# Which type(s) struggle with the meaninglessness of life ?



## Lacy (Mar 22, 2016)

Hi everyone,
I've seen a lot of type's description containing "struggling with the meaninglessness of life", and I was just curious about knowing which type really do.
Thanks, and, as always, sorry for my english.


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## CurrentBias (Nov 23, 2016)

5 or 5 wing. 5 sees right through constructed meaning into the heart of the void.


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## mistakenforstranger (Nov 11, 2012)

Most likely unhealthy 4s and 5s. 

It's even mentioned in the 4w5 profile by Riso-Hudson.



> Unhealthy persons of this subtype inhabit a particularly barren and terrifying inner world. There is a self-denying, even life-denying element of inner resistance to everything outside the self, throwing all of the Four's existential problems into sharper relief. Since Four is the fundamental personality type, fours with a Five-wing are assailed by self-doubt, depression, alienation from others, inhibitions in their work, and self-contempt. To the degree that the Five-wing plays a part in the overall personality, unhealthy fours of this subtype will also resist being helped by anyone, thus increasing their alienation from others. They also tend to project their fears into the environment, resulting in distorted thinking patters which may include elements of suspicion, paranoia, and phobias. *Not only are people of this subtype subject to torment from their self-hatred, they can see very little that is positive outside themselves, and they become very pessimistic about the apparent meaninglessness of life.* Of all the personality types, people of this subtype are potentially the most isolated from themselves and from reality. They are prone to the depressive forms of schizophrenia.


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## singinbluebird (Jun 11, 2012)

Ive seen all types struggle with depression however its extremely prevalent among 4w5s, 5s, and 6w5s. The thinkers are the strugglers.


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## Daeva (Apr 18, 2011)

The introverted types (4 ; 5 ; 9) are all about the "gap" in the Enneagram symbol. The Empty.

Types 4 and 5 standing next to, being drawn to, and looking into, the abyss. Type 9 is on the direct opposite from it, not willing to engage for fear of loss (to the abyss, the perceived meaningless of life).


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## kirsten.j (Jul 12, 2016)

I was going to say a definite *"NFs"* for this; but then I realized you meant Enneagram... So I guess type 4 would be a good bet. I'm not certain about type 5... they seem so analytical... which doesn't always factor in MEANING, per se. 

I often notice my NF friends/ classmates/ co-workers struggling with finding meaning behind what they do, or specific causes to work towards... It seems like such a burden to carry! Personally I just try to find something that is fun and challenging to me.


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## Purple Skies (Aug 31, 2015)

I think 5's would be the first ones to realise it. 4's will realise it later than 5's but will be the ones to actually struggle with it cause they hoped for much more.


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## Stellafera (Jan 19, 2015)

You could honestly make an argument for any type. 1s probably have it a bit less than others due to their tendency to consider _everything_ important, but:

1s: My efforts are meaningless, it's no good trying to bring light to a corrupt world.
2s: I'm nothing without the love of others.
3s: It's worthless. I'm worthless. I've done everything I can and I still have no idea who I am. Pathetic.
4s: It's not even worth trying when you're a failure from the start. People can only be happy when they're shallow and fake.
5s: Why engage with the world? There is no need. It's too dangerous... so I don't do anything. Again. Whatever. Carry on.
6s: I'm never going to find something that makes me happy. It's never good enough. Nothing will ever soothe that worry.
7s: I just jump from thing to thing. There's no purpose. I'm selfish but I love it too much to give it up.
8s: Savages. We're all savages. It's a damn dog-eats-dog world out there no matter how much we dress it up. 
9s: I'm not happy like I want to be... what's the point?


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## cir (Oct 4, 2013)

*sees all of the five suggestions* ... *wonders whether eight is connected to five* ... hmm... *momentarily distracted by a Vulpix that's still a fire type...*

Eh. I mean, I struggle with it too... It seems to me that this is one of those universal, fundamental, existential struggles...

When I have so much rage and anger that can't be exhausted by expressing it outward... to the point where it inwardly compresses into wrath... by that point, I look at other people and things and think to myself, "What's the point of your existence? What's the point of _any_ existence?" In that state, whether life is involved or not... it's an immaterial afterthought to me. Ego-_objectification_.

At my worst, cynical, unhealthy states, I definitely have a nihilistic mindset and attitude towards existence itself. As if I'm just another manifestation and embodiment of the abyss itself, a herald of destruction, I seek to strip the life out of matter and reduce matter into degradable, disposable, fleeting, forgettable _things_. Even intangibles such as "memories", "sentiments", or "meanings" are "things to be destroyed".

