A personal working model for understanding what drives you — and why that matters for finding your footing. Built on neuroscience, iteratively refined, openly pseudoscientific.
Not a scientific theory. Actively being developed. Shared because it's been useful to me.
I started building this model in high school, as a way to make sense of myself after leaving the religious framework I was raised in. For a while I called it a "scientific theory" — which, in retrospect, tells you a lot about where my head was at. After taking formal psychology classes and reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, I recognized a few fundamental problems with how I was building it, not least of which is that nothing in it is falsifiable enough to qualify as a theory in any scientific sense.
What it is: a working model. Something built from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and older frameworks like Maslow's hierarchy and Graves' model of human existence. Iteratively refined through observation, reading, and personal experience. I've found it genuinely useful for understanding myself — useful enough that I want to share it, even if it's incomplete and probably wrong in ways I haven't found yet.
The core claim: the feeling of not being fulfilled, or of "missing something" — that has structure. It maps to specific underlying drives. And understanding those drives, and your personal hierarchy of them, gives you more traction on the problem than most generic advice about finding your purpose.
The core framework. Human behavior traces to a hierarchy of inborn drives, each associated with a specific chemical messenger. Understanding the hierarchy explains a lot about why we do what we do — and why we sometimes feel like we're fighting ourselves.
Intrinsic Drive Sequence Notation. The hierarchy isn't the same for everyone — some people have achievement at the top, others have connection. IDSN is a notation system for representing that individual architecture, which is where personality actually lives in this model.
Codex for Eudaimonic Living and Action. The practical side: a framework for making decisions that actually serve your long-term wellbeing, with two modes — one for when you're thinking clearly, and one for when you're not.
Partly because writing forces more rigorous thinking, and partly because the kind of model that's useful for one person might be useful for others. If you're looking for something to help you understand your own patterns better — especially if you've found traditional frameworks (religious, psychological, self-help) either too constraining or too vague — this might be worth your time to read.
If something doesn't ring true to your experience, trust your experience. The model is supposed to serve you, not the other way around.