The act of taking your current idea/belief/opinion Very Seriously, reifying it, acting as if it is definitely true and must be acted on, thinking about all the implications of it, thinking about how people who don’t agree are wrong, etc
So, when I’m being a Kegan 4 dumbass, I am totally "blended with" my special Kegan 4 worldview (or perhaps, I am currently foregrounding and reifying/deifying one single value, for example “I must become more sociable”).
This is the subject/object thing that Kegan talks about: when you’re “subject to” the thing, it’s holding you, and you’re not even aware of it. You’re like a fish in water.
So, blended with this axiom, believing it to be true, you then have all these implications that you need to figure out and stress out about. “Because I definitely Need To Become More Sociable, I need to do xyz”. “Because I definitely Need To Live In The Perfect Country, I need to figure a bunch of stuff out”
And you may spend years in a particular world-view, with people who agree with you, investigating the implications of the world view - AI safety is a salient example to me, but of course any career would apply. Finding people who share your axioms, learning (getting ""A”s”), being able to talk to people at the same level of abstraction (having the prerequisite “B” floor), etc.
Yes for sure this isn’t a brand new thing that I’m inventing
Scrunching is my own signifier that is pointing at some thing in the territory
I like how this does require you to think about parts, it’s just either, you’re scrunched or unscrunched
Really it’s the same as Kegan’s subject/object. But saying I’m “currently subject to my worldview” is way less memetically fit (?) than saying “oh shit I’ve been scrunched”
2026-02-03
You scrunch many times per day
E.g., you have an idea for something that a coworker could do, you scrunch with how important this thing is for them to do, how useful it’d be for the team, so you write a message from that headspace
Vs, unscrunching, stepping back and seeing it from other POVs, wondering if it can wait, be batched into a synchronous IRL conversation with other topics, whether maybe it’s not worth sharing it all
You scrunch into the annoyance of the first aid course taking 7 hours because the facilitator tells stories and jokes rather than being efficient. You scrunch with annoyance at how silly it is that passing a 15-question do-it-as-many-times-as-you-need multiple choice quiz qualifies you for 3 years. You scrunch with the recognition that it’s ultimately just a legal/compliance thing. Etc
2026-03-14 - abbreviated history of my scrunching
Quick braindump of things I’ve scrunched with:
“Eeee, clearly what I care about most is music, therefore I should learn how to make music, and make youtube videos about the process”
Really fun, and I’m happy and proud that I did it, but I totally stopped ~23 days into a “I will make a song every day this year” project, and totally didn’t miss it at all. So like, clearly not a first principle that I Must Make Music
“Eeee, effective altruism”
“Eeee, learning”
Having a great job (e.g., Alvea, Longview)
And really, there was a long period of no scrunching at all. Just being kinda passive, not aiming for anything ambitious. And then there was the period of “oh shit, I’ve been so mid, I need to Find My Thing That Will Make Me Exceptional”
And now, more of an era of: “there’s no specific thing, like music or whatever. But there are probably some simple unifying things”. Honestly, this is where astrology feels really useful. Leo sun Taurus moon Scorpio rising with venus in Gemini and a Pisces mars. Really feels like it points at some useful stuff for me