What Makes Self-Knowledge So Shareable
Self-knowledge is big on social media. We love to share our Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, horoscopes, and even diagnoses. But why?
Back in 2019, Steph Barron Hall had the viral moment that many creators crave—or, conversely, fear. Sophia Bush, Jay Shetty, and a slew of other influencers reposted her image and started the wave of attention that would help her amass over 250,000 followers on Instagram.
Before her “big break,” Steph was on Instagram to promote a line of Enneagram-inspired mugs, and unfortunately, that content wasn’t getting much traction. So she tried to post about the Enneagram as a tool, educating followers on how the system works. “When I actually posted about the Enneagram tool, that’s what people really liked and engaged with,” she told me in an interview. “I kind of pivoted at that point to offer more of the service and education [content].”
Steph had a full-time job, she was in graduate school, and she was running her growing Instagram account. She was burnt out—and she knew she needed a break.
Feeling desperate for a bit of time off, Steph took to Instagram. She posted to her Stories and asked her followers: “How do you find rest?” As the responses came in, she realized there were strong themes that could be organized by Enneagram type. “So I created this post called Nine Types of Rest. I just threw it on a graphic, posted it, and walked away,” she recalled.
Needless to say, this post—the one that went mega-viral—did not lead to a life of leisure and rest.
Today, Instagram is awash in Canva-created inspirational or information graphics. But back in 2019, that was not the case. Posting graphics—rather than a stylish selfie—was considered a bit gauche. “When I started, posting graphics was not how people did things on Instagram,” she explained. A year after she started the account, after she’d amassed over 100,000 followers, a social media marketing friend told Steph that what she was doing (i.e., posting graphics about the Enneagram) shouldn’t work. The friend told Steph, ‘I don’t know why this works because it shouldn’t. The algorithm is not supposed to like this.’
It works, and the algorithm loves it, because algorithms are coded to reward engagement. And what’s more engaging than a graphic you can share to your Stories or DM to a friend that sheds a little light on who you are?
One of the chief reasons we use social media (at least before its enshittification) is to share more about ourselves, our lives, and our points of view with our friends and family. Whether it’s based on the Enneagram, the Myers-Briggs, neurological diagnoses, astrology, StrengthsFinder, or any of the myriad other self-knowledge systems out there, people love this type of content because it’s a shortcut to self-expression. It’s a readymade way to say, ‘This is who I am.’
Keep reading or listen on the What Works podcast.
Steph Barron Hall, aka @ninetypesco, went viral five years ago. I spoke with her for this series in 2022. While the aesthetics have evolved, this self-knowledge content trend is as strong as it has ever been. So something about this trend is tapping into more than just our internet-stoked vanity.
At least, that was my hypothesis. And that’s what this fourth installment in the Self-Help, LLC series is all about. This series is all about the business and politics of self-help—how it operates, why we’re so attracted to it, and how we might think about personal growth in new ways. The series also poses a core question: Are we all in the self-help business now?
Before we get back to Steph’s story, let’s take a closer look at one of the most fundamental questions of the human experience:
Who am I?
In my book, I devote a whole chapter to this question, inspired by an episode of Hurry Slowly, in which Jocelyn K. Glei poses the question: Who am I without the doing?
When I first encountered this question, I assumed I was trying to uncover my core, essential self. My true identity. The nut of who I am without the pressures of the outside world. But the more I explored the question, the less it seemed like I could uncover that essential self.
Well, I am in good company when it comes to doubt about my true, most authentic identity. Existentialist philosophers started to come to this conclusion almost a hundred years ago. They argue that there isn’t some pre-established essence inside each of us. There isn’t a Who I Am underneath layers of dust and culture and lived experience.
Skye Cleary, in her book about the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, explains it like this:
To become authentic means to create our own essence. It’s the creation that is vital here. We don’t discover ourselves, we make ourselves.
One way to see all the content about personality types and conditions is as a response to the yearning for an essential Who I Am. But another way to see it is that it helps us to identify ourselves at this point in time and learn more about who we want to become. About who we want to make ourselves.