In that state, if there's a drop of humanity left in me, then maybe I can see a purpose or path after annihilation and destruction. Maybe there's something after nothing.

"Meaning" is simultaneously objective and subjective. The void/abyss/nothingness... Sure, it could be "meaningless", but "meaningless" to me means "pure", "tabula rasa", or "blank slate". The void offers infinite opportunities to create meanings where previously there were none. "It is like the number zero... empty, yet holding infinite potential within itself."

After all, the abyss and the cosmos are the one and the same, and I found my home in the intersection of zero and infinity, the intersection of unconsciousness and consciousness.


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## Doll (Sep 6, 2012)

This seems to me a universal struggle, although I can see it coming up more for a 4w5 or 5w4. It's the nihilism of the 5 combined with the hopelessness of the 4 that most easily fits. However, type 4 and type 5 are disintegration points for 1 and 8, so any type, when unhealthy, could despair about the world for reasons related to their own type.


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## Maye (Feb 15, 2015)

I know a 9w1 seriously struggled with it for a long time.


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## psyche (Jan 5, 2011)

I voted 5w4... I'm thinking core 5 in particular. Because if you go too far in the direction of becoming masterful intellectually just to soothe your own fear, there are always going to be more and more angles of a given subject or object that you haven't yet considered. You never really can master it if your whole identity is wrapped up in knowing more, so the subject or object becomes more and more terrifying; you feel more and more dominated by it even though the reverse was what you wanted. How are you ever going to find peace, living that way? Or, how is life ever going to seem like something good? And I just thought the 4 wing would make it more difficult because of the tendency to become that much more isolated and darkly imaginative.


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## AvaISTJ (Nov 24, 2016)

My first thought was 4s and 5w4s and from the answers so far I'm not alone in thinking that.


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## Cthulhu And Coffee (Mar 8, 2012)

I'm not totally sure if I'm a 4w3 (the other possibility seems to be 3w?) but just wanted go give some input into my perspective at least, in case I am a 4 and 4s seem to be the ideal candidate here.

It's not so much that life seems meaningless, as much as it seems chaotic most of the time. But I believe chaos can be purposeful (just not necessarily in the way we think.) I could see how someone could question the validity of it being so chaotic or whatever. Though, that's never personally been an issue for me.


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## cir (Oct 4, 2013)

http://personalitycafe.com/enneagram-personality-theory-forum/530794-significance-nadir.html

It's probably "the dark night of the soul" for fours and people with four wings. I found the "soul repair" thing at point one... it heals, cleanses, and purifies the soul... Assuming, of course, that people here believe "souls" exist... At the center of the cosmos is the anima mundi, the world soul, the Holy Origin.




psyche said:


> Because if you go too far in the direction of becoming masterful intellectually just to soothe your own fear, there are always going to be more and more angles of a given subject or object that you haven't yet considered. You never really can master it if your whole identity is wrapped up in knowing more, so the subject or object becomes more and more terrifying; you feel more and more dominated by it even though the reverse was what you wanted.


 You brought up some great points, so I'm going to go on a very personal, angry rant.

Here's an idea: If I'm the dumbest, least-knowledgeable person in the room, then that means I'd have the most to gain. The more people who know something, the easier and quicker it is for successive generations to learn that topic, synthesize it, and then expand upon it.

* *





Knowledge isn't static; knowledge is dynamic. Fives who think they've "mastered" something _will_ face humiliation and shame in addition to fear. The "basic desire", "temptation", "vice/passion", and "virtue" are operations of the heart center. The basic fear looks like a stick, and the basic desire looks like a carrot, but if the carrot is long enough, it can be used as a stick. When the basic fear is triggered, shame is also triggered from failing to meet the basic desire.

If you feel like you've met your basic desire, then make sure you've examined the source/origin of it and how you attained it. Like all things heart-center, there are layers of self-deceptive qualities to work through. Like the mirage of water in a dry desert...

When the five's ego tells the five that they've mastered something, and the five believes it... No matter how well they try to hide it (deceptive humility), it tends to manifest publicly as "unjustified/unearned arrogance". It's in how quickly they dismiss the value of others' input, the "you're too dumb/uneducated to have input worth listening to" body language, followed by social faux pas... like insisting how something "makes no sense" when this person is the _only_ person having comprehension troubles (they dismissed other's attempt at explanation).

In a cooperative educational environment, it might be quietly annoying people to the point of gossip. It has a way of inspiring people to see if they can "unseat" you. Not even to see if they're "smarter" than you, but maybe because they're bored assholes looking for "fun". For me in particular, I rely on shallow, breadth-based probing to see where and how current their domain of expertise is and go from there.

