(2017-10-07) Rubin Whatever Happened To Just Being Type A

Whatever Happened to Just Being Type A? A few years ago, Gretchen Rubin, the best-selling self-help author, pivoted from the happiness racket into the habit business with her seventh book, “Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives.” Embedded in it was a personality typing system of her own invention she called the Four Tendencies: a homage to Freud’s “fateful tendencies.”

• (personality test): https://quiz.gretchenrubin.com

Meanwhile, Ms. Rubin gestated her eighth book. “The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too),” out last month, is already a best seller. By mid-September, over one million people had taken Ms. Rubin’s online quiz, making her the queen of personality typing.

She thinks I’m a Rebel because I’m squirrelly about deadlines, but the quiz deemed me an Upholder when I first took the test, and then a Questioner the second time around; a couple of days ago, I took the test again and came up an Obliger.

Obligers, Ms. Rubin writes, are the most challenging of the Tendencies, other than Rebels. This is because Obligers, pushed to their limits, will go rogue: quit their jobs, walk out on their marriages, abruptly end friendships. Obliger rebellion, she calls it. (Lateness, she writes, is a small but popular form of Obliger rebellion.)

According to Ms. Rubin’s research, Questioners have other charming weaknesses in addition to a certain mulishness about deadlines. These include “crackpot potential” and an inability “to accept closure on matters that others considered settled if their questions aren’t answered.”

The energetic Ms. Rubin, a member of four book groups who has said that she loves to take notes, “often for no apparent reason,” larded her memoir with insights and observations, nuggets from Nietzsche to Diana Vreeland (and the Duke of Wellington, whose advice is to urinate whenever you get the chance, a happiness booster we can perhaps all agree on), along with enough social science “data” to fill three Malcolm Gladwell books.

The book and its offspring — journals, calendars and coloring books — have been consistent best sellers

Personality typing has long bubbled merrily atop the self-help soup. Self-improvement may be a distinctly American habit, from its founding, a national credo, but the father of psychological types was Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, who laid them out in a book of the same name in 1921.

“As swipe-based dating apps proliferate, the pressure is on to differentiate yourself in sound bites,” said Emily Listfield, a co-founder of Jyst, a dating-advice app. “One trend we see is people putting their personality types in their profiles as a shortcut to describing themselves

“This kind of neat categorization is highly appealing when one’s internal emotions and struggles are so messy,” said Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, an associate professor of history at the New School who has been researching wellness and self-help culture since the 1950s.

Since 1975, self-help books — nonfiction books that offer advice for behavior modification and make explicit promises for positive change — have doubled as a percentage of all book titles,” Dr. Whelan said. “Self-help offers us hope that we can take control of our lives. The more alienated we feel from what’s going on in the larger world, the more likely we are to seek to regain some sense of control. And what can you control? Yourself.”

Personality typologies seem to multiply with each publishing season, growing ever more baffling

Ms. Rubin devised an online quiz and, last summer, introduced an app, Better, a digital hub for women — and the occasional man — eager to join accountability groups, tweak their organizing, exercise and networking practices.