How do you experience your sense of the past and future? Do you have clarity of memory, nostalgia, dreams about the future? I'm having a little trouble wording my question, but I understand that Si and Ni have time orientations towards past and future, although both plan things out. It may be that Si enables more accurate memory than the other functions, so I was wondering if you experience Si as a strength for memories, etc.
I don't see myself as being fixated on the past, and I definitely don't live in the future. The present is where I reside and focus all of my attention. However, the past has shaped my experience and thus influences my decisions in the present. ("I won't talk to that person because that person was an asshole to me in elementary school.")
Honestly, I have a shitty memory. I remember almost nothing about my childhood. I don't remember what I did last week. After a couple days, everything gets purged from my mind unless it's really important and made an impact on me somehow. What I do remember, though, I remember accurately; I wouldn't say detailed in the visual sense (everything in my imagination looks kind of fuzzy and vague when visualized), just detailed in events. I'm not nostalgic (lower Si imo) as much as I am sentimental (higher Si imo--and which is different from nostalgia). This sentimentality is rather closed off though--well, I am a person am rather closed off--so some people see it and some people don't. My ENFP mother and INTP sister have accused me of "having no sentimentality" because I didn't want to do something I saw as useless (walk when I graduate from college). However, my choice not to walk at graduation is because, from my knowledge of high school graduation, graduation ceremonies as boring as fuck and a waste of time because I don't know anyone at my current school. I don't see this at all as not being sentimental. Basically, nostalgia is like hearing that one song you danced to at prom and having a "moment". Sentimentality is a complete re-experience of past events in the present. Where was I going with this again? Oh yeah, so I'm not nostalgic as much as I am sentimental but unless people are close to me and I've let my barriers down around them (none of you would recognize me irl I'm so different) they don't even see that sentimentality. Sentimentality to me is a very private thing, too.
I don't have any dreams or goals for the future. I don't think about the future at all. The present will lead to the future so I focus on this. If I try to plan out my life it just stresses me out. The plans would just get fucked up anyway when things inevitably come up. I don't even have a vague end goal.
Honestly though, memory, sentimentality and nostalgia are not what Si is; Si is about archetypes. I think I made a post somewhere else about what I mean by that but I'm too lazy to find is so I will just try to re-explain it.
Si creates archetypes from personal experience and compares what it faces in the present to that archetype. This archetype is solid, unchanging, completely static; if archetypes could change or be altered and re-defined, then there is
literally no point to there being an archetype. This is why Si doms may have a reputation for being stubborn or "stuck in their ways" depending on the archetype.
For example:
One Si dom's archetype of a chair is a seat that has legs and a back. Imagine this Si dom sees a barstool and someone calls it a chair. They argue with that perosn. No, it's NOT a chair. It doesn't have a back and all chairs have seats, legs, and backs. This item does not qualify as a chair because it does not meet a chair's archetypal qualities.
BUT, unlike Ni (which I think it more about universal archetypes), Si's archetypes, being based completely on past experience, are
unique to the individual. One Si type's archetype may not match another's.
Let's imagine the person the Si dom from the argument above was arguing with--the one who called a barstool a chair. Maybe this person is also an Si dom, but their archetype of a chair looks different; to them, a chair need only have a seat and legs. Thus, a barstool qualifies as a chair to them, but
not to the first Si dom. And neither of them are going to change their minds about who's right, ever. Because archetypes do not,
cannot change, or else they lose all meaning.
...This ended up being longer than I expected. Sorry
What about the process of a sandwich?
Bread. Mayo. Cheese. Lettuce. Bread. Done.
Do you hold onto grudges? What's your sense of humor like? Do you feel appreciated by the people in your life?
I'm really bad at holding grudges. In the heat of the moment I feel like I'm going to have a grudge forever, but end up actually being the one to approach the person who angered me to resolve things, because I don't want to lose them. That is, depending on what they did and how important they are to me.
I have many senses of humor. Stupid humor. Morbid humor. But mostly, inside joke kind of humor. There's a specific humor dynamic between ISxJs that's hard to describe but it's really fun.
And no, no one expresses appreciation to me so if they do appreciate me, I do not know it or feel it. I don't really do anything worth appreciating anyway, not at this point in my life where all I'm doing is going to school and living at home for free.