(original thread) with each passing year I get more and more convinced that people are practically born with most of their personalities pre-installed. we can edit, modify, reconstitute, etc to varying degrees, but certain core attributes seem to run all the way through
I know this sentiment can be weaponized into some nasty, cruel things, like… “if you didn’t like math as a kid that means you’re going to be bad at math always and you should never try” or something like that. I wouldn’t say anything like that, that seems over-fitting
I mean more loosely… when you look back on your life, you will find that there are dots that you can connect.
I think to be more precise about it, there are likely many patterns of behavior that we try on and experiment with, and not all necessarily stick
I think about this a lot. I love to observe how young people behave, socialize, interact – this was at a birthday party: “Kids are SO different than each other, with staggeringly different personalities. Some kids run around greeting adults. Others congregate in the bouncy castle. Some stick to their parents, others go wandering off to explore”
I will probably have to write novels eventually in order to fully articulate + express all of my thoughts and feelings about all of these topics. I think I’d frame it like this: “people can and will change. more than you can know, more than you can imagine, or even understand. and also, all the way at the end of a person’s life, you’ll find that there are things about them that were there from the very start”
and the impt thing is you shouldn’t be deterministic about this sort of thing. like, if you have a kid that’s obviously shy, that doesn’t mean you shd say, “oh, you’re a shy kid, you’ll always be shy, there’s no point trying to get you to socialize”. don’t diminish people. but also, if you have a shy kid, it’s cruel to force them to socialize if they clearly don’t want to! each person has a whole range of attributes that respond differently to different things to different degrees, is what i’m saying