Example: mono-lingual, mono-cultural fives. (In other words, multiple angles of blindness for issues relating to the image center.) They have a strange tendency to assume that what they value is evaluated in the same manner and weight by everyone else, and greed/avarice necessitates this condition to be as true as possible in order for it to work as survival strategy. When they're talking about how people perceive (image), evaluate (value), and interpret something (meaning), pay attention to see if they have an implicit assumption that something's a settled matter, _especially_ if there are legitimate, widely-accepted alternatives or ambiguities. They might be certain that black is "universally" the color of death.

I've personally found fives _really_ hate discovering that their applicable or relatable knowledge can become outdated quickly, and they _hate_ it when a room full of idiots point that out. Talk about humiliating! Threes hate it too, but mostly from the shame of being a "has-been" who's way past their prime. For fives, it's just more fear-of-death triggers because even the knowledge they collect "expires" in conventional utility.

One of five's biggest weaknesses is their reluctance/refusal to cooperate with other people. Their specific difficulty is "isolation", and it shows. (Eights are more willing if it's the quickest/easiest/laziest thing to do.) It's ironic because some fives have secret, idealistic fantasies of being able to exercise power over other people "teach" people, and _those_ fives (vs fives who actually are teachers/professors) are the _least_ flexible in adapting/simplifying/"dumbing down" explanations to be more understandable/coherent from a different perspective.

It also pisses me off when they "can't hear what I'm saying". There were times when I would ask them a very specifically formulated, technical question, and they would reply back with an answer to a _similar_ question, but not the question I asked. When I followed up with clarifications of my original question, I found resistance in the form of "when people ask <this>, they usually mean to ask <that>". Then I impatiently blow them off by going "But that's not _my_ question. Oh, I get it, you only know the answer to <that> question, but not my question. Never mind, I'll go ask someone else."

I would feel like a _genuine_ desire to teach people necessitates a willingness to see from a different perspective. I _should not_ have to pull teeth to try to convince them that everyone learns/understands/perceives differently. Alas, poor Holy Omniscience.

A group of people can adapt, synthesize, and expand knowledge in orders of magnitude faster than a single, isolated individual. Cooperative team work increases the possibility for greater varieties of people to interface with your ideas, which increases the odds of those ideas getting propagated. If you identify with your ideas and hope your ideas transcend your death, then it's counter-productive to dismiss the value of other people's input. Only other people can keep your ideas alive beyond your grave.

Personally, I don't see the point or meaning of becoming a "master" of something. Even if you made it to the top, you won't stay there forever. You'll constantly be facing new challengers, people who possess different sets of expertise, knowledge, and skills than you, people who can see and actualize new avenues of possibilities that you missed, wrote off as worthless, or neglected. If your ideas are useful/meaningful enough that other people would adapt and incorporate into their own understandings, then they become parts of new _foundations_, new bottoms. And if they don't consider you a competitor or an obstacle, then they can just ignore you and move on.



There's the darkness of zero, and then there's the light of infinity. "All is one"; that's why nine also has a special relationship to the abyss/nadir. The lack of meaning is only the first third of the story. From five, that naturally cascades into seven's fear of deprivation (fear of lack). For the second third of the story, fives also fear being overwhelmed (lack of control), so logically, _those_ fears can be triggered by overwhelming them with multiplicities of meaning. Moving upward necessitates a confrontation with infinity, so they will be flooded with "many small things" from seven or "one big thing" from eight.

The first cycle concludes with the visceral humiliation and powerlessness felt when a five faces the self-deceptive, transient, illusory nature of their "mastery" and "understanding": 2 -> 8 -> 5 -> 7. To establish a connection to 4 from 2 means crossing the heart center. What personal trials would you face there? What decisions would you have to make in order to have the resources at points 4 and 1 be available to you? 

This is one version of the hero's journey. Fives are not the only ones who take this journey, and neither will they take this journey alone, and yet, details and results will vary.





> How are you ever going to find peace, living that way? Or, how is life ever going to seem like something good?


 Good questions. I'm placing bets on whatever they think "non-attachment" means. Since the virtues are associated with the heart center, I wonder if "emotions" have anything to with "relations" or "meaning". _Both_ of five's wings are "emotionally reactive" types, and they're internally connected to the third "emotionally reactive" type. If you use this map (this co-exists with the default map), even their hidden internal line is to the heart center. Hint hint.

I'm of the school of thought that "we integrate in one direction and disintegrate in the other direction" is outdated and misleading. I'm not saying that 5->7 is _necessarily_ "dis-integrative" (because if the goal is to integrate all nine types, then that's going to be the quickest route to seven... but also eight's specific difficulty is "duality", and "backward/forward" is a set of duality, an illusion reinforced by the ego... directions/locality are meaningless in the eternal, formless realms)... but when they're tempted to "replace direct experience with concepts", they're tempted to withdraw/retreat further inside the center of intelligence they are most familiar with. In other words, away from the action/body center for their own direct experience and away from the image/heart center for other people's experiences. Convincing proof of experience is that you can make it relatable.

