Talking Enneagram 7 blues

A report on a type of guy

1. There is a truly sacred moment that can occur when you are reading a book on the Enneagram. It is the moment when you realize that you are a type of guy. (If you want to do the same, I recommend Rohr or Riso/Hudson.)

In my case, I am an absolutely classic example of type 7, AKA “the enthusiast.” 

The rest of this post is an anatomy of my type of guy. If that is not of interest to you, come back next week, when I will give you a general-purpose informational post. Partly, I write it in hoping that other types will write about themselves in this fashion: the Enneagram literature could use more personal accounts of the inner workings of each number.

The irony of this type is as follows. We love the world effervescently, constantly, and comprehensively. We can find virtually anything beautiful. This smog is just so evocative. Have you really noticed these shoes? God, the flow of time is really trippy, isn’t it? 

But the same force that propels us to devour the world stops us from truly enjoying it. In the search for moreness, we can miss the suchness. We fall in love with our own velocity—the incandescent arrow of our attention, which is always ready to double-click on the next thing. What we are not as happy with is the complete substance of existence. That would involve accepting simple boredom, dull sadness, and purposeless anxiety, and seeing them as necessary parts of life, not just fuel for poems.

I’ve been through a lot. Severe bullying, years of suicidal ideation, and other things that I can’t mention. Not totally interesting, sure. But what’s interesting is: if you asked me how I was, during those difficult times, I might have said, “great, thanks for asking!” When I was in despair, I could get deeply invested in the melody of an Elliott Smith song, or switch my cigarette brand, or alternate between fasting and overeating for stimulation. Later, when I was better, but still frantically on the run from a more mediocre misery, my escape route took me through disparate obsessions, glamorous parties and cocktail bars, and months of psychedelic whimsy. If you saw me at any one point, you might have been amazed at the seeming novelty of my experience. But a more clear-eyed appraisal would have revealed complete monotony. 

And what’s also interesting is that I am still, after a lot of genuine psychological growth, sometimes quite uncomfortable with simple discomfort. If I stop meditating for a few days, it starts seeming bizarre that I should experience normal suffering. In the end, the truest test of my spiritual life is this: can I just sit there and be gloomy for like two fucking seconds, without freaking out about it? 

2. There is really not much to me. I don’t mean that as an insult or anything. It’s just what occurred to me when someone told me the other day, “I’m curious about what it’s like for you, inside.” I found it difficult to answer, because I found there wasn’t much information to retrieve. Fundamentally, I am not complicated.

I am not an inside person. I have little ongoing speculation about my purpose in life. These two blog posts basically contain my philosophy. More broadly, I’m confused by why philosophers fiddle with abstractions—isn’t the world right here? My dreams are not deep. When I record them, I find warped versions of my waking life, with no intelligent commentary added. My ethical dilemmas are all simple practical questions, like how not to be a dick over email. I do not contain worlds of imagination. None of my intense spiritual experiences have had a visionary quality—I’ve never spoken with angels, or entities from other planes. After potent meditations, I wander around flower markets, seeing Buddha nature in men selling freesias.

What I am is an outside person. I touch, skip, gather, rant, gossip, pace. When I go places, great volumes of language are produced, dinner is cooked, perfume is sprayed. When you ask me to do something, I say, “no problem,” because it generally isn’t. I will find you interesting and pay attention to you. That is who I am, rather than anything hidden. When I am healthy, this can be a spreading radiance. When I am unhealthy, it is cowardly avoidance, and my surroundings become a vending machine I kick until the appropriate feeling is produced.

3. And yet, in the scheme of the Enneagram, the 7 is considered a “head” type. This might sound odd given the image of an experience-driven life that I have just produced. But the heads of 7s are extremely active. They just aren’t thick with reference and detail, like the head of an intellectual. For a 7, the head is a high-speed engine for weaving anecdotes from thin material, avoiding challenging emotions, and navigating constant social interaction.

