Values are not just what you want, they're the architecture of what you can perceive

[Bjorn K Holmstrom]

Most discussions of personal values treat them as preferences: things you care about, goals you pursue, metrics you track. I want to propose something more unsettling.

Your values don't just shape what you pursue. They determine what you can see about yourself.

Most people operate through an implicit objective function; a set of dimensions along which they evaluate their own life. Am I successful? Am I happy? Am I in control? These aren't neutral questions. They're observation filters. Whatever is true about you but absent from your value architecture registers as noise, not signal. It doesn't exist, as far as your ego is concerned, until it becomes loud enough to be undeniable.

This is the self-variety gap: the distance between the full dimensionality of your actual state and the dimensionality of the lens through which you observe it. The larger the gap, the more of yourself is invisible to you. And invisibility, over time, produces crises that feel sudden but were always already present, just below the threshold of what your values allowed you to perceive.

The contemplative traditions have been pointing at this for a long time, in their own language. The dissolution of a fixed self-concept isn't just liberation from suffering, it's an expansion of observational dimensionality. When you stop collapsing yourself into a narrow narrative, more of what's actually happening can be registered.

I've developed this into a more formal framework; drawing on control theory, Ashby's Law, and research from psychology and contemplative neuroscience, but the essential movement is simple: what you optimize for is what you can see, and what you can't see will eventually govern you.

I'm curious how this resonates here. Leo talks often about the limits of conceptual frameworks and the necessity of direct experience. This is, in some ways, a formal account of why those limits exist structurally, not just philosophically.

What dimensions of yourself became visible only when you loosened your grip on a particular value or identity?