Mid-Life Personality Development + Jungian Theory Of Personality Differences

I'm not going to write a very long piece because I'm don't have the time or the inclination right now. My daughter's school year began three weeks ago and we've all had the flu this weekend. I coughed my eyes out last night and the night before that I had a sore throat preventing me to sleep well. @tarazkp knows what I'm talking about all too well as his daughter fell ill, too.

Anyway, what I wanted to write about how it is quite common for people to begin to develop a more well-rounded personality at middle age. I'm not that into pop psychology such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator because such watered-down ideas tend to oversimplify and actually cause harm if used to pigeonhole people by corporate HR departments. That said, when I was younger I was clearly - and still am - predominantly of the NT temperament. In plain English it means that I'm have always been interested in the abstract and imaginary as opposed to concrete hands-on topics, the future potential of things or timeless principles as opposed to a nostalgic past, tradition or the here-and-now. Also, I've also been predominantly inclined to use logic and analysis to pick things apart and judge them.

Central to the Jungian theory of personality differences are four so-called cognitive functions that are broad categories of skills and preferences. Jung named them intuition, sensing, feeling and thinking. Each of them can take an extroverted or an introverted attitude. In my case, it is fairly obvious that the dominant one has been either intuition its extroverted attitude or thinking in its introverted attitude. I'm inclined to think quickly on my feet and to come up with ideas and solutions. Whether they are any good is a different matter. I'd say I'm socially extroverted but not very far from the average because I don't mind alone time either.

At middle-age it is typical for people to want to widen their repertoire and to want change. In my case, what happened was that @gamer00 introduced me to Steem in early 2017. I finally got round to creating this account in February 2017. I started posting in earnest in June 2017. A lot of posts here were centered around photography. I started taking more photos than before at around that time. Combining blogging and photography was new to me. At first, I'd just document things with my camera phone with text being the main content. I didn't even consider photography a hobby of mine until about March this year. I still don't have a real camera but you can study many aspects of photography with even a phone camera.

Photography is a visual art. In Finland, school grades range from four to ten. Four is failure, five and six and the lowest passing grades, seven and eight are considered satisfactory (and average) while nine and ten are considered excellent. I always had an eight in Arts from primary to upper secondary in school. My photography hobby was kicked off by a desire to make money on Steem but the more I did it the more satisfying I found it. I think my starting a photography hobby ties in with mid-life personality development. I'm exploring my sensing function. In my case, partly limited by gear but also out of personal preference, it is about an increasing use of sensing in the introverted attitude. Photographic composition is all about being cognizant of patterns and laws that the human visual system are subject to and an intrinsic sense of beauty and harmony based on patterns common in nature that humans have. It should not have come as a huge surprise that I'd take up a new hobby like this at this stage. I've always had this in me, although buried under other preferences. For example, my wife has often used me as an arbiter of taste when it comes to clothing and interior decoration. And that hasn't even been about asking trick questions typical of women in the vein of "Do I look fat in this?". :D