There is one 7 on Twitter who really annoys me. He speaks volubly about many subjects as if he’s an expert, but he hasn’t really done much to earn that status—he’s just a talker. This annoys me because I stumble into doing the same thing without even realizing it. During a recent conversation, I caught myself producing a short monologue linking Kegan stages, the decline of agrarian civilization, and toxic social media behavior. It was intelligible and maybe even intelligent. But the depth of knowledge behind it was quite limited—it was an arrangement of memes that snapped together seamlessly as my mouth summoned them. I can say five non-stupid things about a tremendous variety of subjects, but if you press me on most of them, I will change the subject.

There is a lot stored on my hard drive. But what gets stored is the textured, intense, sensory stuff, rather than what is generally considered important. I can recite poems that move me, hum hundreds of complex melodies, call to mind the smells of streets in Kathmandu and Topanga, and mention designer fragrances that evoke those smells. But I might be off by 300 years if you asked me when the Roman Empire fell.

4. The advantages of being a 7 are easy to see. Sure, we are dilettantes, not extraordinary at anything specific. Greatness isn’t our style, we can’t stick with the routine long enough. But you can get a lot done by being relentlessly energetic, chummy, and optimistic. Opportunities are generated by simple kinetic energy. The healthy 7s I know seem to make a lot of money, much of it by just walking around and being likable. It is a good racket, and not fraudulent—it is an actually valuable skill to be happy and outgoing 90% of the time.

All the bad stuff takes place in negative space. The problems we abandon, the people we flake out on, all the time expended in our constant ping-ponging. It’s more about waste than destruction. And when we suffer at a mundane level, it often remains invisible. We have a hard time admitting it to ourselves or anyone else. This is not to say that we are secretly suffering all the time, or anything. When I say “happy and outgoing 90% of the time,” I really do mean that. It’s just that we can be quite bad with the 10%.

I did not deserve my first serious girlfriend. She was wonderful, a fully-formed human at an age when I was still a bag of reactions. When I was with her, I was a mess—thrilled that she’d let me be close to her, terrified that I’d lose her, in love with my projections of her that were so vivid I didn’t see the real person. Too jittery to say real things, I constantly voiced bizarre and fabricated opinions that I vigorously defended once they left my mouth. The relationship dissolved because she went off to study abroad, and I didn’t have the money to do an exchange program to see her, and I was too insecure to tell her that. I don’t even remember what my excuse for breaking up with her was.

Years later, we met up. I apologized for what I imagined was a nightmarish experience for her, dealing with my transparently tortured teenage soul. She looked confused and a little sad that this was my impression. “I just thought you were really sweet and really in love with me,” she said, “and then I didn’t know what happened.” Somehow I find this more stinging than a more negative appraisal: it indicates that I was emotive, but never sincere.

Speaking of stinging commentary from the romantic partners of 7s, I will never forget these words from Geoff Dyer’s girlfriend, recorded in Out of Sheer Rage: “Being with you is like licking sugar through a glass. You’re never quite there.”

5. An Enneagram-loving friend recommended me Facets of Unity, a book which contains “Holy Ideas” that can help each  type transcend their limiting ego structures. For the 7, it is “Holy Work,” the idea that life is an unfolding work in progress, proceeding according to an underlying logic that doesn’t require our manipulation, or, for that matter, respond to it. We don’t have to always plan and anticipate—in time, all of our allotted delights and horrors will visit us in the correct sequence.

When I first read this chapter of the book, I was like, the fuck are you talking about. What? I thought my problem was something like gluttony or intensity, and that the solution was something like moderation or tranquility. Sure, I’m always planning for a better future with less pain, and this habit contains a thread of escapism—but that’s not the issue, right? One day, I will come up with a good plan, right? One day I’ll finally know where all of these slaloming thoughts and temporary obsessions are going.

And then I sat with it for awhile, and it hit me. No: I have never been moderate. And I’m just not going to be. As long as I’m true to myself, I will be a ball of restless energy. When I’m truly happy and productive, it’s not that I’m tranquil or careful. Just like my fake enthusiasms, my real love is intense, fast, and various. It’s not about style, it’s about orientation. As long as I’m trying to find my way out of the maze of suffering, I can’t do anything real. When I am trying to escape pain, I am living from a place of defense and denial. I am most functional when I relax into the idea that the maze of suffering is where I live, and that my version of power comes from being good lost.

Photo credit goes to Saul Leiter.