anxiety
fear » guilt
The Observer seeks to discover physical truths and share them with the world. They have a strong sense of the truth, and a strong aversion to untruths.
Intelligent and analytical, the Observer is really great at complexity.
Emotions are arguments, each arguing for survival in one of three arenas:
SELF
The self argument argues for the extended self: You, your family, close friends and valued possessions.
WORLD
The world argument argues for survival in the physical environment, making the feeler confront danger.
SOCIETY
The society argument navigates the complexities of human society, arguing for survival in the tribe.
Eristic order describes the usual order of an archetype's emotional arguments. There's always a self, world and society argument, but the order and expression differs between archetypes.
Your eristic order goes like this:
WORLD
SOCIETY
With a world-first viewpoint, and the two most complex arguments up front, the world-society-self order is great at analysis and complexity.
Benefits: A strong sense of the world
Drawbacks: A weak sense of perspective
Emotions are dualities, having one of two forms that can be felt at a time:
SELF
LOVE/DISGUST
Love argues to add to or nurture the extended self, while disgust argues to remove from the self.
WORLD
FEAR/ANGER
Fear argues to model and understand the world, while anger argues to modify or destroy the world.
SOCIETY
GUILT/PRIDE
Guilt argues to do work for society, while pride argues to be a high-quality member of society.
Your first argument is the world argument, expressing in the fear form.
The second most common first argument behind love, fear connects you to the real world. First-slot fear archetypes are rational and cognitive.
Benefits: Intelligent, creative, observant
Drawbacks: Anxious, fawning, avoidant
Your second argument is the society argument, expressing as guilt.
Guilt as a second argument compels you to second-guess yourself in favor of society. Guilt-second archetypes are good at fitting in with groups.
Benefits: Conscientious, thoughtful
Drawbacks: Pandering, overextending
Emotions are felt in beats, like heartbeats, all three arguments made each beat.
Beats span from one base emotion to another along the LFGDAP scale.
Generally: Farther up and farther to the right are more energy-intensive.
Each beat has a point-of-view shaped by its base emotions.
The Observer is characterized by anxiety, the combination of fear then guilt.
Anxiety spans from fear to guilt.
Anxiety is the emotion best suited to taking in and analyzing information, so the Observer is something of an information sponge.
Anxiety is often future-focused, making the Observer good at prediction. At its highest levels, it makes the Observer an anxious mess, but at lower levels anxiety is, plainly put, just good at figuring things out.
The Observer is the smartest archetype in terms of handling complexity. Systems and logic come easily to this archetype. The Observer will often lean towards science (of course), technology, engineering and math.
Emotions have energy costs:
In a beat, the lower energy emotion is felt first.
While flexible in externalizing, the Observer tends towards the grief/zeal pattern, as zeal is another expression of the fear and guilt that compose the Observer's characteristic emotion.
Passion, anxiety, grief and zeal are the most-used emotions of the Observer.
Zeal is great for working toward a mission. The Observer may struggle with the grief, though. This can be thought of as leftover, or unserved disgust. This personality archetype won't generally seek out the kinds of jobs or hobbies that give disgust rewards, leaving the disgust to turn inward and express as grief. Sometimes the Observer will experience this as "FOMO"—a fear of missing out.
The Observer and the Artist have plenty of complementary strengths. The Artist's strength in creativity is just as stark as the Observer's weakness in creativity.
The self argument handles the concept of perspective. With a third-place, weaker self argument, the Observer may struggle with creativity, storytelling and inventing. Ironically, this archetype is most adept at developing the material skills needed to bring immaterial creative visions to life. In a making sense, this archetype is among the most creative.
Groups, cultures and societies need to satisfy all six base emotions for their members.
They'll typically do this in one of three patterns:
Attachment/envy/zeal cultures are typically family- or individualism-oriented and hardworking.
Devotion/contempt cultures have strict rules, devoted followers and a disdain for outsiders.
Satisfaction works for smaller groups which focus on avoiding fear, guilt, disgust and anger.
All cultures are characterized by one of these three patterns.
The Observer fits in better to the devotion/contempt societal pattern:
Devotion/contempt cultures have simpler-but-stricter rules.
The Observer isn't as good at handling contempt as the Giver. He or she may also need to supplement anxiety, the Observer's characteristic emotion, with passion in order to "fill out" devotion:
Passion and anxiety together function like devotion.
The other societal pattern, attachment/envy/zeal, may present more of a challenge to the Observer:
Anxiety straddles attachment and envy.
The Observer is naturally worse at dealing with attachment and envy, but does tend to do well with zeal. In an attachment/envy/zeal culture, the Observer is best at focusing on zeal— or in more practical terms, focusing on work/career.
The Observer can follow this pattern to fit in with attachment/envy/zeal.
Attaining joy, the fleeting combination of love and disgust, is important to the Observer as a way to escape anxiety without the coping emotion of zeal:
Joy fulfills the missing needs of love and disgust.
The Observer gets the most out of "nerdy" hobbies and entertainment, which essentially combine joy, action and narrative in this pattern:
Joy is fleeting but makes a good pairing with zeal.
Beats (combinations of love, fear, guilt, disgust, anger, pride) have opposites:
Since the coping emotion has the same arguments (self/world/society), but in opposite form, it effectively "turns off" the characteristic emotion, giving you a way out of overwhelming feelings.
The coping emotion serves as a sort of shadow archetype, characterizing you in times of extreme emotion.
Zeal, the combination of anger and pride, is the Observer's coping emotion. It stops the Observer from feeling his/her characteristic emotion of anxiety.
As the highest-energy emotion, zeal can take a toll on the archetype.
Huge undertakings: The Observer may take on huge projects or join them.
Organized anger: The "do something" emotion and the narrativizing emotion of pride together can push the Observer to join activist— and sometimes extremist— organizations.
Jumping to conclusions: Anger can have the same "truth feeling" of fear, sometimes leading the Observer to premature conclusions.
Anxiety/zeal are both high-energy emotions in their respective all-internalizing and all-externalizing groups. As a result, extreme emotions may be exhausting to the Observer.
Emotions can become addictive, like a drug that's made in your head. The addictions usually involve the emotions that make up your archetype's characteristic emotion:
Addiction to fear looks like depression and anxiety, with duress as depression.
Addiction to guilt results in a dramatic personality.
The freeze response stops all action in favor of examination by fear and guilt. For the Scientist, the result can be a sort of analysis paralysis that short-circuits the other four Fs:
Observers can become overwhelmed by the freeze response, but they can also build up the biggest resistance to it, having the most experience with it.
Emotions model and modify their spheres of influence—the extended self, the physical world or the feeler's tribe/society.
| Self | World | Society | |
| Model | Love | Fear | Guilt |
| Modify | Disgust | Anger | Pride |
It can be useful to think of the three dualities as pairs of opposite emotions.
They're also called the internalizing and externalizing forms of an emotion.
Love & Disgust
model/modify
Your extended self
Fear & Anger
model/modify
Your physical world
Guilt & Pride
model/modify
Your tribe/society
Virtues help you avoid the negative effects of an emotion by consciously producing the results of its opposite emotion. It's like coping but conscious and intentional. Here are your archetype's virtues:
Withstanding or overcoming fear. Acting as anger (the 'do something' emotion) would when feeling fear.
Doing the work and making sure it's good work. The use of pride when guilt is felt.
Read all the other archetype descriptions here:
The people most similar to you will be your own archetype:
These archetypes share your eristic order:
These archetypes have the same first argument:
These archetypes share your second argument:
Archetypes with the same missing/third argument:
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