• You are currently viewing our forum as a guest, which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community, you will have access to additional post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), view blogs, respond to polls, upload content, and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free, so please join our community today! Just click here to register. You should turn your Ad Blocker off for this site or certain features may not work properly. If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us by clicking here.

[Type 4] How do you experience life as an Enneagram 4?

highlander

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Dec 23, 2009
Messages
26,559
MBTI Type
INTJ
Enneagram
6w5
Instinctual Variant
sx/sp
We have a lot of Enneagram 4s on the forum and this type is a bit of a mystery to me. For those of you are 4s, can you explain how you experience life as a 4? How do you see the fixations/vices of a 4 - melancholy, fantasizing, envy - as distorting how you experience life on a day to day basis? How strong of an influence or grip do those things have on you?
 
S

Sniffles

Guest
Pretty much something like this:

A more sarcastic take on that general sense of being alone and not being fully understood, and sometimes meditating on the vanity and absurdity of reality. That's the stereotypical image, which has some elements of truth to varying degrees. I'm sure most E4s can relate to such in some ways. Of course the positive side can be a very enriching aesthetic appreciation and the wonders of reality and its beauty.

In terms of E4 fixations. I certainly notice a tendency for them to blow things way out of proportions, making things seem worse than they really are(melancholy), but yet those times can also be times of deep inspiration and even personal transformation. So there's that push-pull struggle trying to balance it out.

I know this is vague, but it's hard to fully explain some of this stuff.
 

Southern Kross

Away with the fairies
Joined
Dec 22, 2008
Messages
2,910
MBTI Type
INFP
Enneagram
4w5
Instinctual Variant
so/sp
We have a lot of Enneagram 4s on the forum and this type is a bit of a mystery to me. For those of you are 4s, can you explain how you experience life as a 4? How do you see the fixations/vices of a 4 - melancholy, fantasizing, envy - as distorting how you experience life on a day to day basis? How strong of an influence or grip do those things have on you?
I feel sure to fail you with these questions.

It's actually pretty ordinary - at least externally. There isn't a lot of emotional drama or pretentious proclamations, and there's a lot more humour.

There's a lot of self-awareness and stepping outside myself - you can't just do things; you have to reflect on them (and on yourself doing them) as you do them. Even the banal is dissected and pondered.

I spend a lot of time in my head connecting different thoughts together. I do get carried away in fantasies - when I'm doing something mindless alone (walking, waiting for a bus, showering etc) I usually am disappearing into one. I don't consider it a distortion; it's entertainment.

I do think of depressing shit, but not in way that depresses me. I don't really envy much in everyday life - perhaps I do, but not it as constantly and overtly as people might imagine a 4 to. I do wish my life was better and that I could have the things I want. I do wonder about other people's lives and what the world looks like through their eyes.

Pretty much something like this:
Strike everything I said above - it's exactly like this. ^
 
E

Epiphany

Guest
I have a love/hate relationship with my enneatype - frequently more hate than love, I'm afraid. It's just not very practical in a professional world that doesn't value creativity. "But just get a job that suits your type," you say; well that's easier said than done, especially in this economy. I think I tend to exude a melancholic vibe, which isn't the best way to be sociable. I have to consciously convey a happier, lighthearted disposition so other people aren't put-off by it, socially and professionally. I wouldn't say that I am even depressed at this point in my life. I am much healthier now than I have been in the past. Envy doesn't necessarily play a huge factor in my ambitions that I am aware of. Can't think of anyone off the top of my head who I envy, but I definitely fantasize a lot about my aspirations and wish that I was more successful in certain areas. The grass is always greener, as they say. One thing I've noticed is that, on the employee bus ride from the parking lot to my work area, I tend to look out of the window, lost in contemplation. I rarely see other people gazing out of the windows, which surprises me. I figured it was a fairly common thing. And I rarely, if ever, engage in conversation when surrounded by a bunch of people I don't know.
 

Amargith

Hotel California
Joined
Nov 5, 2008
Messages
14,717
MBTI Type
ENFP
Enneagram
4dw
Instinctual Variant
sx/so
As stated before by the others in this thread, I too feel somewhat stunted in my ability to 'do' stuff in real life. Things need to be mulled over, feel right, investigated and fit into a fantasy before executed. And that execution always somehow seems to butcher the dream anyways :shrug:

I too feel that my skillset isnt exactly useful to this world, and especially not in an economic sense which leads to dreaming, fantasizing and wistfulness. I think many of us are probably not aware that envy is something we definitely struggle with as it doesnt present in that seething, rage type of envy. It is more in that sighing it is what it is-kind of way, which promptly launches you into yet another fantasy world where things are just right.