This content also helps us see others as they are and as they might want to become. While biases certainly exist, a system like Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram is purposefully ambivalent about any hierarchy when it comes to types. My 3 is not better or worse than my husband’s 9. My INTP is not better or worse than his ENFJ. But knowing that he’s a 9 and an ENFJ helps me make sense of our differences and remember that he will make different choices than I do. Knowing that I’m autistic, and he’s decidedly not, helps us navigate misunderstandings.1
None of these labels or the graphics that make use of them can fully convey who I am or what I’m about. But they can be a helpful shorthand. At the least, these labels encourage us to recognize and respect others and their unique experiences, just as we hope they recognize and respect us.
With that all said, if you’re not already schooled in the Enneagram, you are probably wondering what its deal is.
What is the Enneagram?
The Enneagram is a self-knowledge system that addresses what motivates us—and, in turn, how we communicate or relate with others because of how we’re motivated.
For instance, as a Type 3, I’m motivated by a quest for significance. I want to be useful, valuable, and even distinguished in the fields that are important to me. Within that motivation, I have a deep fear of being worthless and undeserving. On the other hand, I know my husband, as a Type 9, is motivated by a desire for peace and stability. He prefers to avoid conflict and so ends up being very agreeable—sometimes in self-destructive ways.
What the Enneagram is not offering is a picture of my essential self. Instead, it’s a sort of sensemaking tool. The system helps people make sense of why they do what they do, how that motivation can cause them stress, and what makes them feel good. The Enneagram offers pathways for healthy growth and shows how stress can manifest in action. It’s a system with existential freedom and authentic change built in. I’m not an Enneagram evangelist, and I’m not unaware of the challenges with any personality typing series—but I do appreciate the wider range it gives us for understanding ourselves and others.
I found Steph Barron Hall’s @ninetypesco account on Instagram around the same time I was first learning about the Enneagram system. I was immediately struck by the care she offered in each post. Her posts went deeper and offered more nuance than many of the other content I’d come across on the subject. Her posts were shareable but steered away from becoming self-referential sharebait.
When I started thinking about the rise of self-knowledge content on social media, I immediately reached out to Steph for an interview.
Steph is a twice-certified Enneagram professional with an MA in Communications and Leadership Studies. She’s also the founder of NineTypes.co, a coaching and consulting business that uses the Enneagram to help people communicate better.
Steph told me that her fascination with personality types started young. “I remember having a book that [said] if your favorite color is X, then that means [Y] about your personality,” she said. Her childhood interest blossomed into an educational interest and inspired her to study psychology in college. But it wasn’t until her husband introduced her that she learned about the Enneagram system. Those early conversations with her husband dovetailed into a bit of an obsession. And before long, it turned into a business idea.
Before NineType.co, Steph ran a wedding floral business on top of a full-time job. She was exhausted from the relentless schedule and the physical demands of working with flowers. In an effort to generate some cash flow without further taxing herself, Steph started to think about building a digital product. “I basically got bored for five seconds,” she told me, and that’s when she created the line of coffee mugs featuring the Enneagram that eventually led to her viral Instagram moment.
Understanding The Algorithm
Long before Cory Doctorow coined the term ‘enshittification,’ creators, social media marketers, and even casual users have been frustrated by The Algorithm.
No one likes to spend time creating a great set of graphics or crafting an engaging video only for a minuscule segment of their audience to see it. When we talk about “changes in the algorithm,” we often do so in a way that makes it sound like there is someone out there dictating what content is going to do well and what content is not. Now, that’s not entirely untrue. For instance, in 2022, Instagram’s leadership put their thumbs on the scale when it came to video. But the vast majority of the time, The Algorithm uses data about what content people engage with and then surfaces more of that same content to those people. This happens on an individual user level and on a platform level.
If we want to figure out what content will do well on the platform, we need to consider how humans are actually engaging with the platform. What are they there to do? What needs are being fulfilled? And how does that impact the kind of content they’re likely to comment on, save, or share? Instagram (and really any social media platform of note today) has become a key way people develop and signify their personal brand—not only in an entrepreneurial sense but in a human relationship sense, too. We want people to know what we’re about.
The photos we share, the graphics we create, and the videos we post help clue others into who we are.
