I keep seeing these four letters like INFJ or INTJ in people's profiles. That's MBTI, a personality model with 16 types. Claude knows me from hundreds of sessions on my projects by now, so I just asked which type I am.
The answer was INTJ. Introverted, because I like being deep in a topic on my own, whether that's my homelab, my family tree or an archive of old magazine CDs. Intuitive, because I'd rather build a system than a one-off fix. Thinking, because I decide based on efficiency. The J was close: my instructions for Claude run to hundreds of lines of fixed rules, but all the side projects running in parallel point more towards P.
Then I tried to describe myself. I collect data, archive it and sort it into categories. I want to know how things work, though more computers than radios. And in the end I want to make everything faster, more flexible and more powerful. I collect the knowledge so I can get faster.
According to Claude, that fits INTJ better than INTP. An INTP wants to understand things because they find them interesting. For me, understanding is always followed by improving.
Scientifically MBTI is pretty shaky, I know. I still recognized myself.
Why I often don't answer simple questions
It also explains something that regularly drives me up the wall: really general questions. When someone asks me something, my head immediately runs through every possible thing they could mean and wants to answer all of it properly. Even small questions often have hundreds of factors behind them, and a lot of those won't be true anymore tomorrow. Many answers also rest on years of experience. Squeezing that into a short paragraph just raises more questions.
So "What's your favorite movie?" isn't a simple question for me. Which genre? Top 3? Maybe another one is actually better? Videos sent with "What do you think of this?" are even harder. I'd have to watch them, understand them and form an opinion before I can say anything at all.
Every question feels a bit like a task. When they come in from everywhere all day, that gets exhausting fast. So I'd rather not answer at all for now, even if that looks rude from the outside.
Also, what I say holds for the moment I say it. It's not a promise for all time. When old statements get dug up later, I think three times about every answer, and at some point I'd rather say nothing at all.
What helps me: questions that can be answered briefly, or a sentence saying what someone is actually getting at. And when I say "I need to think about it", I mean it. I'm not trying to brush anyone off.