I remember talking to a friend who was in love with someone. Unlike anything she had ever felt before. And she couldn't explain why but it felt...'right'. Even if the situation itself was less than ideal and they still had a long way to sort things out. There was just this sense of...this is it. It was something she could not explain to her friends and family, she could not logically support or even find the words for to describe.

When I told her that that feeling is something that I seek for in *everything*, from the smallest little detail in life to the biggest life events - that I felt incapable of moving forward unless I had that feeling of 'right', she finally understood. As great as it is to feel 'right' and find that right puzzle piece, the search is maddening. You have no parameters to narrow the search, no way to explain to others what you are looking for or why it is that crucial and you have no way of moving forward without that right piece in place. And life demands a *lot* of pieces in place to make it work right. There is just a feeling of right and wrong to judge whatever comes your way. And there is a lot of pieces that almost fit, but not quite.

*warning, lyrical 4*

In a way, I search for true love in every aspect of my life. It is a never-ending quest. And a lonely one, as friends, family and the outside world do not understand the yardstick you are working as there are so many other workable and more practical solutions to use in order to obtain your material goal. And unfortunately, there is no way to explain to them why it just does not work for you.

/lament.
 

Tiltyred

New member
Joined
Dec 1, 2008
Messages
4,322
MBTI Type
INFP
Enneagram
468
Instinctual Variant
sx/sp
We have a lot of Enneagram 4s on the forum and this type is a bit of a mystery to me. For those of you are 4s, can you explain how you experience life as a 4? How do you see the fixations/vices of a 4 - melancholy, fantasizing, envy - as distorting how you experience life on a day to day basis? How strong of an influence or grip do those things have on you?

It comes and goes. For the past several years, I have maintained that I don't really get the envy thing. I'm happy when other people do well -- happy for them, and happy to see something go right in the universe in general. I thought somehow I was immune to the envy thing. Then I started hanging out in places where stay-at-home-moms with husbands who make good money hang out, and OH. MY. GOD. wow. I'm eaten up with envy. Sick with it. Hate my life because I've been working since I was 17 and I'll work until I die, can never afford to retire, can take days off but not a vacation because I can't afford to go anywhere, etc. etc. While they post things like "Why does fb make me approve pictures I post from my iphone? What if I have a shopping emergency and can't post a pic of my intended outfit to get comments on?" and I realize this person basically never has to go to work, never has to sweat the mortgage payment, it makes me sick with envy. I have to laugh at it, it's so extreme. It's painful. I can't make it go away so I have to live with it. (Objectively I realize there may be things in her life that I would not want, that nothing's ever as it seems, that I might be bored to tears with her life, etc., but there's an envy state I can't deny that is extremely powerful, nearly crippling, when it kicks in. Also, I like the person I referenced in the example. I just hate my life that I can never have even a little bit of that part of what she has.)

Melancholy is just a form of beauty that happy people can't recognize, like the way other species see colors we can't see. Melancholy is comforting and soothing and familiar and good. I also prefer rain to sunny weather, and cold to hot, and slow, sad songs to fast, happy ones.

I fantasize constantly, always have. Don't know what else to say about that. Seems just to be the way my brain works, making visions and inhabiting the visions.

ETA: I just went back and read what others had written. I understand Amar's saying she searches for true love in everything. There's a state of bliss that once achieved, you keep searching for. Sometimes I wonder if it's like heroin. They say your first hit is what hooks you, that it will never be that good again, but you keep doing it, wanting to feel just like that one more time. I feel that way about most of my life. Slightly on edge, wishing for a state of bliss that I catch glimpses of or sometimes get for brief periods, wishing it could always be that way, thinking about what it would take to make it that way, fantasizing that it is that way, getting excited if someone else comes up with a plan for a better way and wanting to participate in the effort while simultaneously realizing it's futile and we're all dust in the wind, recalling Ozymandias, wondering what's the use. I wonder what's the use a lot. Then I wonder why I wonder, and wish I didn't care.

Basically, something's always bothering me, and I'm always wishing it didn't. I feel out of joint with what I'm called upon to do and be in this life. I feel like I don't belong here, like somewhere there is a planet I came from where I do belong, and I'm constantly homesick for that place. I feel like just due to the fact of being a mortal on this planet, I can't fully express who I am. I feel confined and limited, or, to put it more like I experience it, crippled and imprisoned, by my life. And then I read all this and hate myself for being whiny. Totally understand Kurt Cobain, Sylvia Plath, et al, too, because how could it be otherwise.
 

