Everyone is different^{[please, stop this joke]}, our genes, our appearances, our personalities, our lives… That said, it’s not that everyone is very distinct from another. It’s more akin to color hues: there is a huge variety, yet they can be really similar.

When it comes to our physical and physiological differences, things are well-defined:

• Your DNA/set of genes is your genotype.
• Your traits constitute your phenotype.

But when it comes to the mind, things are fuzzy, at least for the plebe like myself. So I want to suggest a word for this purpose:

Psychotype: Everything that constitutes your own mind (personality, fears, tastes, experiences…), that defines how you will act.

Basically, your psychotype is what makes you… you. Now, imagine you want to compare these things with others’:

• For genotypes, there are DNA sequencing tests.
• For phenotypes, you just need to look, at least for the external traits.

When it comes to the mind, it gets tough. There are some personality tests out there and if they’re a step-up compared to the “your personality is defined by the stars’ orientation the day you’re born” stuff, they have serious shortcomings.

Maybe the specialists have better tools and can make better assessments, but they’re not easily accessible to us peons. And that’s not even considering the fact that your personality is just one part of your psychotype.

But let’s say one day we can easily measure it, how would we compare them? Well, as I hinted earlier, we could use colors!

Pretty colors *-*

Everyone would get attributed a hue depending on its test result. Similar people will have a similar hue and different people will have very different colors, pretty simple.

More realistically, your hue only represents you at this moment. It will evolve with time as you age and experience new things, good or bad. I even suspect that, as the mind is fuzzy, rather than getting a single hue, you’d get a chunk of the color spectrum. The bigger the chunk, the less stable you’d be, whatever that means.

If the hue is your psychotype, we can imagine saturation represents how pronounced your psychotype is, while the lightness could be the ratio of introspection to extrospection… Or other things. Or maybe the color analogy doesn’t have enough parameters, and we would need something more abstract.

Still, the concept of attributing a color hue to your psychotype is easily understandable, so I’d like you to keep it in mind. Now, in the absence of a test, we can’t determine what color you are, so feel free to pick one yourself. I’ll take this one:

No... that's... absolutely not my favorite color...

With all being said, it might actually be a boon that we don’t have such measurement. I suspect we would rely on it too much and for bad reasons, leading to discrimination. If you want to see what it might look like, you can watch the movie Gattaca (1997) that treats this exact subject, albeit on a DNA basis. So yeah, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all…

Oh, before you leave, if you want to argue that astrology or whatever actually works, just make sure it’s not the result of the Barnum effect.