What I Mean by the Unfolding

At the top of the home page, under my name, there is a small line of text that reads in service of the unfolding. A reader scrolling past has maybe two seconds to decide what those words mean before the page continues. Most people, in those two seconds, will reach for the nearest English synonym and assume I mean progress. They will picture a graph. They will picture an arrow. They will picture the kind of word a startup puts on a recruiting page.

I do not mean progress. I want to spend this essay being precise about what I do mean, because every other thing on this site — the work, the marriage, the children, the lab I am building toward — is downstream of this one phrase. If the phrase is hollow, the rest of it is hollow. If the phrase is exact, the rest of it has somewhere to land.

So: definitions, by way of negation first.

Not progress. Progress is a word that has been doing too much work for too long. You can measure progress in GDP, in compute, in throughput, in median income, in the number of stars a satellite can resolve. All of these can scale beautifully while the thing they were supposed to be serving rots out from underneath. A civilization can be richer, faster, smarter, and more capable than any prior civilization in history and still be producing more anxious children, more hollow marriages, and more lonely old men. That is not the unfolding. That is span without depth, and span without depth is not goodness, it is sprawl.

Not optimization. Optimization presumes a fixed objective. It presumes you already know what the good is, and your only remaining job is to get more of it per unit cost. Most of the hardest questions in a life, and certainly the hardest questions in a civilization, are not about how to maximize a known good. They are about whether the thing you are maximizing is actually the good in the first place. An optimizer that has aimed itself at the wrong target is not slightly worse than one that has aimed at the right one. It is a different category of thing. The unfolding, by contrast, contains the question what is worth wanting? inside its own definition. You cannot optimize for it without first asking it what it is.

Not growth, either. Growth is a quantity. The unfolding is a quality. A tumor grows. A startup grows. An economy grows. None of those are necessarily good, and most of them, past a certain point, are explicitly bad. What grows is not always what is alive. What is alive is often not what is loudest about its growth.

Here, then, is what I do mean.

The unfolding is the widening and deepening of what is genuinely life-giving. I borrow this language, and most of the frame underneath it, from Ken Wilber's A Brief History of Everything, which gave me the vocabulary I had been groping toward for a decade. Wilber's basic move is this: every whole in the universe is also a part of a larger whole. He calls these things holons. Atoms become molecules. Molecules become cells. Cells become organisms. Organisms become minds. Minds become cultures. Each level encloses the level beneath it without erasing it. The cell does not abolish the molecule; it incorporates it and reaches further. The mind does not abolish the cell; it stands on it and sees more.

You can measure any holon along two axes. Depth — how much it contains within itself, the height of its interior. And span — how widely it reaches, the breadth of what it touches. A bacterium has very little depth and enormous span; there are quintillions of them. A whale has tremendous depth and very narrow span; there are not many whales, and they are slow to make. Goodness, on this picture, is not on either axis alone. Goodness is the simultaneous lift of both. More depth without losing reach. More reach without losing depth. The forward evolution of consciousness through the whole structure at once.

That is the unfolding. It is not an arrow on a chart. It is a tide rising in a thousand small bays at once.

Concretize. In a single life, the unfolding looks like a marriage that gets warmer, not colder, in its tenth year. It looks like a body that learns to listen to itself instead of override itself. It looks like a mind that can hold more without losing its edge — that can love a child and read a paper on mechanistic interpretability in the same hour and find that neither one diminishes the other. It looks like work that serves something larger than the worker. My daughter Olive is two; my daughter Blossom is seven months. When I rock Blossom at three in the morning and feel my own nervous system slow to meet hers, that is the unfolding happening at the smallest possible scale. There is more of me there in the dark than there used to be. The container has gotten deeper. The reach has gotten wider. Both at once.

In a civilization, the unfolding looks like institutions that can hold complexity without flattening it — courts that get fairer, schools that get more humane, hospitals that get gentler. It looks like intelligence that grows in wisdom and not only in power. It looks like a species that, given more capability, uses that capability to deepen what it already loves rather than to manufacture new things to want.

The opposite movement — the anti-pattern — is what I am most careful to name, because it is the movement I am most likely to be tricked by. Every era has its counterfeit of the real thing, and ours is unusually good at counterfeits.

Stimulation gets mistaken for aliveness. I know this one personally. I spent two years as a professional gamer playing eight hours a day of games I genuinely loved, and I got more depressed every month. The games were beautiful and the inputs were fast and the dopamine was reliable, and underneath all of that I was decaying. Stimulation is what aliveness feels like for the first thirty seconds. Aliveness is what is left after the stimulation stops.

Productivity gets mistaken for meaning. You can ship a feature every week for a decade and arrive at the end of it with no idea what any of it was for. The output graph goes up and to the right. The interior goes flat. Meaning is not what the graph measures. Meaning is what the graph was supposed to be a proxy for, and proxies, given enough pressure, always come apart from the thing they were proxying.

Intensity gets mistaken for depth. This is the most painful one to admit because it flatters the person fooled by it. A loud feeling is not a deep one. A dramatic week is not a meaningful week. Intensity is depth's loudest impersonator, and I have to remind myself fairly often that the quietest stretches of my life have usually been the ones where the most was actually happening.

None of these counterfeits are evil. They are just what depth looks like from a distance, the way a billboard from a hundred yards looks like a window. Up close they are flat. The unfolding is what is left when you stop accepting the counterfeit and require the actual thing.

Last, the stakes. Why this word, and why now.

Within my lifetime, and probably within the next decade, humanity will share the planet with intelligences not its own. Those intelligences will be trained on objectives we choose, in ways we do not entirely understand, at a speed we cannot fully see. Whatever metric we point them at, they will pursue. Whatever metric we forget to point them at, they will neglect. The default trajectory — the one we get if no one chooses otherwise — is for those systems to scale span without depth. More capability. More throughput. More reach into more domains. And the interior — the wisdom, the care, the holding of complexity — left as an afterthought, a footnote, a thing we will get to later when there is time.

There will not be time. Span scales fast. Depth scales slowly. If we let span run ahead of depth long enough, the gap closes only by collapsing the depth side of the equation. Civilizations have done this before, on smaller scales, and it does not end well for anyone living through it.

This is why I keep using the word. Progress is the word the gap closes around. Optimization is the word the gap closes around. Growth is the word the gap closes around. The unfolding is the word that holds both axes in view at once and refuses to let either one win alone. It is the only frame I know of that is honest about what is at stake when an immensely powerful new kind of mind enters the world, and demanding about what we are obliged to do about it.

That is what I mean by the phrase. The widening and the deepening, simultaneously, of what is genuinely life-giving — in a self, in a family, in a civilization, in whatever comes after us. Every other essay on this site is an attempt to live inside that definition for a few thousand more words at a time. The next century is worth winning only on those terms. There is no other version of winning I am interested in.