Forging the Once and Future “You”
As a companion to my essay for The Hedgehog Review, “Sorting the Self: Assessments and the Cult of Personality,” I have devised a psychometric instrument: the Deceptagram. It consists of fifty multiple choice questions with a simple scoring rubric to reveal your personality, or what I will call your Decepta-Type.
Answer the questions to discover your Decepta-Type:
- a Breezicle
- a Scorio
- a Struggilist
- a Docmeister
How to respond to your results? First, weigh the extent to which the typology feels right to you. Assuming it mostly does, then consider whether (a) you think your self-deceptive measures are useful and good (if so, then imagine what formalizing them purposefully would look like), or (b) consider whether you would like to change your ways (if so, imagine what doing that might involve). Either way, what matters is making the choice explicit and owning it. If you do not feel that your revealed Decepta-Type really “fits” you, then go ahead and try taking the test again to see if you can land on the one you prefer. Up to you.
If you would like to print the Deceptagram and score your results offline, download a PDF version here.
—Christopher Yates
Overconfident that things will always work out for the best, you tend to disregard the BS in life. As a result, you have a Friday afternoon sort of ease about you. You can laugh at yourself when your houseplants take a turn for the worse, or you forget to take the parking brake off while driving. But, since angst, like heat, must go somewhere, it settles into a remote pocket of your spirit where it sometimes emits little radio waves of self-doubt.
Double Down? Go on a road trip —say, Santa Fe—and post daily on Instagram. When you return home adopt a shelter dog and take up ceramics.
Dial it Back? Read a print newspaper faithfully. Learn to install and finish dry-wall. Get a punching bag.
Naturally adept at the little things that vex most people—like how to score free concert tickets, where to find the best happy hours, and how to go the way GPS doesn’t know—you have come to believe your charm will win every room and get you a seat in the exit row. As a result, you think you have a magic touch and what your aunt calls “a certain way with people” that will see you through. But when you’re alone something feels off and you wonder what’s become of old friends, who would visit you in the hospital, and whether it’s actually true that you could have played Division I or had a career in modelling.
Double Down? Work in sales of some kind. Plan a destination party in Miami.
Dial it Back? Get off social media (including LinkedIn). Go to New York City and ride the subway alone till you are totally lost, then end up at a Latin Mass.
Convinced that the institutional and social cards are always stacked against you, and that those whom you have loved and served take you for granted, you see the world as an alienating and ungrateful place. As a result, you have cultivated a self-reliant fortitude and poise, and a sense of soldiering on sustains you behind that practiced professional smile. But something inside you has perforated over time, and now and then you wonder if you would ever let yourself be known.
Double Down? Stroll in a slow serpentine way down a crowded airport terminal, periodically halting to check your phone. Fill out a mortgage or refinance application.
Dial it Back? Volunteer with a local GED tutoring program. Compliment a stranger on their shoes. Invite a coworker to a local art opening.
Dismayed by the superficial ways of living and thinking around you and fortified by your friendship with books and podcasts, you have come to trust your insights about the world on the basis of how they stand against the status quo. As a result, you feel that you have not, like everyone else, fallen prey to common deceits and the corrosive effects of technology, media, ideology, and consumerism. But sometimes you wonder if you’re using words like “normative” and “neoliberal” correctly, and you tire a bit of the severity in your voice.
Double Down? Spend an hour amid the aisles of your local Walmart then go to a used bookstore. Read some DeLillo after you walk home from the farmer’s market.
Dial it Back? Play some miniature golf. Read some more DeLillo, then flip through some of your early college essays, your high school diaries if you have them.