Self-knowledge content goes viral because people want to share things that reveal interesting or unexpected things about their inner workings. I might share a meme that reveals some quirky autistic trait or evidence of my pervasive anxiety. You might share a meme that reveals how much of a people-pleaser you are or how much you love following rules. But for as much as we reveal through sharing this type of content, it’s only a tiny fraction of who we are, much less who we are becoming.
We don’t share to be seen as who we are—we share to be seen as who we hope others will believe us to be.
Micki McGee explains that the work of self-help has often taken the form of visualizing ourselves as if we were directing ourselves in a movie. We view our inner world by “imagining how it might appear” to others. As an autistic person, I do this constantly—it’s part of the self-monitoring we call masking. As a woman, I learned to regularly take stock of how my appearance and demeanor might be perceived by men. People who hold other marginalized identities self-surveil to make sure they’re not out of step with the dominant culture in a way that might be dangerous to them.
WEB De Bois called this “double consciousness.” With any form of marginalization or objectification comes the need to both know yourself and know who others believe you are.
On Instagram, double consciousness is quantified. We visualize ourselves as if we were starring in a movie because we’re making videos starring ourselves. Self-monitoring becomes constant, invisible, uncompensated labor, and that impacts how we know ourselves.
Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley dubbed this the “looking glass self.” We don’t simply know ourselves as we are. We know ourselves through our social interactions with others.
But what happens when those interactions occur in bad faith?
Bad Faith
Going viral makes you a target. “Part of what comes with this whole social media thing is that you do face a lot of backlash,” explained Steph, “and you get more feedback than anyone is really made to experience.” She even noticed some symptoms of trauma related to threats and hostile messages she received in early 2021. Throughout that year, she found it difficult to post—or even log onto the app. “I would go months without posting, delete the app, and just not even be there,” she recalled.
I know lots of people—myself included—fear bad-faith critique on social media. Well, “critique” isn’t even the right word. Trolling. Threats. Hostility.
The writer Melissa Febos recently shared that, for her writing students, one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is writing for the “bad faith” reader. In other words, her students are writing first drafts thinking about what some disinterested party is going to say about their work on Substack or in the comment section. I’ll admit that this is a big problem for me, too.
The bigger your audience, or the wider the reach of your work, the more likely you are to encounter those bad-faith readers or viewers.
And that leads to some difficult boundary-setting: “I've had to make some really tough choices. And I've also had to say, ‘Okay, now we're stepping back from this viral moment that lasted a few years and actually building a business.’”
Self-Observation
I asked Steph what she’s learned about herself teaching the Enneagram online, and she pointed to the skill of “self-observation.” She’s built the capacity to “notice in the moment, ‘Oh, I’m doing that thing again,’ and not be self-critical about it.” Instead of getting tripped up, she tries to notice the pattern and then moves forward—accepting that it’s going to come up from time to time.
Today, when she gets an unkind comment or direct message, she uses many different tools to sort through how she feels. She asks herself, “Why did that set me off? Why did that upset me? Is it because it’s true? Is it because I think that about myself? Is it because I think about myself really differently than that?” And then, she reminds herself that it’s one person’s comment in a crowd of people who love what she shares.
Easier said than done, of course.
Recently, I came across a project by guerilla theorist and artist Neema Githere. The Data Healing Workbook is a collection of speculative fiction, code poems, screenshot collage, and thoughtful prompts designed to help the reader better understand their relationship to social media. Githere reminds us:
We owe ourselves, and one another, more grace when it comes to the choices we each make to protect our mental well-being as we navigate (or abandon) this platform—the first step to re-humanizing ourselves amidst this era of algorithmic distortion.
Whether we’re creating or sharing, hopping on the latest trend or sticking to an old plan, social media content doesn’t—can’t—tell us the whole story. Nor can any personality type or diagnosis. Enneagram is fun! Sharing a meme to my story about some neurosis I have is fun! But it’s not who I am. Re-humanizing myself goes beyond the shorthand, beyond the reductive distortion amplified by lines of code.
Personality types, social media content, and even self-help guides might be useful tools along the way. But I am who I make myself to be.
No, I’m not suggesting that autism is a personality type. But there is just as much content based on autism, ADHD, OCD, and other neurological differences as there is content on personality types. The genesis of the content—not the condition—is of a kind.