Are You A This One Or A That One

In which I attempt to figure out why my brain is fully obsessed with personality categorization games

Click on this article. Do it. It’s short. Just give it a quick skim and then meet me back here.

If you, too, immediately started analyzing everyone you’ve ever met as a Round or a Pointy, then you are my kind of people. (Which is to say we’re probably both Pointies.) A writer named Rosa Lyster is the person responsible for blessing the Internet/ruining my life with this article, and I want to get her phone number so I can call her to talk about it every day.

I would argue that Bert and Ernie are both Pointies, which is part of why they’re always fighting

Look, there are so many of these things (click on them or don’t, I don’t care) —

• The Round/Pointy article took me to White Swan/Black Swan, which is kind of like Round/Pointy but more relationship-dependent. You may be neither. In order to be a White Swan, there has to exist someone who’s your personal Black Swan, and vice versa.

• On a similar note, last summer, some of my friends became obsessed with a theory that in every relationship there’s a Bert and an Ernie. You might be the Bert to your mom’s Ernie, but the Ernie to your best friend’s Bert.

• Closely related is writer Dahlia Lithwick’s theory that everyone is either an Order Muppet or a Chaos Muppet — but this is more like Round and Pointy in that your Muppet identity stands alone. I think the combination of these two together is particularly interesting. Are you a Pointy/Order or a Pointy/Chaos or a Round/Order or a Round/Chaos??

• And while we’re combining categories, the Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart is literally the only thing I know about Dungeons and Dragons, but it’s one of my all-time favorite categorization formats. I find it works best for a related group of things within a particular universe, like a TV show or, um, a band.

• Concepts like Love Languages and Ask Culture/Guess Culture, though they’re not meant to be funny or a game, feel similar to me in that they’re fun to dig into with a group of friends and figure out which one you all are.

• Obviously Hogwarts houses often come up in these types of conversations, although anything Harry Potter-related feels annoyingly fraught now that J.K. Rowling has decided to use her one life on this earth to be shitty to trans people. Not super cool of you, Joanne!!!

This Gilmore Girls alignment chart by @floozyesq on Twitter is full of spicy hot takes!!! Jess as evil! CHRISTOPHER AS GOOD?? I suppose I do like the symmetry of all Rory’s boyfriends occupying the evil tier. Sound off in the comments.

But anyway… the point is, show me a fun party game that involves sorting people into broad yet specific categories with amusing names, and find me three days later, having barely eaten or slept, still blabbering animatedly about it to anyone who will listen, texting links to all of my friends saying “Look at this!!!! Which one are you!!! Which one am I!!!”

I have a truly bottomless appetite for this shit. I can’t get enough. I could write a master’s thesis on Rounds and Pointies, which is extremely Pointy behavior. My sister, who is basically the same person as me in many ways, does not understand this game or my obsession with it — classic Round, am I right?

I like Rounds and Pointies in particular because it’s simple yet oddly subtle. You can analyze it for hours, but at the end of the day you either get it or you don’t. I have been known to get into more complex systems like Myers-Briggs types and the Enneagram (shoutout to all my Nashville friends — not sure why y’all are so obsessed with the Enneagram but best of luck with that), but I don’t want to, like, read an entire book to understand whether I’m a type nine or a type four. I want to read one short article and immediately begin sorting every person, pet, celebrity, and fictional character I can think of based on little more than visceral gut instinct.

---

Okay, so why am I so into this? I think part of it is just that I, personally, have a really obsessive brain. I fixate on things I like until everyone around me is bored of hearing about them (which is why it’s so great that I gave myself this newsletter in which I can rant freely).

Another part of it, though, is that many people love a safe, light, fun framework in which we can delve into our own personalities and the personalities of others and how they intersect. The stakes feel low, but you are actually getting into some pretty deep shit. Like, you probably wouldn’t sit around at a party (remember parties?) talking with casual acquaintances about the degree to which you care what other people think about you. It’s much easier to say oh my god I’m suuuuuuch a Pointy, even though it ultimately gets at the same idea.

This is also true of astrology, although astrology falls slightly outside the scope of my focus here because the categories are inflexible and not based on your personality traits — you can’t choose your type. I do find astrology interesting for similar reasons, though: it’s a fun and accessible entry point for deceptively deep analysis.

There’s maybe something a bit narcissistic in it, too. Many of us desperately want to be PERCEIVED. If that doesn’t resonate with you and you don’t care that much about being “perceived,” you’re probably a Round. That’s why so many musicians are Pointies. Both types can be total narcissists —they’re completely value-neutral categories, which I like — but I think Pointies have a particular yearning for external validation. I COULD GO ON.

It’s not just about wanting to be seen, though; it’s also that we want to perceive other people, and we want to share in the experience of perceiving each other. It’s about feeling safe in the knowledge that you’ve identified some neatly packaged truth about yourself, and seen that truth reflected in another person. It’s about satisfying an innate curiosity about the people and the world around you. It’s about ~connecting~.

