This article is a continuation of part 1:
As you get older, the infinitely dimensional headspace becomes more perceivable. You accumulate many maps. The maps give you concepts, lenses, frameworks — and more of the dimensions of the world are visible.
Early maps you picked up might include emotions, politics, hobbies, and traits. Every year, you think you’ve finally covered a lot of the territory, and you also realize there’s far more uncharted territory than you realized.
You learn new words like sonder: the realization that every person you meet has a life as complex, vivid, and detailed as your own, filled with their own ambitions, worries, and interiors. New words shape your ability to perceive reality, because you use language to anchor understanding.
You discover that some people operate with completely different lenses to see the world. Your friend tells you about astral projection and CIA conspiracy theories, you learn about new religions that live a few streets away from you. You discover subjects like semiology (culture as a system of signs) or sociobiology (genes & fitness shaping social behavior) or epistemology (how we decide what is knowledge).
Tug on any one of these and you'll find a world with endless depth. Live in it long enough and it becomes alive, internally consistent, and generative. Everything makes sense within it. Many others have lived here too. And you'll find some that say these lenses are absolutely false, and others who swear by them with a fervor that's hard to dismiss.
Every map is contested territory. Which is strange, because each one feels, from the inside, like simply seeing clearly.
alien
The more maps you accumulate, the more a strange question becomes available: what if you could see them all at once, from outside any of them?
I like to play a thought experiment called “Alien.”
You have no existing beliefs, no identity or stake in any human outcome. You observe the world anthropologically. You can hear the thoughts inside people's heads and watch their actions playing out across a vast map. What do you see?
The Alien might see humans and their headspaces bumping into each other, mistaking their maps for the terrain, calling the collisions "reality." It watches as infinite complexity collapses into habit and patterns. It observes humans moving through their lives with the illusion of free will while following trajectories shaped by invisible forces: cultural scripts, evolutionary drives, and organizational systems.
To the Alien, everything is made up. Every cultural concept, every organizational hierarchy, every value system is invented. Humans disagree about many things, and nearly everything they disagree about lives mostly in their heads.
The Alien watches as factions — liberals, conservatives, libertarians, socialists, and more — clash over the right way to govern, each convinced their map is the territory, each directing resources and attention toward validating their own collective headspace.
What's interesting isn't that they're wrong. Each one is right, from within a headspace that produces that rightness. The Alien is fascinated by each of these varying worldviews and opinions.
“Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed we have no other criterion of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the country we live in. There is always the perfect religion, the perfect government, the perfect and accomplished usage of all things. I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, from what I have been told, except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.” - Michel de Montaigne
But the longer the Alien watches, the more it notices something else: the blobs aren't just bumping into each other. Something is moving between them.
egregores
In headspaces, the creatures are egregores.
An egregore is a thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a group. A blob of ideas with its own survival instincts, spreading from person to person, headspace to headspace.
When two people debate, their respective headspace egregores are fighting. The egregores that survive are not necessarily the most true. They're the most fit — fit for spreading, for replicating, for persisting in memory and conversation and social reward.
Why We Sleep spread the "sleep is the single most important variable in your health" egregore. Attached spread the "everyone can be sorted into anxious, avoidant, or secure, and this explains your relationship problems" egregore. Both books are engaging, populist simplifications of much deeper research — but the simplified egregore has more mimetic fitness than the nuanced one. It's easier to hold, easier to pass on, easier to feel certain about.
You might watch this in real time at a party where someone brings up attachment theory. Within minutes, the whole group is sorting themselves and their exes. "Oh, he was definitely avoidant." "That's such anxious-attachment behavior." The framework takes the chaos of failed relationships and imposes a clean grammar. By the end of the night, three people have a new language to explain all of their relationship misgivings. Later, they tell their friends about their new revelations. The egregore has reproduced.
Some egregores are load-bearing. Consider narratives surrounding depression: I am a depressed person, this is who I am, and it is the cause of my problems. That story is a remarkably fit egregore. It survives because it outcompetes other explanations of your own experience — it offers a totalizing account where every setback and uncertainty points in the same direction. It becomes self-reinforcing. And the cultural framing around it can give the story even more persistence, flattening a complex condition into a fixed identity, preempting the possibility that the configuration could shift.
