My Enneagram- 4, 1, 7⁠↗

4, 1, and 7 are referred to as the “frustration” trio, or triad if you’re fancy. These types all have an idealized vision of how things should be, and experience constant frustration at the gap between their ideal and reality. The 4 tries to close it by cultivating specialness, in themselves and their experience. The 1 tries to close this gap through perfection and correction. The 7 tries to close it by reframing everything as positive and seeking constant novelty.

Much of the character of the 7, my type, becomes clear if you extrapolate the consequences of one odd property. We are stimulated and pleased by change, whatever it is. This is unusual — if you list the factory setting human fears, change is supposed to be one of them. But when change is merely amusing, everyone you haven’t met could be a best friend, every skill you haven’t learned could be your new personality, every city could be your new home. This is a superpower which is also a hideous temptation. Almost before you begin to feel pain or boredom, you can already think of a dozen opportunities for stimulation. When I’m trying to type someone, I sometimes ask them: “if I kidnapped you, took your possessions, dropped you off in Russia, and told you that you had to find your way to Myanmar, would you find this fun?” An instant and genuine “yeah” is a 7 giveaway.

To have a rich life, 7s need to thwart their central instinct and commit. To a vocation, sure, and a relationship, yeah, but most importantly, an honest reckoning with our real limits. As I type that, a chill runs through me: limitation as a concept makes me uneasy. And yet, every iota of true value in my life has come from it. Meanwhile, in periods of my life when I allowed myself to be a free agent, nothing real happened. It turns out that compulsive optionality maintenance is not true freedom. But you cannot force 7s to get that message — I received it suddenly one day by the grace of God. Sometimes, I meet 7s who are still frantically trying to feed their hungry ghost, and I think, “oh, I hope the comedown from that realization is gentle.” Anthony Bourdain’s life and death are both instructive for the 7 who wants to understand how they can thrive and, equally, explode.

The woo angle is that if you really relax all the way, like all the way, you discover the ultimate prank, which is that consciousness is made of bliss, and that candy-floss giddiness you were manufacturing was never necessary.