Another interesting effect of this kind of thing is that it reminds us all that our own perspective is inherently limited and skewed towards itself. The first time I read “Are You A Round Or A Pointy,” my first reaction was Well who the fuck is a Round? No one’s a Round. And then I sent it to some people, and a bunch of them were like, oh I’m a Round. Mind-boggling!

It’s that stupid classic (harmful) human tendency to assume our beliefs and experiences are universal. You read a description of your Myers-Briggs type or your zodiac sign or whatever, and you think well obviously, everyone’s like that, and your best friend who you’ve known for 15 years says actually I’m not like that at all.

And, I guess, this satisfies another stupid classic human tendency, which is our ultimately doomed desire to make things fit into neat boxes. We are intoxicated by the fantasy that we (and the world) could be understood by a simple binary system, placed safely and snugly in a space designed for us. This fantasy becomes especially potent during times of uncertainty. I suppose one could question whether this is truly a human tendency, or more of a “Western”/capitalist tendency. I suspect it’s even more complicated than either of those options.

And actually, I’m not going to insult your intelligence or your sense of fun by doing a whole bit about how all of this is ultimately reductive and the complexity of human beings can’t be forced into stupid little boxes, blah blah blah. Yes, that’s factually true, but I came here to this issue of this newsletter to have a good time!! I am not here to take myself or anything else too seriously.

---

For the record, I am a Medium Pointy, rounding slightly with age. Like all people, I’m the Bert/White Swan of some relationships and the Ernie/Black Swan of others. I like to think that in the context of my band I’m True Neutral, but in the context of my family I am Chaotic Neutral at best. My Love Languages are basically all of them, and I’m firmly in favor of Ask Culture. I’m a Chaos Muppet, Virgo sun, Sagittarius moon, Virgo rising, ENFP, Ravenclaw, and I’ve gotten a different result literally every time I’ve taken an Enneagram test.

What are you?

---

Your Semi-Regular Collection of Recommendations

• After my latest Round/Pointy deep dive, I found myself wanting to read everything else Rosa Lyster has ever written, and I came across her article “We All Sometimes Feel Like This Bird,” which made me laugh so hard that a strange snort/choke sound came out of my mouth, and then made me feel a deep tenderness, and then made me laugh again.

• When I put the massively loaded term “Western” in this letter, I was reminded of “The West”, this fascinating video — really more of a short film — by YouTube queen Contrapoints, in which she details the development of the concept of “The West” and then more or less eviscerates it. Don’t watch it around kids, but do watch if you like razor-sharp analysis smothered in camp, extravagance, and dick jokes.

• This profile of musician Beverly Glenn-Copeland (thanks to lifelong pal Lina Tullgren for the recommendation)

• A reread of this article by my bandmate Mali Obomsawin, on why the climate movement — and this entire country tbh — should be led by Indigenous people

• This was actually a while ago, but I neglected to mention it in my last newsletter: Lankum, the Irish band I wrote about in that letter, managed to present the only really good livestreamed concert I’ve seen in the COVID era. Like a real concert, you had to be there to see it, but this review of the show is an excellent, thought-provoking read regardless. Lankum managed to create a show that was actually conceived and designed to be livestreamed, not a sad facsimile of an in-person show, and yet paradoxically it felt closer to a live show than anything else I’ve experienced since the pandemic. You actually saw the theater — the camera ambled through the doors, through the aisles, among the empty seats, through the bowels of the backstage hallways. It was eerie, and the band sounded incredible. Anyway, read the review, especially if you’re a musician trying to figure out how to share art During This Time™.

• This piece about Brad Pitt because sometimes you are just in the mood to read a light, sharp, zippy article about the art of celebrity

• The show Sex Education!!! Oh my god it’s one of the best shows I’ve ever seen!! Maybe I should write a whole newsletter about it. If you have watched it, let me know. I need to talk about Adam because he haunts my soul, and also about Gillian Anderson.

• This fascinating interview with Ita O’Brien, a professional intimacy coordinator who worked on the set of two other amazing shows, Normal People (based on the obviously excellent novel by the obviously excellent Sally Rooney) and I May Destroy You, the latest creation from mega genius Michaela Coel. Did anyone else sob like a tiny child at the end of Normal People???

• If you check out only one of these recommendations, let it be this podcast episode in which Brené Brown interviews writer, poet, and activist Sonya Renée Taylor about her book The Body is Not An Apology, radical self-love, body shame, systemic oppression, justice, and the belief in a better world. Hoooooooooooooooo boy. I listened to this on a night drive and literally YELLED ALOUD several times, alone in my car, driving up I-95. I think the world would be significantly better if every human listened to this conversation. It’s really deep, transformative stuff. Thanks to my sister Julianna for the recommendation.

And thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this issue of What Even Ever, consider leaving a comment and/or a tip. I would also love it if you forwarded this email to a friend who might like to subscribe. I am continuing to donate half of my tips to Maine-Wabanaki REACH.