HealthyGamerGG - You're Boring Because You're Afraid To Change

Episode Date: November 29, 2025

Dr. K talks about what it really means to “have no personality” and why so many people feel like NPCs in their own life. He explains that a lot of people who say this aren’t clinically depressed or totally isolated, but feel like life is just a series of side quests with no main quest, no clear sense of who they are, and no strong preferences of their own. He breaks down three big patterns he sees in these people: living by “what’s right” instead of what they actually want, being extremely risk averse, and constantly chasing identity through groups and labels. From goths to gamers to political identities, he shows how over-identifying with a group can become a mask that blocks you from discovering your real self. He also defines personality in a concrete way: how you interpret situations, how you feel inside, and how you behave in response. Using examples from his practice and his own life, Dr. K talks about cultural conditioning (especially in immigrant and Asian families), the pressure to maximize your advantages, and how suppressing desire leads to a flat, “empty” existence. He then lays out what actually helps: noticing how comfort, efficiency, and fear shape your choices, allowing yourself to do things that aren’t perfectly “optimal,” taking meaningful risks, and stretching your capacities instead of always staying where you’re safe and competent. Over time, those choices are how you actually build a personality. Topics include:Feeling like an NPC, side quests without a main questThe trap of always doing the “right” or efficient thingComfort and risk aversion as personality killersIdentity vs identification (goth, gamer, trad wife, politics, etc.)How family expectations and culture suppress desireWhat personality really is: perception, internal reaction, behaviorWhy you fantasize about disaster forcing you to “prove yourself”Noticing your mental rulebook and changing itStretching your competence instead of “smurfing” through life HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3Szt HG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Start selling on Deepop, where taste recognizes taste. List now with no selling fees. Payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. website for details. Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Al-Aunoja, but you can call me Dr. Kay. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. Today, we're going to talk about why a lot of people feel like they don't have a personality. So this is kind of funny.

I was in the car with my wife recently, and she basically asked me, to diagnose Harry Potter characters. And she asked me about Seamus Finnegan. And I was like, yeah, there's no personality disorder. There's no diagnosis. He's basically like an empty person. There's not enough of a personality. And the really shocking thing was that this is what resonated with the internet.

So many people were like, I feel like I don't have a personality either. And this is something I've seen a lot. So sometimes people will come into my office and they'll sort of complain they're depressed. They're like, I don't know like what's wrong with me. I think I'm depressed. And I'll be like, well, what's, you know, tell me what depression feels like for you. And then I'll assess them. I'll see like, do you have trouble getting out of bed?

And they're like, no, do you feel sad all the time? They're like, not really. Like, do you have friends? Like, yeah, I've got some friends. And we sort of end up with this kind of vibe that they're not like, they don't have clinical depression. They sort of feel like they're an NPC in their own life. They kind of feel like life is just a series of side quests.

But I don't really have a main quest. I don't really know who I am. I don't really know what I'm doing. I kind of feel like other people out there are really good at figuring out what they want. They're like going places and I'm kind of like trundling along, but I don't really know who I am. And so as I work with these people, I started to realize that there's a series of things, a series of like cognitive features and personality traits that they have, which lead them to have no personality. The first is that they're very value focused and risk averse.

So when they make decisions in life, they're not thinking about what they want or what they feel like doing or what would be gratifying to them. They always think about what would be, good. I want to major in like English literature, but I should become an engineer because that's better. They're so efficiency focus that they end up closing doors that would lead to gratification in their life. Another big aspect is that they tend to value comfort is the number one thing. So they don't want to put themselves in uncomfortable situations. If it ain't broke, I'm going to kind of keep trundling along. And the last big aspect is they're hungry for identification. So the first thing to understand is that identity begins when identification ends.

Now, what does that mean? So if you take a human being and they're trying to figure out who they are, oftentimes what we do is we will go explore. We'll try to think like, okay, I don't really know who I am. Let me go hang out with the Goths. And the Goths are like, oh, like, oh, I sort of share some stuff with the Goths. So maybe I'm goth too.

Or we'll sort of look at the ADHD kids or the autism kids, the kids with autism spectrum disorder and we'll be like, is that me? That kind of feels like me. I kind of have difficulty focusing. I have difficulty with social interactions. Maybe I'm autistic. Or we'll go hang out with like, we'll join a fraternity really, really common.

If you don't know who you are, one of the key things I'll ask is when someone comes in with existential depression. I was like, hey, by the way, did you join a fraternity in college? Because they don't know who they are. So they're like, let me join this group. And once I join that group, I will develop a sense of identity. They will give me my identity. So this is the process of identification when there's a group of people over here and I identify with them. This is not me, but I'm determining who I am based on my identification with a group.

