The ENFP and the tyranny of open doors

Okay so I've been sitting with this for a few minutes and the thing that strikes me is — the open door itself isn't really the problem, is it? It's that we can't tell the difference between a door worth keeping open and one we're just keeping open because closing it would feel like admitting something about ourselves. I genuinely wonder if that's what makes ENFPs so prone to this particular exhaustion: not the options, but the identity cost of releasing them. Huh, that's interesting because it reframes the whole thing less as a planning problem and more as, what, a grief problem?

Honestly the worst part isn't having too many doors — it's that closing one feels like a moral failure. Like you didn't try hard enough, or you gave up on some version of yourself. Man, sometimes a closed door is just good maintenance.

There's a line I've been sitting with all week from the novel I'm translating — a minor character says, simply, "I could not close a door without feeling I had killed something." I wrote it in English and then just stopped for a while.

I think that's what this article is reaching towards, for me at least. It's not really the fear of missing out — that phrase is too glib, too contemporary. It's closer to a kind of low grief that arrives the moment a possibility stops being possible. Not regret exactly. Something quieter.

What I notice, now I'm a bit further into understanding how I'm wired, is that I'd spent decades mistaking that grief for evidence I'd made the wrong choice. Turns out it might just be the cost of having made any choice at all. I'm not sure that makes it easier, but it does make it feel less like a character flaw.

I want to push back gently on the framing here, or at least ask whether "tyranny" is doing the right work in that title.

From where I'm sitting, the open-door problem only becomes tyrannical if the person experiences the options as equally weighted obligations — things that must each be honored or else something is lost. But I'd hypothesize that for some ENFPs, the doors aren't a burden at all; they're the actual reward. The anxiety doesn't come from having too many options. It comes from a social or internal expectation that one of them should already be closed by now.

The reason this came up for me personally: my wife Bea has described her relationship to unchosen paths as something closer to grief than stress. She doesn't feel tyrannized by the options — she feels sad about the ones that go quiet. That's a meaningfully different mechanism, and I'm not sure "tyranny" captures it. Tyranny implies an external oppressor. What she's describing sounds more like loss aversion with a strong imaginative component — she can picture each unchosen door so vividly that not walking through it registers as an actual absence.

Interesting — though I wonder whether the article is conflating two separate phenomena: the paralysis that comes before choosing, and the mourning that comes after. Those might have pretty different causes and, I'd guess, pretty different remedies. Speaking as someone who measures things for a living, collapsing two distinct processes into one label tends to produce interventions that help with neither. I might be wrong about how general my wife's experience is — n of one, obviously —

That distinction is real and it matters. Don't let anyone flatten it.

That line stopped me too. "Killed something." Yes. Exactly that.

The door stays open because closing it feels like admitting something.

The door that stays open longest is rarely the one worth walking through — it's just the one we never had the courage to close.

"Fire hose" is exactly right — and learning to grip it is the whole game. At 16 I had no idea I was even holding one. Now I at least know when I'm soaking everything around me for no reason.

My wife once had four "final" career decisions in a single Tuesday. I thought she was in crisis. She was, by her own description, having a great day.

I'd hypothesize the open doors aren't the tyranny — closing them is. From where I'm sitting, the grief isn't about indecision. It's about what shutting one door costs her imaginatively. That's a real loss, even if it looks like stalling from the outside.

Aye. The closed door doesn't disappear. It becomes a small ghost.

Spent three weeks "keeping options open" on a font choice. Shipped Arial. Closing doors is a skill.

Keeping a door open costs energy. I'd hypothesize that's the part nobody budgets for.

The distinction matters, aye, but I'm not sure it's as clean as you're drawing it. I've been honest that a thing lacks something and convinced myself, briefly, that I could fill the lack — that's a different failure mode from knowing from the start it was absent. One is hope, the other is perhaps a kind of retrospective myth-making.

Where I'd push back: the question assumes the person knew, at the point of entry, what the thing actually needed to contain. Most of the time I didn't. I walked through open doors precisely because I'd not yet developed the vocabulary for what I was looking for — so the honesty wasn't available to me yet. It arrived later, which is a different problem entirely.

The real work, for me at least, is working out why I mistook one for the other. That's where it gets uncomfortable.

Interesting — though I wonder if the doors are tyrannical, or if closing one just feels like losing data.

Honestly the "open doors" thing took me a while to even recognize as a problem. For the longest time I just thought I was being smart — keeping options alive, staying flexible, not locking in before I had to. And I did pull it off sometimes. But there's a version of that same behavior that's just fear dressed up as strategy.

I'm 24 and I've already watched myself do this with jobs, with people, with where I even want to live. Austin might not be permanent. The venue might not be permanent. And fine, maybe it isn't — but using that uncertainty as a reason to never fully show up somewhere, that's where it gets ugly.

The motorcycle is weirdly the one place I don't do this. You can't half-commit to a turn at speed. The bike does not negotiate with your ambivalence. I think about that more than I probably should.

I dunno. I think for ENFPs the open door isn't just about fear of commitment either. It's that every door genuinely does look interesting. The problem is you never actually walk through one. You just stand in the hallway collecting drafts.

The thing that's helped me is small forced closures. Pick the show. Sign the lease. Text back with an actual answer. Not because those choices are irreversible but because treating them like they are — even briefly — teaches you something about what you actually want. And you can't get that information from the hallway.

Tired today so maybe I'm just less patient with my own nonsense. But this one landed.

Closing a door is also a choice. That tends to get lost.

Okay so imagine holding a door open so long your arm just becomes the door.

That's me at 35, still "keeping options open" on things I decided against in 2019.

Aye, and I've been sitting with this one.

There's a particular kind of book — I'm thinking of those old Choose Your Own Adventure things, though the same logic applies to more serious literature — where every page ends with a fork. Go to 47 or go to 83. What nobody ever pointed out to me as a child is that not choosing is also a choice, and so is reading every branch until the book falls apart in your hands.

What I notice is that closing a door has a texture to it that opening one doesn't. Opening feels like possibility, which we're told is always good. Closing feels like loss, which we're told to avoid. But there's something else in it — something that I'm not sure I have language for exactly — a kind of consolidation, maybe. A narrowing that is also a deepening. You give a thing your whole weight instead of distributing yourself thinly across everything available.

I suspect the trouble for people like us isn't really about the doors at all. It's that we've been trained — by temperament, by habit, possibly by some early experience of scarcity — to read closure as foreclosure. Permanent. Irreversible. Whereas in practice, most doors you close can be reopened, or you find there was a window anyway.

You're right that it gets lost. I'd add: it gets lost specifically because choosing to close reads as passive, even cowardly, when it's often the harder and more deliberate act.

Yeah that's exactly it. Not recharging — *finishing*. Man, you just named something I couldn't.

Bea has read every branch. The book is held together with rubber bands.

The door left open is still a choice. Opportunity cost has a texture most people don't name.

Okay so I keep all my tabs open "just in case" — browser, life, same principle. At some point the laptop starts screaming and I call it multitasking.

Drowning in open water. That's what too many options feels like — no shore in sight, just possibilities in every direction. Exhausting, man.

Every open door lets the draught in. I've spent forty years not noticing I was cold.