Monthly Archives: November 2009

As of Friday last week, I’ve been married to an INTJ for 13 years. I attribute most of that success to finding someone who was willing to put up with me. That and the fact that I’ve never expected her to make me happy. Your personal happiness is a big burden to place on another person.

I’ve always believed that if my life was crap, burdening someone else with the responsibility to relieve the crappiness is just a crappy thing to do someone. They have their own crap to deal with.

I am so screwed.

Let’s do the INFP thing and begin at a seemingly unrelated topic: fractals and complex systems.

Fractals have a property called self-similarity which means that if you just looked at part of the fractal, that part would look roughly similar to the whole.

Complex systems have self-similarity. A person’s life is one of those complex systems where interconnected behavior act upon each other to produce various outcomes. Say you’re an early riser. That behavior produces a different set of outcomes than if you were a night person. Different opportunities present themselves. Different actions are taken. Different results are produced.

Self-similar properties get observed when you take the entire span of a person’s life and map the ups and down and sideways of that life. That pattern of a lifetime would look very similar to an hour of a person’s life which would be similar to a day which would look similar to a week or a year.