Personality quiz
Freedom Archetype
Six psychological relationships to freedom. Answer eleven questions and the scan names which one you are, the shadow that comes with it, and one concrete move toward the exit. No account, result stays in your browser.
Launch
No account · no email
The six archetypes
Not productivity categories or corporate personality types — six psychological stances toward freedom itself, each with a strength, a shadow, and a collapse risk. The result cards below are the actual share images the quiz generates.
The Exile — reinvention through movement
The Architect — autonomy through systems
The Ghost — invisibility and low demand
The Drifter — impermanence, no fixed anchor
The Survivor — stability and protection
The Performer — recognition, an audience for the leap
What it is
An 11-question scan that scores a primary and a secondary current, then renders a full result screen in place — no link-out, no account, the result written only to your browser. The writing brief was "emotionally precise rather than flattering": recognition, not motivation.
The scan — options reshuffled each render, auto-advance on tap, Back supported. Scored from an answers array at the end, so changing an earlier answer never double-counts.
Six archetypes, 30 reachable results — every primary pairs with all five other archetypes as a secondary current, each with its own paragraph. Not 36: primary and secondary are always distinct.
A pixel scene per archetype — a small animated canvas on the result screen, plus a large line-art glyph behind the name. The type's accent colour drives the whole result.
"The shadow" — a callout naming the failure mode that comes with the type. "You are good at leaving. You are still learning what it means to arrive."
"Your next move" — three tiered moves (5-min / this week / big), single-select, remembered. Framed around actually leaving a job, deliberately un-reckless, tied to that archetype's kind of freedom — each "big" move carries a hard number.
Share + save — Web Share on mobile, clipboard copy on desktop, and "Save image" renders the 1080×1350 card. The same renderer produces the six OG images above.
Where it came from
It started as one module inside Freedom Date, a larger "brutalist digital mythology about modern escape." The calculator there answered "how long until leaving is financially possible?"; the question underneath it was "what kind of freedom are you actually searching for?" — which is what the archetypes answer.
By its eighth version Freedom Date had six interlocking modules and was unshippable as a single build. The archetype quiz was pulled out to stand alone: it's a complete experience on its own, it's the strongest cold-open (a named identity beats a savings number), and a contained page could actually be finished. No cross-links back in — Freedom Date can point to it, not contain it.
How it was built
The final page pulled three separate strands back together.
Engine
The scoring engine and six animated scene functions lived in
freedom-date-v8.html — proven, shipped-adjacent, and the last version that still had the full scene set after a later redesign dropped them.Screens
The result screens existed separately as six hand-built standalone pages with hardcoded content — a parallel effort never wired to a scoring engine. The landing and shell were rebuilt from scratch alongside them.
Reunite
The final job was to fold all three into one self-contained file: port the v8 engine rather than rebuild it, render the result inline with no link-out, keep it to a single file with no build step. Packaged for the site as one HTML file plus a
share/ folder of generated OG images.Real snags hit along the way
The six-types "circuit board" — built, fixed repeatedly, then deleted
The middle section was an animated circuit diagram for several sessions — traces, nodes, a pulsing hub. It went through rounds of fixes (idle visibility, a glow bug where the active state lowered opacity, node/row misalignment once descriptions wrapped to different line counts). Verdict: it "isn't adding value on PC." Removed. The plain legend list underneath had been doing the real work all along.
Hand-rolled paginated scrolling → native scroll-snap
First built as JS-driven eased scrolling between folds, with a debounced wheel handler to kill an up/down double-jump and a fix for tall folds landing at their top when entered from below. Replaced with native CSS scroll-snap — correct trackpad, wheel and touch momentum for free, no gesture heuristics to get wrong.
The result-glyph size war
Started tiny and near-invisible. Made large and bright — then it collided with long names like "PERFORMER". It had to be big and behind the name. Final: large, behind the text, with a left-edge gradient mask that fades the glyph to nothing exactly where it passes behind the solid letters. The Exile glyph got a from-scratch redesign that was rejected outright ("doesn't look like the original SVG at all") and reverted to the original composition with only heavier strokes.
"Your next move" went from generic to specific
The first draft of the 18 lines was essentially "save a runway and hand in your notice" for every type. Rewritten so each move channels that archetype's particular freedom, and every "big" move was given a hard figure — six-month runway, 12-month notice fund, three exit conditions checked quarterly. Quantifiable, not aspirational.
Lessons learned
The more sophisticated technique is not automatically the better one — the animated circuit board absorbed sessions of fixes before being cut for the plain list it sat on, the same lesson the Manifestation Jar learned chasing real-time 3D glass. And reach for the platform feature first: native CSS scroll-snap replaced a whole custom gesture engine and just behaved.
Where it stands
Live as its own standalone quiz. All six archetypes are fully built out — each with a result screen, animated pixel scene, shadow read, dossier, secondary current, and a tiered "your next move" panel — across all 30 primary-plus-secondary combinations, all verified in-browser. Single self-contained HTML file, one external dependency (Google Fonts).
The default and six per-archetype share/OG images are generated and in place. Still open: an accessibility pass (the quiz overlay opens without moving or trapping focus), a real-device test of the native share sheet and clipboard on a live
https origin, and a fresh single-sitting proofread of the copy.Part of the Freedom Date family
Freedom Date — Calculator — In progress
Freedom Archetype — Quiz — Live
Compatibility Scan — Diagnostic — Built, locked
Freedom OS — Umbrella — Deferred
Freedom Date itself is not abandoned — the calculator, compatibility scan and identity nexus are still real future scope. Freedom Archetype is simply the piece that got finished first, and it's built to stand alone.
Everything above is real and in the shipped build. The result cards are the quiz's own generated share images; the pixel scenes animate, so any still is a snapshot of a moving thing.