I think I just lost my job as the parent who makes the plans
My son’s personality type is ISFJ. I’m an ENTJ. We’ve always worked well together: I could see where to climb, and he could see how to do it. I offended people, and he smoothed things over. At first his people-pleasing, detail-oriented nature made me think I was failing as a parent. Then I worried that we were such a good team that we’d become codependent.
Now that he’s in college, he doesn’t trust my plans. He relies on advice from friends at school who are obsessed with positioning themselves well for an AI-infused workforce.
I try to get him to listen to my ideas by telling him that I navigated a fast-changing job market in the 90s. He calls me an “Internet Bubbler”.
“What?”
“Mom, you were there when the bubble popped.”
I am not sure he even knows what he‘s talking about, but I do question my own ability to predict what will happen with AI.
My son is in computational linguistics. He calls me late at night with dire predictions:
“Duolingo did layoffs. Computational linguistics is dead.”
I actually go through my LinkedIn connections to see if I know anyone in computational linguistics who can give me a reality check. What I find out from my LinkedIn is that my son is right: all my friends are Bubblers.
While my son interviews for internships for next summer, I write posts about personality type. For a while I swore off any more posts about personality type, because AI can do it. But in trying to figure out how to deal with an ENTJ/ISFJ relationship, I realized I know more about type than AI does.
My son would say that this is only temporary. But whatever. I went ahead and made eight different Substacks for personality types.
I’m noticing that when I get very specific about a type that is not mine, I end up seeing myself in it. This makes sense, because everyone has some traits of the other types. So it’s like seeing myself from a different angle — finding something new that I didn’t know I had.
My nonstop writing about personality type also allows me to understand my son’s perspective. He cares about what’s true now, about what he can observe. And things are moving fast. When I talk about what might be true later, he thinks I sound like someone who can’t keep up with the current pace of change.
I tell him a Bubbler is someone who moved very fast in the 90s.
He says it’s someone who couldn’t see the pop.
I’m scared to not be making plans for my son. I don’t know where I’ll fit into his life if I’m not making plans. I know we can be useful to someone by loving them. I need to find an aspect of my personality type that’s good at doing that.
Check out my personality type posts on Substack:
You’re son sounds like an ISTJ.
Is computational linguistics dead because it’s an attempt to understand language, and the brute force processing of LLMs (what people call AI these days) just ignores understanding in favor of imitation? Why bother to construct schemata painstakingly when you can plop down a mega-factory of processors and instantly grind out good-enough simulacra of fitness?
I wonder if the subset of important things that LLMs are good at (corralling data other people already created, mimicking speech patterns, outlining a semblance of reasoning, etc.) will eventually clarify which important things only actual people are good at (listening to other people, using reason, improvising…) The sub-generation that comes after the one now in college might benefit from those insights.
It’s good that your son is no longer following your advice; it’s age-appropriate. My son rarely follows my advice either. You just have to sit back and let them make their own mistakes, because they can’t learn from yours. Which son is this, the one at Duke or the one at NU?
I still find non-stop writing about personality types funny; when I first heard of Meyers-Briggs types it seemed to me like astrology for geeks (INTJ: You’ll be offended by the inefficiency of a store display today, and think of a better way to construct a folding convertible top. ENTJ: etc..) I wonder if all typologies are comforting for the same fundamental reasons.
We Bubblers can see that AI is a bubble from a hundred miles off. Here’s a useful take on how this time, even this bubble knows it’s a bubble.
https://craigmccaskill.com/ai-bubble-history
It’s genuinely hard to figure out the child-adult relationship when the child becomes an adult and moves out. My two sons have been out since 2019 and 2021 and we’re all still struggling with it. We all want it, we just don’t know what to do.
Thanks, Jim. I don’t know which is worse news: that I have to live through another bubble or it’s going to take a long time to adjust to a relationship with adult kids.
That’s me, spreading sunshine everywhere I go.
LOL
Semi related comment: I looked at your posts about ENFJs and you mentioned the idea of making people feel special. I would say ENFJs don’t try “to make people feel special”. We simply see all people as special so it’s actually probably just that with ENFJs, people feel seen. There is no “virtue signaling” in trying to make people feel a certain way, IMO.
One more comment. I read this blog just to see how other people think. You may be shocked that the whole point of this post and analysis has no relevance to many people including myself. We operate in a totally different mode in life. It is interesting for me to learn about how you see life and others around you.
Having lived in three other countries, I can also tell you that this is a culturally specific subject. This is not universal humanity type stuff.
I’m so curious how/why you chose the 8 types you did, and why you excluded the other 8? I know it would be a ridiculous amount of time to manage 16 substacks and you know better than anyone which 8 types might be more likely to read what you write…
I did all the N types. The S types aren’t nearly as interested in their personality type. That said, I might do IS types so that I can learn about my son.