Daenera

Rogue heart
Joined
Mar 10, 2013
Messages
356
It feels something like this:
It's like climbing the highest mountain, and then diving from there into the ocean, it's the Icarus flight all over again, it's self-fulfilling prophecy set in motion.
It's like immersing yourself in the world, running away the moment after, it's feeling broken and trapped and then comes the discovery of laughter.
To sum up: when it's bad it's really bad, but then you discover most of it is in your head, and from then point on its awesome haha then you get to enjoy life at a level it seems only few are capable of :bananallama:
 

Amargith

Hotel California
Joined
Nov 5, 2008
Messages
14,717
MBTI Type
ENFP
Enneagram
4dw
Instinctual Variant
sx/so
I feel out of joint with what I'm called upon to do and be in this life. I feel like I don't belong here, like somewhere there is a planet I came from where I do belong, and I'm constantly homesick for that place. I feel like just due to the fact of being a mortal on this planet, I can't fully express who I am. I feel confined and limited, or, to put it more like I experience it, crippled and imprisoned, by my life. And then I read all this and hate myself for being whiny. Totally understand Kurt Cobain, Sylvia Plath, et al, too, because how could it be otherwise.

This.


TiaCrab.jpg
 

Amargith

Hotel California
Joined
Nov 5, 2008
Messages
14,717
MBTI Type
ENFP
Enneagram
4dw
Instinctual Variant
sx/so
Fwiw, I do find that that 'feeling of right' , that feeling of true love is achievable again. In a way...it is 'terraforming'. It is turning pieces of unavoidable reality into something that can support your alien life form. To find the right parameters in which you can exist. It can be tiresome,and seem insane, especially to others. And by god, it aint the easiest way through life, but once you are able to find enough pieces of 'right', you can put together a system of rights to work with as a tool, to the point where it becomes your ecosystem. In essence, you are building your own fantasy home world with its physics law of 'true love' in a dark and hostile world.

After that, you develop departments. What I mean is...when it comes to the social department, my ecosystem is rather developed. Other departments are still in their infancy. The limitations of functioning in such an alien world, despite all your efforts are however extremely frustrating at times, much like in sci-fi movies where people are confined to small spaces where oxygen is actually distributed, while the rest of the planet isnt accessible to them.

/crazy Ne-metaphor-mind.
 

Tiltyred

New member
Joined
Dec 1, 2008
Messages
4,322
MBTI Type
INFP
Enneagram
468
Instinctual Variant
sx/sp
:smile: I love you but I don't know what you just said.
 

Amargith

Hotel California
Joined
Nov 5, 2008
Messages
14,717
MBTI Type
ENFP
Enneagram
4dw
Instinctual Variant
sx/so
:smile: I love you but I don't know what you just said.

Lol..yeah, I knew that was a risk. What I meant to say was that you feel sometimes like yo uare from another planet? It is possible to acclimatise this planet to resemble 'home' to some extent, the way people in Sci-Fi movies do when they move to some planet far far away that is so different from ours that it doesnt even support oxygen. And then they install facilities to generate that oxygen, to make it livable...but it makes life on that foreign planet still very limited due to the oxygen only being generated in those facilities.

Building those facilities in this world, in this life = finding what feels 'right', finding that 'true love', putting some elements of the fantasy world we 4s long for into reality. And it is exhausting, limiting and frustrating. But it can be done :)
 

Southern Kross

Away with the fairies
Joined
Dec 22, 2008
Messages
2,910
MBTI Type
INFP
Enneagram
4w5
Instinctual Variant
so/sp
Melancholy is just a form of beauty that happy people can't recognize, like the way other species see colors we can't see. Melancholy is comforting and soothing and familiar and good. I also prefer rain to sunny weather, and cold to hot, and slow, sad songs to fast, happy ones.
:yes:

For me, there's beauty in deep emotional truth - it doesn't really matter if it's upbeat or melancholy in nature. I do think happy truths can be powerful if they are conveyed honestly; unfortunately they often aren't.

BTW I like rain too. :)
 

Chiharu

New member
Joined
Feb 22, 2011
Messages
662
MBTI Type
ENFP
Enneagram
7w6
Instinctual Variant
sx/so
For me it's having these grand aspirations and knowing that I can never achieve them, that no one could, but still feeling like a failure for it. I am deeply ashamed of my inadequacies, yet I fantasize excessively about these archetypes of perfection while carefully crafting this image of someone who's cool and aloof and doesn't really care. It's a cerebral sort of masochism, daily.
 

Galena

Silver and Lead
Joined
Mar 12, 2013
Messages
3,786
Enneagram
4w5
Instinctual Variant
sx/so
I'm conscious of an inner arrogance that life is all about overcoming. For the youngest portion of my life, I denied it was there, but it was, peeking through. If you feel so low, why are your fantasies so rich? You think you're weaker than the rest? But lest you forget, only one can be the least. One, singled out, unique. Even if locked in the shadows, still got to be princess of them. That's an unhealthy four. Being alerted to this narcissism hurt because when I faced it for the first time, I found it morally wrong, and that was a sincere judgment through and through. A real feeling that was neither manic nor depressive, but relevant. That's what beginning to integrate to one can be: suddenly, the inner worlds you spent your whole childhood dwelling in feel as unreal as they actually are. But it's positive because you can bring their color back by taking action in the objective world! And the notions that are too grandiose to realize dehydrate and pass on naturally because they're not even so entertaining anymore without that third dimension of tangible progress. I'm still average and not as stable or motivated as I ought to be. You can still smell the youth on me. I still cycle moods, and the lows have a familiar old flavor. But I have a sense of what is and isn't real. Life is slowly but surely starting to move.

