For no good reason, I was thinking about my childhood today, and whether or not you could see the person I’ve become then, in terms of personality and lifestyle. I’m a pretty clean test case for this, at least subjectively: I draw a very clear line during the summer after freshman year of high school, when I went to math camp at Hampshire College. To me, it’s very clear that this is when my continuous personality starts; that’s when I became a romantic idealist, that’s when my quant inklings started growing geometrically if not exponentially, that’s when I started making super close friends (although actually none from that summer have survived continuously as such).
But the question is: if you could have seen me before then, could you have figured out the person I would have become? As far as I can tell, here are the features of my pre-awakening childhood (I’m defining this as ages 6-12) as such:
1) I invented fantasy worlds. When I was 9 (?), I started something that I called “rocketship,” basically role playing based plot-wise on a jungle gym that resembled the eponymous object. We’d pretend to launch the rocketship to various worlds; there would be missions. We’d run off into the rest of the playground to fulfill them, and come back before we had to take off again.
In addition to rocketship, there was an early version of simbase, a baseball engine operating on fictional players. There was also some sort of lego deathmatch league, where we’d build fighting type machines (with few moving parts), which were rated on both aesthetics and on structural integrity when they crashed into each other.
In all of these things, I was the primary creative force. I don’t remember being a follower in anything like this. I also invented a pencil-and-graph-paper racing-style game, which was actually really good and I should implement a web version sometime.
2) Numbers. Everything was quantized. I kept meticulous track of rank and other attributes during rocketship. Simbase was, of course, all numbers. I ranked my friends in 4 (?) attributes and used these to come up with a quantitative best friends list that I tracked week to week a la Billboard. I programmed text adventures and loved things like hit points and magic points and whatever, all numbers. I loved dice and cards. I don’t even mean math here, by the way: I mean numbers.
3) Reading. I read a ton as a kid, probably like 100 books a year (mostly young adult stuff, but also some more real books). Part of this was that I didn’t yet have the social skills to naturally spend all my leisure time playing, so that got channeled into words. I didn’t write much as a kid, I don’t think: never kept a journal, didn’t write any fiction or poetry or whatnot as other kids sometimes do. But I read a lot.
4) My mother. I had an extremely close relationship with my mother during this period in my life. I told her everything (the ins and outs of school gossip, my personal feelings, who I had a crush on, everything). Some of this is probably also because of the lack of a suffusive social life, and some due to our cramped living quarters. But my mom was really my best friend growing up, even if she was never on the best friends list.
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Okay, so how does this relate to me now? I honestly think looking at this profile, you’d expect me to be a writer. Specifically, the first one, which is more personality-based than any of the other ones. It seems natural to translate the creativity and activity to writing — and in fact I do really enjoy writing. But I guess the numbers won out in the end, and I think there’s even an insight there: I wasn’t cut out to really be an academic mathematician, because mathematicians don’t deal with numbers. My job now is great because I actually am dealing with numbers — actual numbers that mean things. Not theorems or generalities, but concrete numbers, which is why I got hooked on math in the first place.
I don’t see an obvious precursor to my interest in psychology as an adult. I guess you could argue that the reading has something to do with that: that reading books has turned into reading people. I really enjoy first impressions and helping people with problems, and I think that is probably related somehow to the reading.
That leaves my mom. We don’t have a very good relationship now, for various reasons. I think that you can actually draw a pretty sizable connection between this and the romantic idealism, though: I grew up with one person as the dominant figure in my life, and for a long time (and still, really, though not as pathologically) that codependent model of a best friend/soulmate lasted. Someone to share your entire life with. Even outside of soulmate territory, I’ve always wanted a best friend.
Now, obviously there’s a fair amount of horoscoping going on. You can probably draw some sort of connection between A and B for most values of A in childhood and B in adulthood, and there are some missing things. Given that I created all these things in childhood and didn’t really partake in any not of my own creation, it’s probably a bit surprising that I am not in a leadership role and have no desire to be in one. I’m not at a startup, either, which seems like a logical next step. Code is probably the adult version of numbers — a formal system which in many ways bears a strong resemblance to GEB-style arithmetic — and while I really enjoy coding, that’s not my job either. I don’t read a whole lot anymore (not for any good reason, honestly).
I wish there were a database for this sort of thing: trying to predict adult personalities from childhood ones (or for that matter, a database for people who raised children a certain way where you could look at the results of how the kids turned out.) Hey, maybe that’s my startup… unfortunately the cycle time is not very viable in today’s fast-moving world.