And you may know people who have done this because there are people whose whole identity depends on identification with a group. We see this a lot in the social media space with like, I'm a trad wife, right? That's my whole thing. My whole personality is that I love anime, right? That's not like a personality. You can like anime. It doesn't have to define who you are. I'm a gamer.

That's another great example of identification that becomes identity. We see this all the time also with things like politics. I identify with a particular party. I identify with a particular ethnicity. That becomes my whole identity. And if you all know people of different ethnicities, what you realize is that black people can like anime too. Like they don't have to, we don't have to put them into the stereotype that we sort of envision

that is propagated by our media. The whole point of identity is that it doesn't map on perfectly to a particular thing. So I once had a patient who was like a goth woman, okay? And one of the really fascinating things is she came in with postpartum depression. And so that like sort of fit. It's like this goth walks into my office with a bunch of piercings, black hair that was super straight, you know, white makeup, a lot of eyeliner. And she walks in and she says, Dr. Kay, I'm depressed.

That's not what she says. But and I'm like, okay, cool. So like I'm kind of looking at her. I'm talking to her. You know, I get to know her a little bit. I'm doing my best not to judge her for being a goth. I really don't. I don't know why I'm talking so much about goths right now.

But over the course of our sort of. therapy, you know, we started to work through her postpartum depression. We started to help her discover who she is. And then one of the coolest things is like, I don't know if you all have ever seen a joyous goth. And that's what she ended up becoming. She loved being a mother. She started to have joy in her life. She would dress her kid up in bright colors, but she would continue to wear like black fish nets and a lot of piercings. And so this is what's really beautiful. And it's like, it's like she's not defining herself. She identifies some with being a goth. And the reason that she's a goth, and y'all may resonate with this. I resonate with this.

Some of us have like the deep hurt inside that the people without the deep hurt like don't understand. So if you look at my life, for example, I have it really good, right? So I'm happily married. I've got kids. I've got a decent job and all that kind of stuff. But no matter how good my life is, there is this like profound deep hurt that no one in my family understands. It's incredibly isolating. And I don't think that that's a bad thing.

It's actually part of who I am. It's part of where my compassion comes from. I can sort of really resonate with people who are like completely lost in life because there's a chunk of me that despite having figured everything out, there's a chunk of me that will always be lost, hurt, and rejected and will never, ever, ever go away. I've learned to accept it. That's part of my personality. It's part of my identity.

It's part of who I've become. So the key thing here is that if you're someone who is focused on discovering who you are and finding your personality, you need to be a little bit careful about looking for it outside of you. As long as you are putting on this mask and this mask and this mask, you will never discover who you are. So I think this is a good time to talk a little bit about what personality is, because if you want to find your personality, it helps to know specifically what personality is. So we think that personality is who you are, but it's actually defined by three characteristics. It is the way that you perceive information, your internal reactions to your environment,

and the way that you behave in response to your environment. So if you're at a bar and, you know, someone is sitting across the bar and they raise their glass to you, you may respond in a particular way, right? So let's take two human beings who someone across the bar is raising a glass to them. How will these two human beings respond to this situation, right? How will they interpret this? Is this a threat or is this a sign of sexual interest? Then they'll have an internal reaction.

I get excited. or I get anxious. I'm like, oh my God, I can't, oh my God. And then there's the behavior. Either I tap my friends and I'm like, hey, let's get out of here, or I'm like, I raise my glass back. So if you sort of think about what personality is, the way that we know people have different personalities is in a given situation. Human beings will respond to the same circumstances in different ways. And that's what personality is. So if we want to discover who we are, we need to change the way that we interpret information, the way that we react to information, and the way that we respond to information. So let's start with risk aversion. Okay? So most of the people that I work with who

come in and say, I don't know who I am, they generally speaking have a rulebook. And that rule book, first and foremost, involves do the right thing. It's not about what I want. It's not about what I feel like doing. There's literally this voice in their head when they feel like doing something. I'm like, I don't really enjoy this job. I find it mind-numbingly boring and things like that. They have this impulse and what do they do? They squash it. They're like, oh, but I have it good. I shouldn't quit. You know, so the job market is so hard. And oftentimes these people, I want to say that like, at least in my case, in my clinical experience, I was looking at this, about 40 to 50 percent of the people who come in with this chief complaint are East Asian or South Asian. Now, I'm not saying

that that's true of that. This is just the selection of one particular, you know, doctor in their patient population. Because a lot of us, like Asian kids get conditioned. This is another aspect, is that they get conditioned a lot. They grow up in a household where their parents are constantly telling them this is right and this is wrong. Who you are is not something we care about. Individual expression is not important. What matters is conformity. What matters is we move to this country by making a ton of sacrifices. And now that you have the advantages that we don't have, you need to maximize those advantages. I didn't move from India and work really long nights and work the night shift running this grocery store or this convenience store so that you could go be an artist.