In the areas of envy and melancholy, I'm the reverse of what a few people have said.

The envy is more of an issue, feeling like someone stuck a giant pillow between me and the world, muffling my actualization. (Notice a little background voice shouting "I WANNA BE HEARD WITHOUT HAVING TO SPEAK!!!"?) At worst, I could claw that pillow to shreds. At best, I realize that I am holding the pillow and can put it down whenever I want. On a more focused sx level, part of being infatuated is wanting to be the target of infatuation. I recall having a crush on a movie character as a very young girl and expressing it by getting my hair cut like his.

The melancholic, though? Maybe sometime, I actually ought to try sitting with the feeling for a while rather than running around in my head searching for the way back into the sun. The previous sentence is a thought I've never had before. Anyway, rain drives me up the wall, although I do love oppressive, deadening heat. Until about the age of 18, I didn't have the patience for slow, calm music at all. I recently had an art piece commented on as "gothic...a little too ornately, like you're trying." I found that very embarrassing! You bet the next creation was as trimmed-down as I could make it while retaining the hard topic at its base.
 

21%

You have a choice!
Joined
May 15, 2009
Messages
3,224
MBTI Type
INFJ
Enneagram
4w5
We have a lot of Enneagram 4s on the forum and this type is a bit of a mystery to me. For those of you are 4s, can you explain how you experience life as a 4? How do you see the fixations/vices of a 4 - melancholy, fantasizing, envy - as distorting how you experience life on a day to day basis? How strong of an influence or grip do those things have on you?

This may not be true for every 4, but how I experience my 4-ness is something like this:

I am acutely, painfully aware of my self in the universe. I feel a deep melancholy from being separated from the rest of the universe, but at the same time I struggle to remain separated. I am extremely self-obsessed, and I am not ashamed to say it. I want to completely feel and be what I am. It's the experience of being in this very condition that I strive for.

I am touchy about my being me, and even when I'm flawed, I'm uniquely flawed, and that is all part of me. Fours have a thing for being flawed, and perhaps this is what motivated the separation from the universe in the first place. Fours love their special place there, but are ashamed by it as well.

Because I need to be me, I want to experience all aspects of myself, and that means I crave all kinds of emotional stimuli. When I see other people having an emotional reaction or a mind state or just about anything internal that I don't, I get awfully jealous, because I so want to experience it myself.

I don't need to prove to other people that I am unique. I just need to believe that I am.

On the surface, no one ever guesses I'm a 4. No one gets to know about anything that goes on under the surface, because I usually keep it all nicely tugged under some nice cheery Fe.

So sometimes I feel trapped, and I experience turbulent emotions, good ones, bad ones, scary ones, and sometimes I want to run away and completely wreck my life and then throw myself off a cliff. It's hard to explain.

:blush:
 

Amargith

Hotel California
Joined
Nov 5, 2008
Messages
14,717
MBTI Type
ENFP
Enneagram
4dw
Instinctual Variant
sx/so
^I relate to that, most definitely' That feeling of 'right' I was talking about is about feeling emotionally connected. And yes, the isolation and loneliness is maddening when you feel detached from others, from life, from the universe. As is the envy when you see others 'connecting' and you aren't able to :)
 

Azure Flame

Permabanned
Joined
Aug 26, 2010
Messages
2,317
MBTI Type
ESTP
Enneagram
8w7
I like 4's because they can endlessly take something small and make it emotionally impressive and somehow worthwhile, as opposed to myself, where I'm basically the unicron of stimulation seeking and my life gets more and more boring as it goes on and I run out of new and interesting things to do and learn about.
 

Mal12345

Permabanned
Joined
Apr 19, 2011
Messages
14,532
MBTI Type
IxTP
Enneagram
5w4
Instinctual Variant
sx/sp
Here:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/user/HenriLeChatNoir[/video]
 

Tiltyred

New member
Joined
Dec 1, 2008
Messages
4,322
MBTI Type
INFP
Enneagram
468
Instinctual Variant
sx/sp
[MENTION=17945]Webslinger[/MENTION], have you considered a 3 wing at all?

I'm curious if other 4s take things too seriously, or get told by others that they take things too seriously.
 
Top