understand is literally at our fingertips. For us, I don’t think it’s an internet addiction so much as an information addiction. We’re curious types.

Note to self. Keep the web browser closed until necessary work is completed. It’s a daily challenge. Perhaps you can relate.

Here’s another daily challenge - noticing all the things that literally seem to make no sense - from store parking lots with lines not painted where they should be or designed poorly to processes at stores, restaurants or banks that seemingly make wait times longer to “who looked at this zig zag road redesign that was just completed near my house and thought it solved a problem?”

Most anytime I have a basic task to accomplish out in the world, I’m thinking ‘If they just did this and this or that (fill in the blank), this process could run so much more quickly and smoothly’, but alas, no one asks me and I’m often, though not always, biting my tongue not to say anything. Occasionally, I do ask “why are you doing it this way? Have you thought about trying it this other way?”

Close on the heels of thinking things often don’t make sense is the blind way I often see people just following along, doing things because other people are doing them, call it ‘herd behavior’. Ever want to be disgusted by the state of the human race, open up your social media account and read what people write in response to journalistic articles. Is it just me that thinks that everyone should read the long list of thinking biases and make a point not to engage in them?

I’ve often heard it said that INFJs love humanity but hate people. True that. Lol. I often find myself helping random people partly because I hear a problem and my mind automatically goes to work thinking how I could solve that for them. At times, it works. (I did recently help get someone new in town a job.) For me, it comes down to being able to make connections between something I know from another context and hearing a need someone has in this one. I’ve always said I need to figure out how to monetize that skill. Yet at the same time I find I’m often disgusted with humans and their behavior.

This next challenge gets at not only the fact we’re always noticing things that either don’t make sense or don’t feel right but also to often feeling responsible for things that may not be ours to carry and touches on our idealism of how things should be in the world. Reality rarely seems to match our idealism.

What does that look like? It’s noticing and being deeply incensed when not everyone abides by the social contract that to me seems fundamental to living in community with others. Things like we don’t drive at high speeds through residential streets, blow through crosswalks, purposely make noise with our vehicles, litter along the roadway or let our houses fall into blight, to name a few. I’m often disgusted that the people who should address things that are their responsibility often don’t.

A few months ago, at the other end of my street, there was a utility pole that had fallen over a pocket park across the street from several homes. After a few days and I noted nothing was done about it, I called around to different companies to find out whose poll it was that needed to come out to remediate it. Driving while on hold on the phone, I’m thinking, ‘why is this my responsibility again?’ Oh yeah, it’s because other people aren’t taking up theirs. I’ve also reported to my city government a few homes in my neighborhood that were becoming blighted or the yard was so overgrown it was going to swallow the house. Did no one else seem to notice or care?

According to an AI roundup, INFJs often feel things don’t make sense due to their intense introverted intuition (Ni), which perceives underlying patterns, complex connections and future outcomes that contradict surface-level reality. Key reasons things don’t make sense:

Contradiction between intuition and reality: INFJs often “know” an underlying truth, but external, tangible evidence hasn’t caught up yet;

Perceiving hidden motives: INFJs often sense hypocrisy or insecurity, making human behavior seem nonsensical when it doesn’t match.

Complexity overload: Due to processing lots of information, it makes it hard for us to explain our “big picture” findings.

The unspoken conflict: INFJs are sensitive to the anxiety and anger lurking beneath social interactions, feeling that people are acting falsely;

Systemic inconsistencies: INFJs often see how systems, rules or traditions are illogical or damaging, leading to frustration when others blindly follow them.

And I’ll second this one whole-heartedly - Ultimately because INFJs live in a future-oriented or deep-thinking reality, the immediate, mundane, and often illogical nature of daily life feels fundamentally out of place to them.

And so it be - the challenges we navigate. Perhaps understanding them leads to understanding ourselves and others better.

It’s a mad, mad world . . .

Happy Sunday.

Peace.