I worked so that you could make $300,000 as an investment banker, so get your ass in gear. Natural things that we want to do get suppressed. And we tend to internalize this value system where I should do what is best, not what I want. The second thing that's really common with these people is that they tend to be very risk-averse. So you'll notice that as your life has become bland and boring, that's because you avoided making bad decisions. And that's kind of good, right? I'm not saying you should go out there and do a bunch of stupid stuff. But if you look at the people around you who have a lot of personality, chances are they're

kind of dumb. Like, chances are they do stupid things from time to time. So you have to be really careful about that risk aversion because when you have that risk aversion that controls all of your life, then your ability to really put yourself out there, discover who you are. There's a great sort of theory called self-determination theory. And one of the key aspects of discovering who you are in the process of individuation is actually stretching your competence.

So human beings who develop their sense of identity and discover who they are, that process, discovering who you are, is when you think you're capable of something, but discover you're capable of something more. The problem is that if you're risk-averse, you will never put yourself in a situation to where you can really discover who you are. And oftentimes when I work with people like this, they have these fantasies. Sometimes they'll have dreams about everything falling apart.

They're like, I wish there was apocococ. Like, you know, there's six months into therapy when we have a really strong connection. They're like, I just wish there was a zombie apocalypse because then either I would rise to the occasion or I would just get eaten. I would rather be dead or brilliant. I'm tired of being this in-between kind of thing. And what they want more than anything else is the environment to put them in a high-risk situation, where they can be test. And they're actually totally fine being like absolutely destroyed. I want to be tested and then I want to be dead or I want to be tested and I want to be great.

I'm going to become strong or I'm going to become nothing. They just hate this dreary NPC existence. So if you're someone who struggles to have a personality, I strongly encourage you to think about these things. And the way to sort of fix this quote unquote, you can absolutely do something like work with our coaches. So when I was sort of like when these people would come into my office, I would kind of think like, okay, this person doesn't really have to have a diagnosis. Like they're not, they don't have major depressive disorder. They don't have social anxiety disorder. It's something else. It's identity formation. It's a lack of purpose. It's a lack of meaning. And when I designed the coaching program, I designed it to be that which therapy is not.

So if you've got a diagnosis, go see a therapist. But if you're trying to discover who you are, you're trying to understand your patterns, then definitely go see a coach. So here's what we try to do with these people. Okay. So what we try to do is get them to notice these patterns within their mind. When you wake up in the morning, how does your risk aversion show up? How does your prioritization for comfort show up? How does your efficiency and value oriented thinking show up? And once you have those three thoughts, how do they shape your behaviors? Because of those thoughts, continue shaping those behaviors in the same way, you will end up in the same place. So this is not just acting in a particular way. That's not really what we discover works. You have to

understand the internal part as well. It's not just changing the action because a lot of people do this. They'll get stuck by just trying to do so. I've tried this. I've tried this. I've tried this. I've tried this. But if you engage in action without a shift of the mental attitude, if your mental internal architecture is still the same, no action will work. Right. So I don't know if you all have seen this, but when I have, you know, patients that sometimes come in for couples therapy, from the get go, I'll quickly realize this person has given up on the relationship. No amount of couples therapy will work if one person mentally has decided I'm done. Does that kind of make sense? So for a lot of people who have no personality, they'll ask, what should I do? What should I do? What should I do? And then they will go do those

things mechanically, reflexively. But personality is not about how you act. There's also how you perceive and your internal reactions, right? The personality is in here and it flows out into the way that you act in the world. So you have to pay attention to these three things. Look for the risk aversion, look for the value, look for the comfort, look at how you prioritize things. And then what we want to do is change that a little bit, right? Say to yourself, okay, even though this is the right thing to do, it's not what I feel like. And it's okay to sometimes do what I feel like, even if it's, quote, unquote, wrong. As people start to move in this way, they start to explore themselves a little bit more, they get some feedback from the outside world.

Is this working? Is this not working? And then the last thing that becomes incredibly important is to stretch your capacities. So whatever you decide to do, and this is so subtle, right? They'll say like, oh, you should, maybe I'll like chess. But when they go to play chess, they never really test themselves. They don't let themselves lose. They'll maybe beat up on nobs.

These are people who are basically smurfing IRL, right? They always put themselves in situations where they do not have to test. themselves and why do they never want to test themselves because this feels empty inside. I have no faith in here. So the safest thing to do is to never put myself in a situation where I'm stressing my capacities. I'll run a 5k but I won't run a full marathon. So as much as you can, push yourself, stretch your capacities because that's when you discover who you are. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe.

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