Depending on how severe it is, and on how sensitive you are to certain kinds of energies... the energy of the abyss might manifest in a way that contorts their face like in the scream painting. I used to think that was just some interesting-looking painting, and now it actually has meaning to me. It was really horrifying, it caused me to question my sobriety and eyesight, and I hope that none of you guys have the misfortune of walking into something like that.


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## Skeletalz (Feb 21, 2015)

An existential crisis is an important part of anyone's life.


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## Dangerose (Sep 30, 2014)

I'm surprised not to see more suggestions of Six; it's the type I associate with a never-ending existential crisis  Cynicism, doubt, etc. seem very concerned with the meaning of things. Agree about Four and Five, I also marked seven-wing-six, not sure why

I definitely associate it least with 2, 1, and I think 8 [though the latter is a type I don't really understand]. 
It's not something I relate to at all really, I've had brief moments where it was a concern but I don't think I've ever spent a full hour thinking about this kind of thing. But Stellafera hit the nose on the head with 'life is meaningless if I'm not loved', a lot of my mental imagery is something along the lines of 'when you leave, the colors fade to grey'


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## Inveniet (Aug 21, 2009)

I'm pretty sure that one is universal.


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## atamagasuita (May 15, 2016)

7s. Joke


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## Catwalk (Aug 12, 2015)

Most of the suggestion(s) are "fives", but I do not relate to all the elaboration, as they are oddly worded.

As for "which" type; it can be associated with any. Inserting "meaning"; filling natures "emptiness", , supplying meaningfulness into the world; mm.. sounds rather universal, as stated. Many of these things can _apply to anyone_; so I find it uninteresting to associate (X)-characteristics solely - or _uniquely_ with the 5. _If I had to pick_; however, I would associate it with the *4*.

I would associate "usefulness / competence / capacity" with 5 || and "meaning / value" with 4 and 9.

____

I "realize" life is meaningless; but I do not '_struggle_' with it. It is an actuality; an _is what it is._ I have no strong (destine path) to change it, or "_fill the void_", but only _contribute _to (utilizing myself-knowledge) or explore the unexplored areas of *the void*. The "void" (e.g., life) has been injected with _meaningfulness_ of other types, thus I aim to innately exhaust it, through implication, implementation through causing "effects", or examination. Rather than construct it into _something else_.

_What is the void or (X, Y, Z); and what are it's contents..._ (?)

I do not "hope" for anything to happen; nor have any remote sense of hopelessness (&) tend to be relatively disinterested in too much direct participation to "give thing(s) meaning"; strange - as that would interfere with privacy; and seems to have a rather (4) touch. The whole idea just sound(s) cringe-worthy.

I am more interested in context; not meaning. I recognize "knowledge" as _unlimited_; so I over-indulge to find context; those who seek "meaning" are looking for an ultimate. An "ultimate" knowledge would bore me - (&) be rather repulsive. I do not see absolute(s) in knowledge; from over-information hoarding. I will no longer be able to execute my 5-ness; with absolutes. 

Trying to be the "_smartest in the world_" (e.g., meaningfulness) is not a goal, but a _possible _. [Magical-thinking]. My only option is trying to satisfy my need(s) that vary. (Healthy) 5's should be and are often unlimited and rather *greedy*; with _large amounts_ of storage capacity. (5)'s are gluttonous; and _never full_. _Never restful_. This breed(s) anxiety by implication, but it has nothing to do with "meaninglessness". 

Although, boredom festers with fixation to 1 outlet of knowledge-gain; (5)'s who do not "channel" properly; will become rather unhealthy. If I am "unhealthy", I tend to fixate on a point; (&) _exhaust it_ without keen self-awareness of anatomy, it is likely because I think I _do not know_ something I am _supposed to;_ and I am being withheld + deprived from it.

Most of my "fears" stem from lacking capacity; being made a fool of, (&) of course; (mostly) mental competence. Not sure where "meaning" plays any significant role. I have no ties to nihilism (those who struggle); as they often commit _performative contradiction_; it is _meaningfulness_ supplied that drives the curiosity, and the _realization_ of "meaninglessness" that omits the acceptance of the 'unknown'.

There also seems to be a_ confusion_ with "pessimism" (&) "nihilism"; neither which do not denote, nor entail "unhappiness / uncheerfulness / lack of satisfaction".


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