Yama
Permabanned
- Joined
- Dec 1, 2014
- Messages
- 7,684
- MBTI Type
- ESFJ
- Enneagram
- 6w7
- Instinctual Variant
- so/sx
Quoting myself because this post is perfect and I think the closet I've ever come to properly explaining Si, which can be hard to articulate.
Si is very similar to Ni, but instead of drawing its archetypes from some sort of collective unconscious, it creates its own archetypes from experience, and these archetypes do not change. Because if archetypes can change, then what the hecky is the entire point of having an archetype in the first place? It becomes completely useless and the world is chaotic.
For example, from my experience, a chair has legs, a seat and a back. Does it have all of these qualities? Congrats, it's a chair. Missing one? Not a chair. Ever. So imagine you show me a barstool. It has legs. It has a seat. No back. It's not a chair. And you can argue with me all day long, but I will never, ever classify it as a chair because it does not meet the archetype's qualities, and archetypes never can change or else they become meaningless. Si can be extremely stubborn about this.
BUT, since these archetypes are based off of personal experience, one Si user's archetype won't necessarily match another's. Maybe to me, a chair has legs, a seat and a back so a barstool is not a chair. But maybe to another Si type, a chair only needs legs and a seat, so a barstool is a chair. And we can argue all day, but neither of us are going to compromise, because we take these archetypes very seriously. The whole point of an archetype is that it is constant, eternal, never changing. If we can change a definition or an archetype whenever we want, then they lose all meaning. This is why sometimes people can find Si frustrating or "stuck in its ways," but it really does depend on the individual Si types' archetypes and personal experience. Older SJs will have archetypes that look very different from younger SJ's archetypes because they grew up in a different time period and had vastly different experiences that structured those archetypes.