Firing from the hip
And killshotting the binary
Extroverts are like guns in Hollywood movies. Never seem to run out of bullets and give you an unrealistic idealized expectation of a gunfight (or what socialization is supposed to look like for everyone).
Introverts are like most guns in real life. You probably have anywhere from 5 to 60 bullets before you run out, but in the meantime, your bullets kill just as well.
And guess what? There are people that are like artillery, without that many shots but the shots count way more. And people like a rifle with a drum mag, where you’re praying to every deity that you don’t even believe in that your cover holds. And so many more types of people.
So even though it might not seem like it lately, I’ve been fighting in a civil war.
One fought between my desire to reach more readers and my desire to be able to “speak my truth” even when it’s inconvenient.
Seriously, I go back and forth between getting sad at the fact that I lose subscribers every time I post anything on here, and the adult version of Frozen’s Elsa singing Let It Go (“fuck it all, fuck it all”).
Then the good old Nicholas Orcutt from The Fractured Line had to go and write another kickass piece that gave me the push I needed to write another something that didn’t have something to do with my books or being an author in general. (That said, please do buy my books! Indie authors have to eat too!)
In the above piece, Nicholas dissects the stupidity of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test and another similarly garbage piece of pseudoscience. For those of you who don’t know about the MBTI, and as an ethnic Korean I’m very jealous of you, it divides people into buckets based on four axes:
Extraversion (E) vs Introversion (I)
Sensing (S) vs Intuition (N)
Thinking (T) vs Feeling (F)
Judging (J) vs Perceiving (P)
If any of the above seem like they’re heavily aligned to gender stereotypes, … you’re not alone.
Mind you, if you’re scoring say, 51% Introvert and 49% Extrovert (just a hypothetical numbers out of my booty kind of situation here), then you’re probably going to get the I for the first letter.
Never mind that you still have the capacity to socialize with others. If you’re going for a job in a place run by extroverts, who might see the I--- crowd as anti-social, that’ll work against you.
And as an introvert, I feel an obligation to take this opportunity to clarify something. Introvert =/= Anti-Social. It just means that we might have a finite “social battery” that can on occasion need some downtime to recharge, either alone or with a small number of other people only. Or in other words:
Extroverts are like guns in Hollywood movies. Never seem to run out of bullets and give you an unrealistic idealized expectation of a gunfight (or what socialization is supposed to look like for everyone).
Introverts are like most guns in real life. You probably have anywhere from 5 to 60 bullets before you run out, but in the meantime, your bullets kill just as well.
And guess what? There are people that are like artillery, without that many shots but the shots count way more. And people like a rifle with a drum mag, where you’re praying to every deity that you don’t even believe in that your cover holds. And so many more types of people.
Because *le gasp*, human beings are complicated and come in so many kinds of varieties? No, however could that be? /s
The Dark Triad, the other test that Nicholas eviscerated, is pretty similar. It uses three traits / axes instead of four, but it’s a similar personality model proposed by Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams in 2002 [1].
Narcissism — Narcissist or not Narcissist
Machiavellianism — Machiavellian or not Machiavellian
Psychopathy — Psychopath or not Psychopath
What makes a narcissist? Grandiosity, pride, egotism, and a lack of empathy[2].
What about a machiavellian? Manipulativeness, indifference to morality, lack of empathy, and a calculated focus on self-interest [3].
What about a psychopath? Continuous antisocial behavior, impulsivity, selfishness, callous and unemotional traits, and remorselessness [3].
I don’t know about you, but as an American, I and many of the people around me have many of the above characteristics. After all, to paraphrase Shakespeare for my own ends (manipulative, much?), American exceptionalism by any other name would be just as grandiose.
I take an immense amount of pride in being one of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children. A degenerate that Eleanor Roosevelt is purported to have said had “…the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals…”, who personally got a giant ego boost from being able to survive all the nonsense that life threw at me when I made that dubious decision to start eating crayons.
Quickly trying to see how I can use all of the above criteria to describe myself (I’m not a hypochondriac, but this is just for an intellectual exercise):
I have a subjective, and therefore not grounded in objective facts, belief in my own knowledge, skills, and abilities (Grandiosity, pride, egotism) to write compelling stories without regard for the sensibilities of potential readers (lack of empathy) in a desire to influence (manipulativeness) others away from the Overton window of sociocultural constructs of principally Judeo-Christian/Abrahamic and Confucian morality (indifference to morality) because I personally want and believe these stories need to be told (calculated focus on self-interest, selfishness), can’t hold them in anymore (impulsivity), and generally (not always, but often) don’t give a damn about what it will do in terms of my societal standing (continuous antisocial behavior, callous and unemotional traits, and remorselessness).
