He’d rather feel everything than settle for ordinary. The twist he never sees coming: the depth he’s been chasing was hiding in the plain, unremarkable days all along.
THE MORE creatively oriented of these men believe they can “fix” the world by finding some perfect interpretation, or representation, of the world’s imperfection, and giving that back to the world in the form of art, music, poetry or literature. They believe that their creation will cause people to have that perfect insight that will forever change human nature and bring about some kind of nirvana.
Of course, they never quite manage to “nail” the message, and their audience never quite “gets” it the way they’d hoped. And so it’s a never-ending quest. If they’re not professional artists, musicians or writers, they’ll still carry that yearning, and will at least express their desire to bring about nirvana on earth as a quest for their own personal meaning.
At a deep level, what they can’t handle is the possibility that life is chaotic, random and meaningless — or, as Hobbes put it, “nasty, brutish, and short”.
At a low level of maturity, they can spend too much time in contemplation without reaching any conclusion or producing any results, and be prone to bouts of melancholy. At a high level of maturity, they can temper the world’s suffering with great beauty and art. Paragons of the type — creative in orientation and mature in expression — would include Carl Jung himself (though he may also fit the “Learned” Right Man), Bruce Springsteen, or Deepak Chopra.
How people see you
You’re not like all the other guys. You’re different. You’re deep. You’ll have heard those phrases more than once by the time you turned twenty. And it isn’t just that you dress with a sense of style and creative flair, or that you stare off into the distance while everyone around you is jabbering about nonsense. Those are just the indicators of your reflective self-awareness and your habit of questioning things — including yourself.
You have the air of an intellectual, a thinker. Some people find that intriguing, some intimidating, and others may find it pretentious. To that last group you’d say, quietly, that they simply don’t understand you; lacking your sensitivity, they’re philistines. You hate superficiality, and nothing matters more to you than an authentic, meaningful conversation. When people do engage you, they discover that you really are a thinker, that you really are different, that you really are deep.
Your yearning and questioning can carry you off into reverie, so you can tune out of a room and risk seeming “distant”. Those close to you may take it personally at first, but they learn that these phases usually precede — and almost seem necessary to — your bursts of creative output.
And if you’re not an actual artist, you’ll still look like one. Even on a conventional path — lawyer, actuary, accountant — you’re the one with the off-beat touch: a bracelet, a tattoo, the man bun. The tell is that you still harbour secret aspirations to get published, or to finally do something that matters.
How you see the world
The world is home to man’s fallen state. Everything is so much less than it could be, so much less than ideal — and you see it everywhere, and you yearn for the ideal. If pressed to describe that ideal, you’d struggle; you certainly wouldn’t hand over a list. You’d go away and think, and come back with a poem full of longing, like Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth, or a song like The Cure’s Disintegration, or a painting like Munch’s The Scream.
Whatever you made would express a feeling as much as an idea — that feeling of longing you live with all the time, like a faithful pet. Bruce Springsteen, an exemplar of the type, described his own work as measuring the distance between what’s reality and what’s a dream, and called it a rich subject to write about.
You feel the suffering of the world while everyone else talks about the latest reality TV series. No wonder you feel broken sometimes.
“Why?” is a question you ask a lot. Why is life so full of suffering? — while everyone else discusses the weather. Why is this building so ugly? — while everyone else talks about the latest reality TV series. No wonder you feel broken sometimes. This is where you diverge from the Restless Optimist: he sees future possibilities; you see — or rather feel — current ones. You can feel how this building, this family, this very moment could be, right now, if it were its own ideal version of itself.
Your reverie can deepen into melancholia, and further still into a malaise that can look like depression. Your way out is almost always the same: capture the thought or the feeling in something made.
Why people like you
You’re deep, and you can hold a real conversation. You’re sensitive, and you can name your feelings. You’re intuitive, and so you’re tuned to other people’s. You’re more likely than most men to care about art, music, architecture and design, and to have a genuine language around them. You have an original take on things. For all of that, you make interesting company — not in a once-off, “too much” kind of way, but on an ongoing basis.
You have a good sense of style, and you may even be a bit of a trendsetter in your circle. If you share a home, you’ll contribute real ideas to its design and be glad to go and find the pieces. You can even tell a woman something true about her outfit when she asks — without the eye-roll, and without getting into trouble. That’s not even a joke; your sensitivity lets you land it.
At your best — especially with a can-do streak and some decisiveness added in — you’re the man who most offers that extra dimension of self-awareness, depth and creativity that many women hope to find.
As a friend, you’re the one who quotes the poets and philosophers and stays up late in the deep end of a conversation, willing to go to the dark places with someone and bring an unusual angle back. At work you bring a unique lens, a real concern for people, and, more than most, a concern for the environment. You’d rather do your own thing than climb — and if you do lead, it’s usually something you built yourself.
Why you drive people crazy
A man becomes a problem to himself and others when he’s too one-sided — and here that means too deep, or too sensitive. The trouble with depth is that you don’t always know where the bottom is. Ask you about Brexit and, instead of “it should never have happened”, you’ll offer, “Well, if you look at the whole thing of collective national identities, it’s never really been guaranteed, has it?” Everyone stares. Huh?
