He hates the system and how everything works. At the same time he knows that he can't do anything to change it, and this helplessness fuels his anger even more. Fortunately for him, the world is rife with evil halfling creature things for him to kill and/or send to Hell.

John is pretty sure that the world doesn't like him, for the simple reason that he doesn't like it and assumes that the feeling is mutual. Somewhere inside he feels vulnerable, hates that, and protects himself from it by going on the offensive.

He is defiant of authority - even if said authority happens to be God or something - and does not wish to be told how to live his life, even if stubbornly going his own way is going to hurt him. He would still rather do that than have to bend to someone else's will.

John thinks of most people as inferior individuals who know nothing, and who would probably go insane if they knew half the things he did. He takes some sadistic pride in this.

He doesn't just think that life sucks; he knows it.

Yet some of that persona is a facade, a kind of calm, defensive front he presents to the world as he directs his anger inward and keeps it under the surface. He's burdened by the past, tormented by his guilt and resentment around his father: not yet over the anger he felt for him wanting to forget about Alex's mother when she died, selling the lake house to get rid of that reminder of her and move on in an almost cavalier way. Alex didn't want to move on.

He resents the way that people still expect him to be like his famous architect father, pressurising him into a life he doesn't necessarily want. And Alex's way of acting out is to waste that talent he'd inherited - building generic condominiums when he's capable of so much more - to spite him, which succeeds in further widening the gulf between father and son. Their relationship brings out a mean streak in Alex that is otherwise absent in his other relationships, and perhaps in some way he consciously keeps it like that, only wanting to hurt those whom he believes deserve it.

Alex is driven by the need to escape, to get away from all those expectations and obligations and go somewhere where he can be alone and be his own man, and where he could be a better person than the one he is whenever his father is around. He bought over the lake house to reclaim that bit of his past and reconnect with the memory of his mother. "This house is about connections," he tells his brother Henry, and it is: connecting him symbolically to his past and literally to the future, where he finds Kate through their magical time-portal mailbox.

Somewhere in him there's a good person. But that's since been buried under layers of cynicism and too many disappointments in life. He's been hurt once too often. It's made him defensive, untrusting, and filled with a repressed anger that all too often ends up being directed at himself, the only one he knows how to blame without consequence. Beaten up by the world and by his own hand, Conor's just trying to survive, nothing more, and maybe have things get better somewhere along the way... even though he's more or less resigned himself to how it never will, flickers of hope flaming up temporarily with each new bet, hoping that the next one will be his way out and into a better life, only to die again and find him sunken even further in the hole he finds it increasingly hard to get out of. Yet there's something in him that refuses to give up, stubbornly and determinedly persistent in continuing the fight, on and on even if it kills him.

He likes yelling, though. Volume is always useful in getting points across. Simple-minded fellow. Would be fun to poke with sticks.