Critique of personality

To disparage wealthy elites in our minds we construct a young person with a professional services career who travels frequently and is vain to the same degree as Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. This young professional obsesses over clothes, status, wealth, and furniture. They come off as a foody, or at least, they take pride in understanding the city they live in and the best food spots available.

The statement we would use is “that person has no personality.” We would also use this same phrase to classify different types of people. During a dinner party, we would meet a new stranger who apparently has no interest in the content of their work and has no goals in life. They seem to light up around the topic of sports. You two eventually connect over a mutual interest in volleyball.

Another example of a person with “no personality” is the Washington DC professional. They are passionate about their work, they’re disinterested in money, and they have a high aptitude for understanding society. They have concrete goals in life. This person is a social butterfly and they can talk about anything to some degree but they are much more interested in talking about current affairs.

What these examples have in common is that different people could conclude that these people have no personality. Career, vanity, hobbies, none of these by themselves seem to have worthy ultimate importance for a person to singularly spend their life on. Some people may view people who make any one of these things their ultimate purpose is not only wasting their time but they make themselves less of a person. “They have no personality.”

The rebuttal that many would make is that they would attempt to create a caveat for their specific hobby or lifestyle. One person is an outdoorsy athletic backpacker while another homeschools their kids and is a full-time homebody. Both people could remark about the others’ lifestyle that their way of living is nonsensical and unfulfilling. This critique holds up for basically every lifestyle choice or hobby.

Under this logic, does this mean that no one “has a personality”? Surely, we are all losers in the eyes of somebody. If we want to convince ourselves that our lifestyle obsessions over hobbies or careers are what will make us whole, why should anybody take that away from us? To do otherwise, our lives would be boring and possibly depressing.

A singular obsession is an unbalanced way to live regardless of how much value it may bring to individuals or society. Is the key to personality a diversification of interests? How can this be so? The basket of activities that most people would agree upon would be 1. Spending meaningful time with family. 2 Spending meaningful time with friends and building each other up. 3. A goal in life. 4. Two to three hobbies.

This seems like a pretty solid list. If you have these four things, people would say that you “have a life.” With any of these being missing, a person’s life would seem fairly unbalanced. But perhaps your key to personality looks different than mine. Conscious or subconsciously, we all have a basket of worthy criteria for “having a life” that we impose on ourselves and sometimes impose on others.

Is it even worth pondering the significance of personality? People have their interests and I have mine. We can leave it at that. If that’s the case, let’s use this exercise, not as a tool for judging the lifestyle of others, but in examining our own lives. Surely you have your own basket of interests that another person will deem as shallow. What if they’re correct? Have you successfully fulfilled the items in your basket? If not, why?

After going through a mental exercise of examining the things you value, you may find that your personality is chained to vanity, duty to family, duty to society, etc. To avoid this examination of identity is to live a life that may be full of “personality” but devoid of real purpose.