Ever see bad guys on the news and immediately start wishing for horrible things to happen to them? I refer you to the list of criteria above.
In the Dark Triad test, researchers even found that the core of the entire test is boiled down to agreeing or disagreeing with the statement: “I tend to exploit others towards my own end.”
Which, mind you, if you agree with that statement, might just mean that in this world we live in, that you’re a great fit for a career in say, politics or being an executive at a major company.
I leave you with this parting thought: If I somehow became the richest person in the world, and with that money, bought all of the politicians and made them pass laws that resulted in universally affordable and accessible healthcare, safe housing, nutritious food, clean water, and so on, no matter the consequences to greedy corporations and those seeking to effect artificial scarcity to drive up the value of their own assets, would you really have a problem with that? (Almost like the world and the people in it are too complicated to boil down to simply good or bad, hmmm …)
🫡 and thank you for reading this far,
If you found the above content interesting or just enjoy the spectacle of unhinged TED Talks, please feel free to check out my books and serials. All of which are written with the same irreverence and intolerance of nonsense characteristic of someone who grew up with the world on fire and is sick of it.
I write Military / Espionage / Political Techno Thrillers, Time Travel Alternate History Science Fiction, Spicy but Tender Romance, Comedy, Non Fiction, and even draw some Comics, so there’s something for most everybody.
Except maybe the most puritanical, fanatically religious (so not just peeps who have a faith, but weaponize it) types who’ll be offended by my even breathing. Who I also can’t imagine have read this far anyways.
At the time of this article’s publication, my books are available exclusively on Amazon (Geoff Pesos is a powerful corporate overlord) and my serials can be found here on Substack and through the different platforms listed on the homepage for this Substack publication (with a delay because my Substack subscribers are special to me).
Also, and promise this isn’t an upsell, because those are yucky, but if you’d like to get special access to books and other works before they come out, even chapters as they’re written, please consider joining Team K.E. Bartlet!
This could be as a beta reader (super early versions), Advance Review Copy (ARC) reader to leave reviews soon after release, or in any number of other ways, because I sincerely believe that as a team, we are greater than the mere sum of our individual selves.
About the Author
K.E. Bartlet (KEBartlet.com)
is an author, professional hacker turned cyber warrior turned everyday whackadoo, former Silicon Valley engineer, university professor, and survivor of Uncle Sam’s Big Green … Weenie. She loves to hack life through its cheat codes, dumplings, and disappearing into a good book even while traveling around the world.
For anyone who’s read this far, she uses a pen name since she only slept through part of her OPSEC training after running out of snacks.
Other Works Available Now:
The fall of the CRINK Alliance series:
Honor, Courage, Commitment — Vigilantism Buddy Cop Style à la Jack Reacher.
My Dumpling Your Dumpling — Political Techno Thriller à la Tom Clancy.
Different Worlds — Romance meets Thriller meets Rainbows.
Operation Danger Close — Political Techno Thriller, more à la Tom Clancy.
Shall We Play A Game? — A ragtag group of anti-heroes has to come together to kill a rogue Iranian AI before it takes over the world. Tom Clancy meets Marvel’s Thunderbolts* meets Terminator’s Skynet.
Other works:
In Crayons We Trust: A Satirical Tale of Divine Clusterf*ckery — Religious Satire.
Book of MAGA — A Parody of the Book of Mormon (the book, not the musical) to describe the times we’re living through.
Cosmic Correspondents Dinner — What if a transgender comedian dies, goes to a universal afterlife, and headlines the cosmic version of the White House Correspondents Dinner? Religious Satire + Political Parody + Stand-up Comedy. (Or rather, Sit-down Comedy)
Orcutt, Nicholas J. (2026). The Dark Triad Doesn’t Know You. It Barely Knows Itself. The Fractured Line.
Kohut, Heinz (1977). The Restoration of the Self. New York City: International Universities Press. ISBN 978-0-8236-5810-7
Got tired of doing these, but Dark Triad has the rest and it’s incredibly well sourced.
The fact that we've systematized personality types so much to the extent that we're basing hiring (and firing) decisions on them is pretty rich. Do we know for certain how anyone reacts to any one thing at a given moment in a given situation? One motion seems to be enough in the eyes of some to size up a person and gauge their future - at the least, their ability to handle a particular moment.