Returning to the 16 Personalities: An Interlude
Hey everyone, Eric Thor here. In this post, I’m talking about why I decided to return to the 16 personalities framework despite its inherent problems, and where I’m planning to go next.
For the last 10 years—actually longer than 10 years, starting around 2010 or 2012—I have created online content about personality psychology. It has been many years since I walked away from the 16 personalities. Here, I want to address why I left, why I came back, and where I plan to go moving forward. This is a brief interlude, not something permanent.
Over the past few months, I’ve been completely reworking all of my 16 personalities and cognitive function content. I did this because I wasn’t happy having material floating around the internet filled with stereotypes, inaccuracies, and inconsistencies. I didn’t want to be part of the problem that made me leave in the first place—I wanted to provide a fresh, healthy perspective on personality psychology.
Before explaining how I rebuilt everything, I need to share why I walked away initially, and why coming back was the only realistic way forward.
Why Rebuild Now?
Shallow content with vague buzzwords is safe, but it lacks genuine nutritional value for personal growth. Rebuilding this framework allows us to replace empty jargon with concrete, empirically useful psychological insights.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
- Why Rebuild Now?
- Unfinished Business
- Life Events That Force Re-evaluation
- Why Return?
- Understanding Your Dynamic Self
- The Core Purpose
- Moving Toward Values
- Examples of Value-Driven Goals
- Pause & Reflect
- Rebuilding Personaltopia
- Concrete Definitions of Core Functions
- Next Steps and Feedback
- What Personaltopia Currently Offers
Unfinished Business
Unfinished business sums it up best. When you look back at something and realize you aren’t happy with how you left it, you want to clean it up. I didn’t want to leave it hanging. I wanted to make sure my past efforts were not a waste, but rather part of learning, growing, and becoming who I am today. Everything was necessary. To tie it all together, I needed to find a different way of using and looking at personality psychology.
For me, the 16 personalities started as a tool for self-discovery, but it eventually turned into a comfort zone and a trap. It became a rigid box where I placed myself and everyone around me. Whenever I met someone or experienced conflict, my brain immediately tried to categorize them: “Oh, that’s just their inferior Extroverted Feeling,” or “That’s just because of their Introverted Sensing.”
That was not healthy, helpful, or relevant. It did not help me connect better or find amicable solutions to conflicts. It built walls, created false dichotomies, and made people feel trapped rather than capable of change or personal growth.
The same was true for me. From age 25 to around 28 or 29, I put myself in a box with rigid ideas about who I was supposed to be. That kept me from growing and adapting.
Life Events That Force Re-evaluation
Major life events can cause personality shifts or force you to reconsider who you truly are:
- Changing countries
- Changing jobs
- Changing relationships
All of these events force you to re-evaluate what you thought about yourself. You might go through a crisis that causes you to look at yourself differently. Perhaps you finally find who you were meant to be, or maybe what you thought about yourself in the past was incorrect. Alternatively, trauma, fear, or anxiety might shift you into a version of yourself that is less true.
“Leaving rigid frameworks allowed me to build skills I didn’t know I could develop: learning to drive, learning to code, and connecting directly with nature without filtering life through personality terms.”
I moved to another country, learned another language, and changed my career. I transitioned into programming—a completely different lifestyle compared to my previous life in Sweden studying at university and working in politics.
This new situation created a significant incongruity. My audience saw it too: the way I presented myself did not match the person I had become. In my 20s, I tried to be perfect, fit into a box, and adapt to what everyone else wanted. I was presenting a specific persona to the world that did not align with my core values.
The major turning point came when I went through a breakup, moved to Barcelona, and gave myself the freedom, space, and time to reconnect with what I wanted, felt, and valued. That happened because I let go of the MBTI, quit my job, and took time off to connect with myself again. Because of that space, I met my wife, Nina.
I was hesitant to return to MBTI because I am grateful I did not get to know Nina through the lens of personality types. I got to know her as a complex, unique person without a logical filter trying to categorize her as an introvert or extrovert. That made our connection pure. Using rigid tools to navigate relationships can isolate you from the reality of human interaction.
Why Return?
Why decide to come back and build personality tests again?
This return is a starting point, not the finish line. I wanted to address my old content so that it represents healthy psychology. I wanted to create a portal where people can explore themselves, learn, and use the system as a mirror.
My passion for psychology has remained intact. I have continued studying, reading, and learning beyond the 16 personalities framework to focus broadly on personal growth, health, and fulfillment.