Living in the abstract can also mean that thinking about a thing is enough for you. The idea for a novel arrives; the six months of actually writing it seem like a dead bore. So you take another deep dive instead — and the people around you watch you grow old while no songs, poems or scripts ever leave your head, however brilliant they are in there. You can become ever more convinced of your unrealised greatness, and quietly cynical, and you may take others down with you.
The abstraction shows up in love as a push-pull. You’re drawn to a woman you’ve cast as your muse; the moment she turns out to be human, you drift back to the ideal in your head; then she does something that reignites the fantasy and you’re smitten all over again. It’s unsettling to live beside, and it manufactures a lot of unnecessary drama.
You can also be too idealistic, too fussy about the vegan, plastic-free life, too keen to talk about your feelings — while the chores, the exercise, and sometimes the people, quietly wait. In time, the woman who thought she’d found the man she always wanted may start to yearn for something a little more solid, decisive and predictable.
Your core fear
Here is the uncomfortable part. That longing, and the art you make from it, is exactly what gives you meaning — which means, at some level, you need the world to stay in its fallen state so that you always have something to long for, to write or sing or paint about. This is why you can never quite be happy with the ordinariness of things. If you ever got what you were reaching for, you wouldn’t want it. Life would lose its point.
So your core fear is to discover that life is actually meaningless — that there’s no ideal, no escape, nothing to do but go through the motions. And riding on the back of that one is a second fear: that you, yourself, might be ordinary — ordinary in talent, and ordinary in the significance of anything you’ll ever contribute.
You might have noticed that sometimes the longing for a thing is more deeply satisfying than the thing itself. So God forbid you should ever achieve it all.
That is the real reason you might avoid ever finishing anything. While the work stays in your head or your drawer, the question stays open and the delusion of greatness stays intact. Put it out there, and you’ll know exactly where you stand.
Because if you do create, you learn that creating is mundane — the writer discovers how painfully ordinary it is to sit and write every day; the singer rides the bus to perform the same song again and make each night feel like the only one. Those boring, repetitive experiences bring you down to earth. And, strangely, that is the doorway. Face your ordinariness, and you may finally find the very beauty and meaning you were chasing all along.
Your journey through the four stages of maturity
The journey to maturity for every man involves building an ego and its inevitable dark side, or shadow — and then, hopefully, integrating that shadow. A man’s shadow holds the data belonging to the one part of life he tries to avoid, deny and escape. For you, the Deep Original, that avoided thing is the drabness — the disappointing ways life fails to match its promise, the apparent meaninglessness of it all, and the possibility that you might turn out to be “just a number”.
As a child, you probably suffered for your sensitivity. Perhaps it was recognised and nurtured; just as likely, a sibling, a Coach, a parent or the playground tried to beat or bully it out of you, or simply ignored it, and you experienced yourself as “odd” or “different” without quite knowing why. Either way, you retreated into an imaginative world — one more ideal than the physical one — where you could live for hours, in thought or in the making of things.
As an adult, you keep resisting the bullies and the cultural cretins, and you strive to maintain and express your individuality — to feel, in some way, that you’re “above it all”. That theme drives your rebellion in the early years and your criticism of the world in the years after: the ways society herds people into meaningless jobs and turns them into statistics, and your quiet determination that this will never, ever happen to you.
And here is the counter-intuitive part. As the shadow first begins to press, you don’t soften — you double down. You become more of a purist, more insistently different, more certain there’s a pot of gold at the end of the meaning-seeking rainbow, and you go further down the rabbit hole to find it. The depth intensifies before anything gives.
The great arc of your journey is to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Then, gradually, the evidence you’ve been ignoring starts to break through. Life keeps handing you the same feedback, and something in you begins to register that you no longer have to defend yourself the way you once did. It dawns on you that your individuality speaks for itself and doesn’t need proving. It dawns on you that no matter how big a star you become, you still have to pay the rent, attend the family reunion and stand in the queue to vote like everyone else — and that, horror of horrors, you can be ordinary and the sky won’t fall. You can operate on the surface a good deal more, and — this is the joke of it — almost nobody will notice, and almost nobody will care.
That is the great arc of your journey: to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, the beauty in the drabness, and the meaning in the apparently meaningless drudgery of life — including in your own. Read between those lines and the door is already open.
And the road runs through four recognisable men. In the Red stage (roughly 16–25) you arrive as the Seeker — a rebel in search of meaning. In White (26–35) you become the Creative — a white knight full of longing and, hopefully, talent. In Grey (36–55), through the midlife passage, you can emerge as the True Original. And in Black (56+) you become the Master.
What happens inside each stage — where you get stuck, what finally breaks through, and how the “pure” artist and the “commercial” artist walk the same arc so differently — is the map that turns this doorway into a road. That is the work of the full report.
Download your Type 4 report — The Deep Original — and walk your own journey from Seeker to Master, one stage at a time.
Neil Bierbaum is an Enneagram practitioner and leadership coach with more than 20 years in practice and over 500 type debriefs. He created the Four Stages of Male Maturity framework — adapted from the work of Carl Jung and Robert Bly — and The Enneagram for Men series, mapping each type’s path through the stages of maturity and the work of shadow integration. He works with men one-to-one through the Enneagram and the four stages of male maturity →.
