Everyone has good days and bad days; every type enjoys successes and suffers through failures. Yet we each react to those same successes and failures differently, depending on our cognition. The things we value most, and the things we focus on most, determine how we subconsciously interpret everything that happens to us. While our Type Specialization reflects what we most desire out of life, every cognitive type also has a Type Angst, a reaction to our deepest fears, worries, and insecurities.
Of course, anyone can be afraid of anything. And anyone, of any type, can suffer from any weakness. In fact, it’s much easier to gain the unique weaknesses of other types than it is to gain their unique strengths! When we attempt to adopt the strengths of another type before mastering our own, usually all we end up with is the weaknesses of both and the strengths of neither. Yet each cognitive type has one deepest, most fundamental worry, resulting from their unique order of cognition steps.
As an ESFP Morale Officer, your central fear, beneath all others, is that nothing you do will ever have any lasting effect on anyone. You can make people happy for now, but in the end you won’t have really made a difference. Again, anyone can have this fear. But for Morale Officers, this worry is at the root of them all.
With ESFPs’ weakest cognition step being Action via iNtuition, Morale Officers naturally fear that their actions, and their understanding of the resulting consequences, are especially lacking. Specifically, they worry that their actions lack all-important meaning and significance (F), on a conceptual level (N). You fear that nothing you do really has any lasting, long-term meaning. This unconscious worry that your choices, opinions, and actions are not NF enough results in the fear that you can never have any meaningful impact on anybody’s life for much longer than the present moment. You worry that everything you are, and everything you have to offer, will eventually vanish and be entirely forgotten.
This is almost certainly false, but that doesn’t make the fear any less persistent.
Since these worries come from our cognition, we might not even realize that not everyone has them, just as we sometimes forget that not everyone has our same Type Specialization. And since these fears come from our cognition, they’ve been with each of us for as long as we’ve been thinking. They can be overcome, entirely, but only by understanding how they work. Yet when each of us is young, we inadvertently react to every scare or disappointment through the lens of our own type’s central fear. The things that leave the deepest scars are the ones that hit us right in this most vulnerable place.
But since our minds therefore associate these fears with the earliest experiences of childhood, we ironically tend to run to these fears as if they were a place of safety. Childhood usually feels warm, safe, and right in our minds, even if in reality it was nothing of the sort. So when life gets hard, when disappointment strikes, whenever we feel insecure, overwhelmed, or uncomfortable at all, our minds naturally and inadvertently rush back to these deeply ingrained childhood fears. The coping behaviors that result are our unique Type Angsts.
As a Morale Officer, whenever you feel or experience anything stressful or negative in any way, your mind tries to rush back to the supposed safety of childhood. This causes a surge of your central fear that you can never have a lasting impact on anyone’s life. As a result, you then feel the tempting pull to indulge in ESFP Fry Future Phobia.
Fry Future Phobia is the aversion to anything that requires short-term pain, sacrifice, or conflict for the sake of long-term benefit. After all, when you fear that nothing you do will really have any long-term effects, why waste the present on ineffective sacrifices? Morale Officers are supposed to focus on bringing real happiness and peace into people’s lives as they already are, so it’s natural for them to focus on enjoying the moment and helping others enjoy it too. But when Fry Future Phobia strikes, an ESFP is willing to throw away the future, making decisions that will be terribly costly down the road, if it means having a better time in the present.
This does not have to take the form of partying or procrastinating. Perhaps one of the most common and dangerous manifestations of Fry Future Phobia is when an ESFP refuses to do anything that might call attention to unpleasant problems in people they love, or in their own selves. While some personal problems don’t require any intervention, and in fact are best left alone, other serious problems can fester and eventually burst in a sudden tragedy, causing tremendous hurt and scarring to everyone. Fry Future Phobia tempts ESFPs to ignore even the most urgent of problems in order to avoid rocking the boat, fearing that it won’t make any difference anyway, so why cause unnecessary drama?
Yet when people are hurting themselves and others around them, it doesn’t help anyone if you avoid standing up to them. And it certainly doesn’t help you if you reject offers of guidance. Of course you want to do your best to make yourself and others truly happy, and you should. But sometimes you absolutely need to make someone unhappy in the present, even furious or emotionally devastated, in order to make them far happier in the long run. People don’t always want to be saved, especially from their own bitterness, delusion, or fully fledged hatred, but standing up to them can be by far the most loving service you can possibly give them.
Fry Future Phobia doesn’t want to look at this, because deep down it fears that such a painful sacrifice will end up being wasted anyway. It tells you there’s no point in standing up and ruining people’s enjoyment of the now, and it can lead you to resent those who are willing to stand and save others from their own self-destruction. In the effort to avoid conflict at all costs, you may find yourself giving others a hard time when they’re willing to face unpleasant problems. You can make people happy, both now and in the future, but only by recognizing that you can have such a powerful, lasting impact on everyone you know. Fry Future Phobia causes Morale Officers to sabotage their own treasured specialization, leaving themselves and others in misery rather than face problems and heal them.
Particularly unhealthy ESFPs are willing to burn anything and anyone rather than face their own worst faults. This frenzied avoidance never helps the ESFP feel any better about themselves for more than a moment, and then they feel only more insignificant and ineffective after the high of self-gratification passes. An unhealthy ESFP’s entire reason for being becomes the avoidance of problems even if it means ruining everyone’s happiness, in direct opposition to their Type Specialization. This ultimate contradiction, desperately fighting against one’s own deepest, most treasured desire, is miserable to say the least.
Yet even healthy Morale Officers tend to indulge in Fry Future Phobia when things get hard. As a natural and unintentional way of trying to protect people’s happiness, a Morale Officer may resent or even vilify anyone who stands up against selfishness, cruelty, or bullying. Such unintentional slips into ESFP’s Type Angst are nothing to beat yourself up about; after all, they’re unintentional. Rather, accept what a powerful effect you can have on the lives of everyone you know, even when you don’t see how your actions will affect their future. Do the hard things now. And while facing problems can be excruciatingly hard, there is no happiness like the joy of freedom, of finally and fully emerging beyond the suffocating bonds of things that always used to hold you back.
All types can be tempted to declare that they or their loved ones are already everything they’d like to be, even if it means ignoring glaring truths or putting others down. Our Type Angsts tempt us to feel entitled, like we deserve to already be at our goal, rather than being willing to learn and grow patiently, gaining successes for real. This sense of entitlement is a harmful twisting of the good desire to be special. In reality, everyone can be equally special in ways that are different from one another, allowing all to be unique in unique, diverse ways.
As you surround yourself with the loving support of people who care, as you seek out others who try to understand you and accept you, you can grow less and less vulnerable to the self-sabotage of Fry Future Phobia. Look to your Type Specialization, be a Morale Officer with a vengeance, and your mind will retreat less and less into the fears and scars that result in your Type Angst. And even when no one else is around, perhaps the best, most effective, and most fulfilling way to gradually eliminate your Type Angst for good, is to get in touch with your Paradoxitype.
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