Personality—or what we think our personality is—is not absolute truth. None of us can view ourselves with total objectivity. If you look back to when you were 15, 20, or 25, you likely thought you had yourself completely figured out, only to realize later that you were wrong. The same applies today.
Because nobody can fully know themselves, part of you remains an unwritten story. Tolerating that ambiguity is essential. Getting attached to absolute certainty leads to constriction, limitation, and staying stuck in a comfort zone.
Understanding Your Dynamic Self
Your self-concept—whether you view yourself as introverted or extroverted—is simply how you normally act in everyday situations at work or in relationships. It is not true for every moment:
- Context-dependent shifts: You have moments where you are more extroverted or more introverted.
- Functional fluidity: You shift between feeling and thinking functions depending on who you are with and where you are.
- Mode switching: You switch between task mode (solving issues) and experience mode (understanding meaning and purpose).
Your personality profile functions like a comfort zone or a security blanket. It provides stability and explains how you survived past traumas, challenges, and problems, as well as the positive skills you developed along the way. However, it also highlights what you struggle with and what you have yet to explore.
The goal is not to master every trait or collect every personality type like medals. Life is not a completionist game.
The Core Purpose
The ultimate destination of personality psychology is not to lock yourself into a type—it is to move toward your core values.
Moving Toward Values
While your personality represents where you currently stand, your values represent where you want to go. Values provide a vision for the future, helping you determine the life you want to live.
Examples of Value-Driven Goals
- Turning your creativity into a business.
- Connecting with people over shared priorities.
- Living an authentic and honest life.
- Expressing yourself artistically.
- Cultivating wisdom so you are not blinded by pure logic or pure emotion.
- Achieving spiritual self-transcendence.
Your goal should not be to act like every personality type. The goal is to align your life with your values across your job, relationships, social settings, hobbies, and personal time. You can use the skills developed through your personality history to reach those values, while identifying new skills you need to build to achieve your dream life.
Pause & Reflect
Where do you currently stand? To what extent is your current personality in alignment with your values? Does how you act today accurately reflect who you want to be and the life you want to live? What is missing?
Rebuilding Personaltopia
I returned to this space with Personaltopia.com, launching a new personality test, a new cognitive function test, and an upcoming values test.
I wanted to fix what is wrong with the online 16 personalities space:
- Stereotypes, jargon, and limiting beliefs: Shallow content is safe. Defining real behavior risks disagreement, criticism, and attack, so most articles use vague buzzwords like abstract, strategic, social, warm, or imaginative without defining them.
- Lack of substance: Terms that cannot be measured or applied to real-life situations act like fast food. They sound agreeable and comforting, but offer no nutritional value or genuine personal growth.
When rewriting my content and rebuilding my tests, I committed to avoiding empty buzzwords in favor of plain, concrete, and empirically useful language focused on real-world issues.
Concrete Definitions of Core Functions
Writing material with lasting depth takes research, time, and reflection. You cannot rely on AI or copy from generic personality sites. You have to ask direct questions about daily thought patterns, relationship issues, and behavioral manifests.
Here are examples of how we define core functions in plain, concrete terms:
- Introverted Intuition (Ni): Traditional MBTI calls this a mysterious, magical ability to predict the future. In my updated framework, it describes a person driven by the desire to be original, unique, and different—explaining why they make an effort to present original ideas and maintain their own distinct perspective (contrasted with Extroverted Sensing, which often seeks to fit in).
- Extroverted Feeling (Fe): Rather than vague abstractions, this describes a primary drive to be liked, please others, and make people feel good.
- Introverted Thinking (Ti): This describes a drive for perfection—someone who wants to fix, refine, and perfect something to ensure it works properly, even if it takes significant time.
Addressing these real drives and struggles allows for actionable insights on how traits show up, how they help, and how they hinder growth.
Next Steps and Feedback
Personality is your baseline comfort zone. My ongoing work on values—authenticity, creativity, wisdom, courage—provides the second step. It offers practical day-to-day exercises and journal prompts to answer: “What’s next? How do I want to show up at work, with my partner, and in my life?”
What Personaltopia Currently Offers
- Personality and subtype tests
- Interactive polls
- Checkbox assessments
- Journal prompts and exercise frameworks
The goal is to build an interactive, ongoing conversation together. To refine this, I need your feedback:
- What result did you get, and how accurate was it?
- How will you use this for your personal growth?
- How can the descriptions be made even more concrete and specific?
Thank you for following along with this project. This work allows me to resolve unfinished business, complete this chapter, and move forward with closure.
Leave your thoughts in the comments below. Thank you for reading and watching, and I will see you in the next update!
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