Best handle/post combo of the week.
I want to focus on the morals side specifically. Those experts (c.f. Piaget) who have studied such things say that your moral level as such tends to remain stable-if any change does occur it typically is up the scale (broader perspectives attained), but very rarely down (as in moral decay).
Has anyone seen someone’s morals decay like that, down to and including the psycopath level (IIRC Piaget’s zero level)?
And I doubt that’s something he learned from his family, based on your descriptions of them. Frugal, yes, but in terms of price-to-results ratio rather than on absolute price.
It seems to me that most people stay pretty much the same. However, anecdote:
There was this time when I had just started in a new job, and there was this one coworker. She was just about the nastiest, meanest, grumpiest, most unpleasant and most unhelpful person I’ve ever encountered.
And yet, everyone else at this workplace seemed to have infinite patience with her. When she bitched, they never bitched back. They cut her endless slack. They always responded to her with smiles, no matter what. I didn’t get it. I just figured, well, people here must all be unusually sweet, except for her. I adjusted my own behavior towards this person accordingly, adopting the same patience, never engaging her in any kind of conflict. I wanted to fit in, and I didn’t want to cause any fuss. It seemed strange, though, especially since these other coworkers didn’t seem particularly saintly in other respects. They were otherwise normal. It seemed like this particular nasty person was getting special treatment from them. Of course, it did make the working environment much nicer than it would have been if the hostility had been flying both ways instead of just one. Still, I was puzzled. I didn’t bring it up with anyone, though.
After a few months of this, or thereabouts, one of the weirdest things I’ve ever experienced happened: Her personality suddenly flipped. Just like that, from one day to the next. She went from being nasty to sweet as a puppy. From grumpy, to cheerful and happy. From sniping at people, to helping them, caring about them and asking how their day was. Basically, from demon to the sweetest grandmother you’ve ever had.
And that’s when I understood why everyone had been so patient with her earlier: They must have seen this flip happen before, probably multiple times, and they knew that she would eventually turn back again from nasty to nice.
It was totally a Jekyll & Hyde kind of thing, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. She stayed her nice self for the rest of the time I was at that job.
My thinking is that there are two levels to personality- the inherent traits, and the accumulated experience of having those traits. Various life experiences can change how they’re expressed over time.
For example, I’m inherently careless and not a detail oriented person, and never have been. My tendency is to move on, or at least gloss over the details once I have the concept understood, or the paper or program written. That’s the unconscious default behavior of mine.
Over time, I’ve learned that I do this, and have suffered some negative consequences, so I deliberately double-check and meticulously sweat the details. So much so that I’ve been described as “paying a lot of attention to detail”, which always floors me, because it’s totally a reaction to my inbuilt opposite behavior. At home, I’m still the guy who forgets to put the seat down, or skips steps in the recipe because I’m thinking about something else.
So would you say my personality has changed as a result? I wouldn’t- I’m still the same guy who tends to be casual about getting everything perfect or even noticing the details exist, but I’ve learned that I have to try harder to avoid negative consequences in certain situations.
And Martian Bigfoot, I’d think that behavior you describe might be some kind of mental illness. I’ve been acquainted with a few bipolar people, and they’re sort of like that- either super-depressed, or super-energized, so I imagine it might manifest like that in an older person.
Yeah, you’re probably right about that.
Too late for edit:
Or, I should say, thinking about it now, I suspect you’re right about that. This is odd: The way I wrote that post was basically pulling out my experience of it at the time from my brain. This was a while ago, and I hadn’t really thought about it since. I hadn’t had any experience with bipolar people at the time. Well, I haven’t really since, either, but I do know that it’s a thing now, in a way I guess I didn’t then. Mental illness didn’t really occur to me as an explanation back then, but now, looking back, it seems more obvious.
Huh. A belated light bulb moment of sorts, I guess.
I’m wondering a bit, with this sort of case (as I wondered back then, too) what the “real” personality is. Both? Neither? Something in the middle?
I’d think somewhere in the middle, although that’s only because most of the rest of us live our lives somewhere between the extremes that a bipolar person seems to live in.
I doubt we can change every aspect f our personality but I feel relatively certain that we can and often do make radical changes. I have often heard the term fake it until you make it. I have seen this in action many times. A person trys on a new personality trait that does not feel natural to him or her. The responce they may get could be strong enough to override certain default reactions, if this happens even just a few times it could easily become the new default reaction. I can think of examples of this at almost all stages of my life and have witnessed the same things in others.
Miserable, surly old people were miserable, surly young people. They just get better at it.
A little nature, a little nurture. Sr. Weasel himself did not grow up particularly wealthy or extravagantly. His mother was a social worker and his Dad was the black sheep, worked apart from the family business for a long time. They had more than I ever did, but he was instilled with a sense of financial responsibility I never was. He had a trust from a young age, learned about investing, his Dad was a financial advisor, etc.
But it took him a long time to realize things like, when you can either buy one extremely effective $80 chef’s knife that comes with a lifetime warranty or a crappy $12 knife you have to to replace every year, the $80 knife is the ideal choice. One thing I’ll say for my own spending - I buy quality stuff! He’s learned to trust my judgment on these things.
It’s definitely not static while growing up. I know a lot of kids who change into jerks and then come back out of it.
I do think that the brain is less plastic as we get older, and certain things become basically fixed, unless some extreme force works on it to change it. That can be deliberate or some form of trauma or what have you. It does not require a direct physical alteration of the brain.
If people were fixed, mental illnesses would not be manageable.
I went through a rather dramatic and permanent personality change after my divorce at 40 years old. I think my basic traits remained in tact but the degree to which I employ that particular trait may have dramaticaly decreased or increased. That might be an example of extreme or traumatic.