How are you not a pilgrim?

I don’t characterize myself as any nicer, more polite, or "boyscoutish" than the other people around me, some visitors from out of state have sworn that I am but I believe that that is just a perceptual frame colored by their expectations of Midwesterners.

As the INTP page authors were writing about, people like me are 'Chameleons' who tend to reflect back the attitudes of the people around us, and all of the behaviors that I am generally criticized as being a purist for generally fall back in motivation not from fear of some parental or patriarchal ambivalence, but from something else entirely: As children my younger sister and I were taken many places by our mother, a doctor, because she worked full time and did not have anyone to watch us. She would take us on visits to terminally ill patients we would watch writhing in pain, and then a few weeks later she would take us to their funerals. I had knowledge of the brutal nature of mortality at a very young age, and I was wrestling with nihilism even as an elementary schooler.

Hedonistic abandon fueled by a shocking realization of universal insignificance might be a novel development in YOUR life, oh masses of my drunken city, but for me the cold comfort that I could be struck by a brain aneurysm tomorrow and never again see tree, face, or chair has for me been a constant background hum.