Types of people

For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings lived in exactly the same way. There was a small community or village with a number of human beings living there, maybe around 200 people. This community was far enough from the next community that there was no struggle for resources - there was water, animals to hunt and land to plant food on. The vast majority of the existence of humanity has been in this form.

It is only much, much later that something changed and we started building civilisations. I suppose that the thing that would have changed would be the ability to transfer knowledge via some form of writing. Even in villages, we had an impressive ability to communicate information, but without writing, the vast majority of information disappears. With writing, this information stays and allows the building of civilisations.

In those small, village-like societies, there would always be need for certain roles that needed to be done. Just the same way ants have specialisations, human villages have specialisations. For example, someone has to farm and someone has to hunt. Both roles need to exist for the entire village to succeed.

But could there be a personality propensity towards particular roles? Could it be that some people are born with personalities that guide them towards fulfilling particular roles in the village?

Maybe. There are two possibilities for how humans could be:

1. Everyone is born in exactly the same way, and they grow up, find a role that is not currently being done, and they fill that slot.

2. People are born with characters that make them gravitate towards a particular role. For example, someone prefers to be a farmer, and someone else prefers to be a hunter.

To decide which of the two is more plausible, the most important thing is this - do these skills really require different characters, or can anyone do any role? Is the personality of a soldier the same personality as that of a medicine man? Are these personalities obvious, even as little kids?

Some will say that all personalities are the same, but in my own subjective single-viewpoint observation, I see different personalities even in very small children. Some kids have that soldier boldness, and some immediately gravite towards gentle nurturing.

If that one assumption is true, that different personalities are needed for different roles, then it would also imply that a village needs a good mix of all the personalities to exist in the children born there. Only then can it be successful.

These are the personalities I have identified so far that a village would need to be successful:

1. Farmer: Someone who grows and nurtures things
2. Cook: Someone who socialises with others and makes food for the community
3. Hunter: Someone who goes out every day alone, and returns with meat
4. Builder: Someone who knows how to construct structures that others can use
5. Healer: Someone who researches and understands things around and how they can be used to help the community
6. Merchant: Someone who travels to find goods, and brings them back to exchange for money
7. Storyteller: Someone who gets information and spreads it around as far as possible.

These personality types remain today in almost everyone. If you try, you can probably fit in people around you into one of these. Let me go into more detail into the personality types to understand how it works today:

Farmer

A farmer is someone who cares about the process of growing something. They kick off something, and are willing to spend every single day nurturing and taking care of it, till it comes out the best it possibly can. They are not there only for the harvest, their joy comes from the daily tending and taking care of their “farm”.

In the modern world, you can still see a lot of these people doing actual gardening. But it also manifests itself in other ways, for example people who take care of their car obsessively.

Cook

The joy of a cook is not in serving the food, but in the process of cooking. Cooking has always been a community activity - it is often the heart of a community. A cook sits with other people, and chats and discusses about the on-going things in the village. The cook is the most social person in the village, and enjoys spending time with other people every day. The cook also teaches other people to cook without treating it as a big deal.

In the modern world, there are many cooks - many people who enjoy hanging out with friends at work, chatting all the time, staying in contact all the time and constantly updating about what is going on in the world.

Hunter

The hunter is a solitary individual. Hunting has mostly not been a group sport in the history of mankind - hunting involves setting traps for small animals, or carefully tracking some kind of deer for hours and hours. The hunter is detail oriented, silent and has the ability to hyperfocus for a long time. The hunter is also attracted to physical sports, and would have good coordination.

The hunter gets their joy from a successful kill after a long period of stalking. They also live off the praise they would get from the village when they brought back a big one.

The hunter spends lots of time alone, but it does not mean they don’t enjoy company when they are back in the village.

Builder

The builder is the engineer of the village. They live for setting up new structures. They know the intricacies of how things join together to form new structures. Ther joy is in the process of erecting and creating something new. Once it is built, they are not that interested in maintaining it, but would rather move on and build the next item.

The builder wants to learn new techniques and gets exciting anytime they see a new way of building.

Healer

The healer is the research scientist of the village. The “witch doctor”. Their job is to know everything about potions, herbs, roots and other useful chemicals. They learn from the healers before them, and they are excited to experiment as much as they can. Though they heal, that is not where their joy is. Their joy is in discovering new herbs and figuring out how to apply them. They typically do not reveal their information to the rest of the world, as the info they have can be as dangerous as it can be helpful.

Merchant

The merchant connects the village to the next village. No village can survive without trade, and the merchant goes all around the world, discovers things that he or she can sell, and then bring them to where they can be sold. The merchant enjoys exploring, disovering new things, meeting new people and doing bargains.

Storyteller

The storyteller enjoys spreading the news. The storyteller enjoys being the center of attention, and moving information as fast as possible from one place to another. While the cooks spend time together, the storyteller prefers to be the star. The storyteller is good at entertaining and making people happy, but the real value of the storyteller is to ensure that news spreads to as many villages as possible.