View from the North 40: You are who you are, until you aren't

Just be yourself. You are who you were born to be. You are unique and wonderful, don’t ever change. You’re never going to change, are you. Are you?

A popular, widely supported theory about personality is that five traits pretty much account for our entire personality: neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Don’t worry, each trait is measured on a scale, not as an either/or situation.

Yes, the science world agrees that we are all born with our own personality, but traits can be tweaked a bit until about age 5, some even through our teens, but as adults it takes conscientious effort to make changes in personality. Which means technically, I could become a better person, but I actually have to try.

The other major influence that can bring about personality changes are profound life events — the loss of a loved one, birth of a child, an accident, living among people of another culture or lifestyle, higher education, abject humiliation in most forms, an extraordinary kindness during a tough time, reaching that breaking point at which that “enough is enough” feeling comes from a deep place in your soul.

While events like these don’t always shift our personalities, sometimes they do. And while the profound life events are generally personal and affect us on an individual basis, on rare occasions one happens en masse.

Enter COVID-19 stage right, swaggering with open arms to center stage, front. All lights focus on this new character named “Major Life influence.”

Researchers at Florida State University College of Medicine said in an article in the journal PLOS ONE that the “pandemic may have altered the trajectory of personality across the United States,” and described the pandemic as “unprecedented opportunity to examine whether personality changed during a stressful global event.”

Well, you know that old saying, one person’s major life influence is another person’s unprecedented opportunity for research.

That research found that yes, personalities do change during a stressful global event.

Neuroticism, they said, went down very slightly in 2020.

This makes sense, in retrospect anway. Many of us got to go home, our happy place. People resigned themselves to the whims of fate.

Then events stretched into 2021 and 2022 and, well, research says those were dark times for our personalities.

Apparently by 2021 our neuroticism went back up to normal levels but we also became more introverted, less open-minded, more disagreeable and more selfish and self-centered.

“The changes were about one-tenth of a standard deviation,” they said, “which is equivalent to about one decade of normative personality change.”

In other words, the 10 years of effort we would have had to put into changing our personalities, COVID did for us for free in less than two years.

It was a gift, and people squandered it by becoming worse human beings than they were before the major life event.

Not me so much, though.

I’m not bragging, mind you, I’m just saying that people have always made me feel neurotic so any situation that cuts down on the number and duration of human interactions I’m involved in is a positive.

I was working at home; I could do interviews over the phone; all of a sudden it was a good thing to go to the store at odd hours so I wouldn’t run into people; and the few other shoppers and staff there were putting in effort to stay away from me and not converse with me.

Plus, I’m OK with a little hardship. Sure I was a bit worried about the toilet paper situation, but I had a plan — so I got to enjoy some extracurricular creative problem solving activities.

I would’ve been doing a happy dance every day if it weren’t for, y’know, all the death as well as the dissatisfaction of others as they back-slid into a decade’s worth of negative personality change.

I guess you could say that my agreeableness took a downturn because I don’t agree with a lot of the nonsense those negative-nancies started spewing, but I consider it a wash because I don’t have the energy to keep up the good fight against their vitriol so I’m mostly just sitting at home agreeing to disagree. Like, whatever.

Basically, I feel pretty good about myself after reading this research. It’s not often I come out of a serious situation looking good, plus it’s the first time in my life being a lazy weirdo has paid off for me.

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It’s a gift at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .