And a green one is going to be looking for ways to let go of the pain. A real-life activity that embodies red/green is Circling (à la the Authentic Relating community), which in part emphasizes setting aside narratives and frames and just being present, in the moment, with yourself and other people. The key recognition is that all of these ways of being are okay. Red seeks freedom, and it tries to achieve that freedom through action. Turn 4: Play plains, attack with all, after blockers are declared use tactical on ace. Several of our mutual acquaintances had tried to help, in some fairly standard ways — they’d encouraged them to exercise regularly and try to repair their eating and sleeping habits, they’d tried to schedule regular visits to keep them company, and they’d asked them to commit to calling if things got particularly dark. But color identity isn’t about what you can and can’t do, it’s about where you tend to live. Many black/red characters lean evil, such as the Joker from Batman and Voldemort from canon Harry Potter, but the combination can also be one of impishness or chaotic selfishness, as with Peter Pan, Deadpool, or Cap’n Jack Sparrow. Blue and black both agree on growth mindset — the idea that one is not defined by one’s origins or constrained to the role society has set. Lisa from The Simpsons is blue, and Ravenclaw House from Harry Potter exists to serve blue students. Willy Wonka is also a blue/red archetype, as are Doc Brown from Back to the Future and Indiana Jones. Victory for a white agent feels like brightness, purity, exaltation — a clean breeze sweeping across a high plain under a bright sun. Blue/black characters are often intelligent, clever, arrogant, and aloof — notable examples include Odysseus from The Odyssey, Sherlock Holmes, Lex Luthor, and Quirinus Quirrell from HPMOR. Doesn’t matter. There are other intuition pumps that do similar things for other people. It’s feeling alive. If you’re super red, you’re going to be confused as hell when your longtime partner starts talking about wanting to get married. This project isn’t going well. But it did make it better — that was a good day, for my friend, and in addition to the object level benefits of a day at the beach, I was able to stop kicking them accidentally while they were down. Okay, that’s the color wheel. White is more diachronic, interested in finding the small compromises and sacrifices that will allow people to build trust and cooperate reliably. Other words associated with blue: challenge, competence, creativity, curiosity, knowledge, optimism, accuracy, adaptability, awareness, brilliance, cleverness, concentration, development, efficiency, foresight, imagination, insight, logic, quality, rigor, trickery, strategy, service, truth, vision, wonder, perception, nuance, aspiration, focus, invention, patience, wordplay, rationality, subtlety, scholarship, absent-mindedness, cerebral, deception, enigmatic, skepticism, aloofness, ~Extraversion~Agreeableness+Conscientiousness~Neuroticism++Openness. The enemy colors white and black combine to form tribalism — the “us versus them” mentality. Obviously, it’s good to be able to paint with all the colors of the wheel, and to have in your own personal toolkit access to the strengths and perspectives of all five (just as it’s good to embody the virtues of every Hogwarts house, and to be able to access every chakra). The whole concept of a “rationality technique” is extremely white/blue — the idea that we might create carefully defined, algorithmic heuristics for doing things better according to some outside standard is not one that other color combinations are likely to produce. White ties together the orderly tendencies of green and blue, though green and blue disagree on how that order should come to be. In MTG, blue cards are wizards and faeries and monsters of the deep, counterspells and illusory tricks, magic that accumulates knowledge and incremental advantage and undercuts, rather than directly opposing (brains over brawn and mind over matter). A red dystopia, on the other hand, would simply be anarchy. Green and white are the enemies of black, which they see as selfish, short-sighted, and ultimately self-defeating. Effective Altruism is also a white/blue movement, though it makes efforts to reach out to red (compassion) and black (taking the long view on self-interest). What helped (for me) was connecting all of this anecdotal data to my prior, cached sense that this friend was red.