I hate the MBTI.
To start, I think “hate” is a strong word to describe how you feel about anything; and I absolutely despise the MBTI.
And no, it’s not because I didn’t get the four-letter archetype I wanted. If anything, it’s precisely because I got what I wanted.
I’ve always thought my hatred for the MBTI was because “you get the results you want,” which to some extent I still agree with. Inevitably, when picking your answers to these questionnaires, you already have some preconceived notion of who you are as an individual, and you will likely answer accordingly. If anything, you are encouraged to answer according to who you believe you are, rather than who you actually are. I might like to believe I’m someone neat, but my kitchen seems to tell a different story.
Questions like “I frequently check my work to ensure it meets the required standards” are ridiculous. The answer options are usually a one-to-five slider or dropdown, and they completely ignore the nuance of inconsistency that most, if not all, people carry. Even if one considers themself a meticulous worker, and can generally be considered one, they have handed in half-assed sloppy work before, or inevitably will. This applies to every single one of the questions being asked by these personality assessment questionnaires.
Look at it this way. How well do you know your friends? Your family? How well do you know yourself?
I will likely never, with full confidence, exclaim that I fully understand myself, or the “type of person” I am. If so, how could I blindly subscribe to some ad-ridden website to tell me that?
Disregarding the dubious, unscientific origins of the MBTI, the real issue is not that the test misreads people. The problem is that people misread the test.
It clumsily and arbitrarily encourages shoehorning people into categories of personality, and the worst part is that people take it seriously.
Don’t get me wrong, I see the fun in it. In moderation, the MBTI is essentially a glorified BuzzFeed quiz with better branding. It is not fundamentally different from those old online quizzes telling you what type of bread you are, or which planet matches your personality after answering a series of vague multiple-choice questions.
The issue begins when people mistake a fun framework for an authoritative explanation of human personality.
Frameworks matter. Language matters. The categories and labels we create inevitably shape the way we understand both ourselves and other people. If the primary framework through which you understand personality is something like the MBTI, then you will naturally begin filtering human behaviour through those categories. Suddenly, people are no longer complex complicated individuals. They become “introverts”, “thinkers”, “judgers”, or whatever four-letter combination the website decided to assign them fifteen minutes ago.
And once people begin believing in those categories strongly enough, they start performing them.
“I’m just naturally blunt because I’m an ENTJ.”
“I don’t text first because I’m introverted.”
“I’m disorganised because perceiving types are spontaneous.”
At a certain point, the label stops describing behaviour and instead starts justifying it.
The most peculiar, and arguably troubling part is how quickly people begin flattening each other into caricatures. A person can display years of emotional complexity, contradiction, growth, insecurity, kindness, selfishness, maturity, and irrationality; only for someone to reduce all of it into “that’s such an ENFP thing to do.”
People are incredibly inconsistent. Context matters. Mood matters. Circumstances matter. You can be confident one day and insecure the next. You can enjoy crowds while still valuing solitude. You can be logical in your work and emotional in your relationships. Most, if not all people are not cleanly compressible into neat categories, because real personality is messy.
Funny enough, I believe that is exactly why people love, and are so drawn to the MBTI so much.
People like certainty. They like coherence. They like feeling understood. Indeed there is something deeply comforting about being told that you are a particular “type” of person, especially in a world where identity increasingly feels unstable and performative. It gives people a sense of structure. A script to follow. A vocabulary to explain themselves, and abide by.
The real bone I have to pick with this is how we severely underestimate how dangerous rigid frameworks can become when they shape the way we perceive reality itself. If you repeatedly tell someone they are a certain “type” of person, eventually they may begin narrowing themselves into it. Not because the label was necessarily accurate to begin with, but because people naturally mould themselves around the identities they are given. The framework does not merely describe behaviour; it prescribes it.
Even beyond the MBTI, people do this constantly. “Gifted kid.” “Academic weapon.” “Sigma male.” “Nonchalant.” “Burnt out student.” The internet, and by extension, our communities has become obsessed with compressing human personality into marketable archetypes and digestible labels. Everyone wants to be understood immediately, preferably through a four-word aesthetic and an aesthetic colour palette.
The strange thing is that this obsession is no longer confined to internet discourse or casual conversation either. I recently applied for a job that asked for my MBTI type during the application process. At some point, somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that reducing human personality into four letters was not only socially acceptable, but professionally useful.
Maybe personality tests were never really about accuracy in the first place.
Maybe people simply enjoy being told who they are.
To be fair, I understand. There is something strangely comforting in believing that your personality can be cleanly condensed into four letters. That your habits, insecurities, relationships, ambitions, and contradictions can all be neatly organised into a framework that makes sense of you.
Maybe that is why people cling to these labels so strongly. Not because they are necessarily true, but because uncertainty is uncomfortable.
And despite everything I have just said, I am probably not entirely immune to it either.
I still take the tests occasionally.
Apparently, I’m an ENTP.
