Message Boards & Alumni Reunions: Personality Types

I have a theory about alumni message boards.  While everyone who joins up is at first motivated by the same desire to reconnect, catch-up and reminisce, over time the population gets divided into three broad categories, whose hallmarks I think have learned to identify in the tone and content of their posts.

The first type (often the majority) have come a long way away from their school days, are psychologically healthy and balanced, and secure about who they are and what they are doing.  They can look back upon their weaknesses, challenges, and failures in school with equanimity and not have their ego bruised as they do so.

The second type have not made peace with the challenges, frustrations and possible maladjustment they might have experienced in school, so are still trying to prove to themselves and to others just how far they have progressed in their subsequent lives.  They state unnecessary platitudes about having grown up, and being mature adults (whenever an adult says he/she is a mature adult, an alarm goes off in my mind suggesting they’re not convinced of this themselves, therefore feel the need to convince others).

The third type (small minority, and sometimes absent altogether) are ones that never moulted, don’t realize it and don’t care much about it.  In many respects, they wallow in the mindset and mentality they had back then, and are kind of developmentally arrested in terms of psychological evolution.