Determining Factors of Personalities

[Commodorn]

Does anyone else feel that having a personality is really just interpreting many other personalities that you've seen throughout your lifetime and subconsciously emulating them to the best of your ability? Like, going with that idea, what determines the personalities you relate to or like enough to choose? Nature and experience?

(edited out the semiannual existential crisis half-joke <:O) )

[Melooon]

I think personalities totally are something you gain from the world around you and the values of that world; but I also think to a certain extent you're born with a lot of the roots of your personality already in place. Iv seen a few of my cousins grow from the time they were born, up to being young adults, and it was always very clear what kind of a person they were right from the start.

I think the root person is innate, but the specifics are what we acquire later on! For example, if you're born with a love for speed and running freely; but you're born into a world of horses, you might grow to love horses, but if your born in a world of cars you might grow to love cars etc.

Big life events, or even slow small life events can change a person profoundly; but there's always a way to reach back to that first root personality - it always pops up again in the things we like or how we respond to a situation.

I hope your crisis resolves itself soon, they can be a real drag; I feel like I have an existential crises every second week 

[WingsOfImagination]

I believe it's both nature and experience. We are born with natural tendencies and are shaped throughout every aspect of our lives. Sometimes nature overcomes nurture, sometimes it does not.

I think that the factors which determine the human personality are incredibly complex, and are not limited just to us imitating others' personalities, or our major life events, but vary from small things like the media we happen to consume, the conditions we live in, to even the illnesses we contacted before and the substances we've been exposed to - whether it's the food, the air we breathe, etc.

It's a long chain of cause and effect with so many different variables that it is practically impossible to accurately predict, even more so than the weather!

And just like good health, I think that our personalities are not a given. Be thankful for being who you are today because it could always be much worse. Even the YOU of tomorrow is not guaranteed. Even seemingly basics traits like being able to feel empathy towards others, or having mental mechanisms in place that makes you feel remorse and stops you from engaging in overwhelming aggression are not to be taken as granted; not all are so lucky.

I believe that the mind is a physical entity and therefore we should do our best to protect it from harm just like we do with our bodies. History taught us that ideas themselves can be terrifyingly contagious just like a persistent virus. Puncturing the right spot in your brain can deliver a fatal personality alteration. We are all one step away from complete change, even from evil, no matter how good and immune we think we are.

One could argue that choice itself is an illusion, but maybe it doesn't even matter. I'm still going to say what I think I'm choosing to say, even if it has been predetermined!

Take care of your well being, keep yourself in a positive environment, maintain your clarity of mind and try to be down to earth. Accept reality. Try and stir your ever changing personality in the direction that you want it to be. Existence is a mysterious and overwhelming thing, and life isn't always fair, it can be in fact very scary and painful, but I think that has long as we strive to do our best, there is nothing for us to regret and lose ourselves over.

Even if it is not eternal, let us celebrate our inner world and the wonder of our personality! Like small shining stars in the night's sky...

[LunarLepidoptera]

While I've experienced similar feelings of I'd call depersonalization, I wouldn't say one's entire personality is solely a result of learned behavior and/or nature. I suppose it's partially a question that touches on whether or not we have free will, whether our sense of self and our choices are a culmination of determined events, or if we have a say in them. How much of our conscious decisions are emergent from unconscious thoughts?

I do believe in free will, but I also think we are obviously not free to do/become anything, otherwise we'd be something like a god with omnipotence. We are bent into certain forms and personalities by the outside world, natural laws, and the personalities of others. We can't quite reach any possible state of being, but we have free range over an incomprehensibly large set of possibilities. There's this quote by Kurt Vonnegut, an old fiction writer "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be," which I think is the perfect way to sum it up.

We can perceive ourselves through different lenses that we craft, which create artifacts of what we call personalities, but we'll never know who we truly are. True knowledge is the realm of gods, we must perceive through lenses of our own making.

[Memory]

Our personality is definitely a product of our environment. We take up behavior, values, ideas and identities from the things and people we see and the experiences we make. There is nothing inherent about us.

But that's o. k.! That's how all things work.

[Commodorn]

I think what I said is being interpreted as less neutral than I intended <:O) I just wanted to say that I'm o.k.-- I was just curious about other people's ideas on the development of personalities. Thank you for the replies, though. They're still very interesting and thoughtful.