Personality Types

September 23, 2025

There’s a young woman on this platform whose essays I continue to read frequently. She is very intelligent and has a lot to say about a wide range of topics.

Recently, she has been mentioning how she sees herself as the fiery type — someone who needs a day and a bit to get used to. However, I took to her intellect immediately. In fact I was actually impressed with her grasp of her topics.

Anyways, she has spiked my interest in that kind of personality coloring with the elements of Nature. So, I searched the internet for a deeper explanation…

Elemental Personality Types — Google AI Overview

Air, Fire, and Water personality archetypes, derived from astrology and classical temperament theories, describe general traits like Earth for practicality, Fire for passion, Air for intellect, and Water for emotion. These broad categories are sometimes mapped to specific systems, such as relating the four elements to the four functions or temperaments within the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) system, though these are interpretations rather than a direct part of the MBTI theory.

Elemental Personality Traits

Earth:

Practical, grounded, stable, and realistic.

Air:

Intellectual, communicative, logical, and sociable.

Fire:

Passionate, assertive, energetic, and action-oriented.

Water:

Emotional, intuitive, empathetic, and adaptable.

Before I write further, I must insist that astrology is, putting it nicely, a bunch of hooey, and anyone who would allow it to influence their thinking or daily life is, well, to put it mildly, foolish.

So let’s exclude it from this discussion. Okay?

This other approach, seems to me, is not meant to be a person’s guide through their life, but I found it an interesting type of a go-cart track for the mind, and it was quite fun and interesting to race around, and at the finish, I learned a benign way to describe how a person “ticks” without being judgmental.

However, its weakness seems to me to be when I tried to single out which element represented me the best. Turns out for me, that I wander off the track — like in the children’s story of The Little Engine that Could.

Or… and I don’t mean to brag, but it quickly became apparent to me that I was a combo packet of earth, air, water, and with a smidgen of smouldering fire — in the fact that I am action-oriented.

The lesson I learned from this is that while it is important to take stock of yourself occasionally, you never need to lock yourself away into one confining box.

Neither should we attempt to put anyone else into a box.

Intermission … Anne Wilson — Mansions (Official Audio)

Still, I wasn’t done with my research, because I do not trust the single entity approach of discovery and learning.

I found this:

The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a self-report questionnaire that makes pseudoscientific claims[6] to categorize individuals into 16 distinct “personality types” based on psychology. The test assigns a binary letter value to each of four dichotomous categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. This produces a four-letter test result such as “INTJ” or “ESFP”, representing one of 16 possible types. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator

Next, I found a free self test, and I took it.

It was sufficiently accurate. and had a broader system of categorization, but it still wasn’t an all-encompassing procedure that actually “let my white bird fly.” I remain a mutt, a mixed breed, a mongrel… So, the test was actually inconclusive, and it was not earth-shattering nor life-changing.

2nd Intermission … White Bird- It’s A Beautiful Day -1968

I’m theorizing here, but these kinds of self-analyses are existential attempts to transcend the banality and shallowness of the world we live in, and I would infer that the young woman I mentioned at the outset is an illustration of that positive dynamic.

Nevertheless, I will conclude with these excerpts from the Bible. They are statements of the stark difference between the two major life’s existential and transcendent choices and the very different consequences of following either one or the other…

There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death. — Proverbs 14:12.

All who have come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep have not listened to them. I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. — John 10:7–10.

Finale …Katy Nichole — “Turn To Jesus” (Official Lyric Video)