an exploration of seeing the self through the aspirational lens of navigating a free-form headspace.
generally iāve been thinking about pragmatism and empathy lately, and these are some scattered thoughts about this space.
Imagine an infinitely dimensional space, where the axes and planes are personality traits, ideas, beliefs, and skills. This is the headspace ā the space for which our minds can flow.
You are a āblobā that occupies a region in this headspace, shaped by your identity, paradigms, emotions, and personality. Your blob represents your thoughts, actions, beliefs in any given moment.
This blob is dynamic. It shifts and reshapes as you learn, experience, and grow. It absorbs influences from the world, devotes attention and energy to stimuli and thoughts, and continuously adjusts its boundaries. Your choices, reactions, and beliefs are all emergent properties of this blob.
This mental model is pretty neat to explore in regards to psychological growth, learning, and empathy.
language
A similar visualization used in LLM research is an LLMās language latent space.
Like an LLM, our blobs navigate through embeddings of language, emotion, meaning in our headspaces.
Inside this headspace, we have spectrums and clusters of embedded beliefs (religiosity, liberalism), traits (charisma, humor), and knowledge (history, life experiences).
Our headspace is a higher-order abstraction of the underlying neural networks in the brain, just like the latent space is a higher-order abstraction of the underlying neural networks of an LLM.
constraints
As you experience the world, your headspace takes on edges and constraints. We may call these āpersonalityā, ācomfort zonesā, or āpersonal philosophy.ā
āIām an atheist and I hate the idea of religion.ā āIām a night owl and Iām insufferable in the morning.ā āIām a terrible public speaker.ā āI could never get that job; everybody I know who works there is way more competent than me.ā
These constraints are formed by our experiences and environments (nurture) and by our DNA (nature). We solidify these constraints through reinforcing our identity, habits, and stories.
āIām a terrible public speakerā¦ because Iāve had bad experiences with public speaking and want to avoid that feeling of danger and anxiety again.ā
Sometimes, these constraints and walls are helpful. Generations of evolution have shaped the neurology that constructed these beliefs.
But often, they get in the way.
āWe cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." - Einstein
Long-term problems we create in one headspace are hard to solve in that same headspace that created them. This can be why new perspectives, fresh energy, therapy, and friends are so helpful, because they shift us gradually to consider different headspaces.
Thereās this pithy saying that āyou are the average of the five people you spend time with.ā Naturally, headspaces of those around us influence us often to move towards those directions. Our external influences help our blobs construct and refine our constraints.
neurology
In this model, neuroplasticity is what allows our blobs to step into new spaces and adapt to them.
Being neurodivergent means both the shape and the movement of your headspace is atypical. ADHD might mean that your blob is more jumpy and novelty seeking, skewed towards an optimization for short-term stimulation and goal maximization.
Medication & drugs reshape our neural pathways and this produces new and novel headspaces. Alcohol shifts the blob to be more risk-taking and socially adventurous. Psychedelics and anti-depressants change the viscosity of the blob, ideally making it more fluid and capable of inhabiting new, positive spaces.
growth
To grow rapidly in some skill or trait, your blob needs two things: a belief that it can inhabit that space, and an environment that supports that expansion.
āAssume everything is learnableā¦. Many traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite malleable if you (1) believe they are and (2) put the same kind of work into learning them as you would anything else.ā (Cate Hall)
In my first weekend skiing, I had no reference point for āhow difficult it was to do a black diamondā or āhow many people run into trees doing glades.ā But my friends simply took me on these ski runs, and I had no choice but to follow them or be left behind. There was both an internalized self-belief that I could do what they could (powered by the overinflated confidence of a teenager with no knowledge that this was a hard thing to do), and a supportive environment (i.e., good teachers).
In software engineering, thereās a vast difference between learning how to code for a job and deeply loving the craft. In the former, your headspace sees coding more as a means to an end, a tool to solve problems. In the later, your headspace becomes consumed by the craft itself ā you become motivated to dive under the hood of every system and understand how it all works, you see the world through patterns and abstractions, and you build a life around getting to play. Problems that were once hard become second nature; systems that were once too complex to reason about become intuitive and natural.
Books offer a unique pathway of expansion because they let you temporarily inhabit the headspace of someone who has already grown in directions you may aspire to. In books lies their knowledge, their language, their thinking about the world.
If we can cultivate the belief that our headspaces are capable of rapid growth and then immerse ourselves in environments that accelerate that growth, we unlock new dimensions of possibility.
empathy
āThe purest form of listening is to listen without memory or desireā - Wilfred Bion
To deeply understand new ideas or perspectives often requires stepping out of your current blob entirely. This means dropping judgement, memory, ego ā letting go of everything you think you know to fully embed yourself in a different headspace.
To adopt an idea fully isnāt just to consider or entertain it; itās to inhabit the space where that idea is fully formed and true. Every idea is justifiable within its native blob, because each idea is the result of a some other set of values, experiences, and ways of being.
To fully empathize with someone requires reshaping your headspace to understand the underlying origins and intentions. This means temporarily identifying with their ideology, shedding your assumptions, and reconstructing a new headspace until their conclusions feel as natural as your own.
sense
Itās challenging to hold contradictory perspectives at once. We feel our headspace must be in universal alignment ā it must make sense. Identity is a useful operating system - a set of patterns that help us navigate a complex world consistently.
If we see the self as just a blob ā it begins to lose its hold on us.
Everybody seems to have a different idea of what is true and makes sense. Surely, we all canāt be correct.
But what if there is no sense except in the context of some headspace that decides so? Thoughts that are rational in one headspace are totally absurd in another, and yet both may make sense in different contexts with different goals.
When we let go of the need for constant consistency, we free ourselves to see the world through borrowed lenses instead of searching for definitive truths. By treating perspectives as lenses we can try on, we open up our headspaces to new degrees of freedom. We can optimize for goals and values rather than identity and consistency.
The more we inhabit different headspaces, the more comfortable we become with navigating between them. We can readily adopt and embrace seemingly incompatible lenses when they serve us (from the logical to the playful, structured to improvisational, analytical to the intuitive) and discard the ones that donāt.
possibility
To fully inhabit new headspaces and adopt radically different paradigms is a difficult feat. Weāre, in many ways, bound by nature & nurture, and many of those boundaries are beneficial and adaptive. We become comfortable in the headspaces weāve created, and those headspaces are optimized for the real spaces and environments we inhabit. Meanwhile, any exercise in empathy is always an approximation of someone elseās deeply complex headspace.
Yet each day, we surprise ourselves in the subtle ways we reshape our blobs and grow to understand others. We think of thoughts weād never thought weād think (like, maybe your parents were actually right about some things) and we connect with those far different from us culturally and ideologically. We redefine our edges, grow in unexpected directions, and inhabit new ways of being.
Weāre just blobs, navigating through headspace and time.