This isn't to say depression isn't real. But the narrative of depression — the story you tell about what it means, how permanent it is, how much it defines you — has its own memetic fitness, independent of the underlying experience. The egregore and the condition are not the same thing, but they’re also deeply intertwined.
When you start to see the planes on which egregores compete, they begin to lose some of their automatic grip. You still feel them. But you get a little more say in which ones you feed.
stories
Egregores, seen from inside a single blob, often look like stories.
Stories are compressed headspaces, transmitted in language. And we underestimate how much our stories actively construct reality.
When we fail, we narrate the failure in ways that protect us. You struggle to find a job and the story writes itself between rejection emails: the market is brutal right now, they wanted someone internal, the process is broken. Each part is, in some way, true. But the story does something beyond explaining — it preserves the headspace that produced the struggle. It decides what the rejection was about in a way that makes it not about you.
And then the story starts looking for friends. You remember other times you were overlooked. You notice how so-and-so landed a job despite being a worse candidate. You easily build a case because we are very good at finding evidence for things we already believe. The story reinforces itself, and somewhere along the way it stops being a story about external factors and becomes a story about who you are: you're not good enough, you're unlucky, you're bad at interviewing, and you won’t ever make it. The outcomes recur.
Sometimes the market really is difficult. Sometimes you do lack a skill or you’re bad at interviewing. But the point isn't that the story is always wrong — it's that the story doesn't stop where the facts do. It keeps going, gathering evidence, building identity, long after it's outlived its usefulness as an explanation — because at some point, the story stops being about understanding and starts being about protection. A story that says you'll never make it is one that never has to survive another rejection. This story becomes a cage.
Unfortunately, knowing these dynamics doesn't break you out of the cage. You can watch a story running in yourself, name it clearly, understand its structure, trace it back to wherever it came from — and still feel it as simple truth. The headspace that contains the story is also the headspace that would have to deconstruct it.
What shifts stories is displacement. New people, new rooms, new contexts, new stories where the old story has fewer surfaces to stick to and less evidence to feed on. You move somewhere it can't follow. And then you find new stories that serve you better than the old ones.
causation
One of the most seductive stories we tell ourselves is that of causation.
Your friend says she’s introverted. And that’s the cause of why she expends energy when she spends time with people socially and dislikes it. Because that’s how introversion works, right? A quick reading of the MBTI seems to say so.
Causation is the lens that makes the world feel navigable: this happened because of that, I am this way because of my past or because of some label, if I do X then Y will follow. It's compelling because it's a simple story. But the world is a web of interconnected dimensions interacting in non-linear ways, and the clean arrows we draw between them are sometimes imposed after the fact.
The stranger effect is that the story might become the cause. The story produces the behavior that produces the evidence that confirms the story. This is why placebos work and why the story about why something is hard often matters as much as the thing itself. The map rewrites the territory.
The more nuanced “cause” of your friends’ social energy woes might be a blend of factors: her identity of introversion and shyness, her anxiousness, combined with her misalignment with the activities and personality styles of her friends, her love of her activities and autonomy when she is alone, and her social skills need some work to bring out the best of both parties.
If we are anything like the new intelligences we're building, there are no singular causes in us either — just weights, connections, networks. Every change cascades across many outputs. Behavior is not the product of any single node. It emerges from the configuration of the whole.
The urge to find causation is itself a headspace lens. It’s a useful story — but often one that rewrites the territory it claims to map.
mobility
My suspicion is that the right goal is not to find the singular right headspace or the right egregores, because the story that fully captures reality doesn’t exist. Every lens and egregore offers its own clarity and its own blindness — what feels solid from one angle fractures from another.
Perhaps the goal is mobility instead: the capacity to move between headspaces without losing yourself entirely in any of them. To borrow a lens, use it, set it down. To let an egregore in, see what it illuminates, notice when it starts to totalize. To tell a story with enough looseness that you can revise it when the world pushes back.
This is harder than it sounds. Headspaces have gravity. The ones you live in long enough start to feel like reality itself, not like a room you could walk out of. Changing them takes much more effort than deciding to.
But every once in a while, something shifts — a conversation with a friend, a book, a failure that teaches you something — and you find yourself somewhere new, looking back at the headspace you lived in and thinking, “I couldn't even see the walls from inside.”
That's the map getting bigger. And it will keep unfolding, as long as you keep looking.
