There are many, many lenses through which to tell a life story. The same story through a different lens might be unrecognizable. In that spirit, I beg you not to take this as a be-all end-all on me or what I think, but here’s an attempt at a version of my story through the lens of the Kegan stages.
3 to 4
If I try to trace the stage shifts through my adult life, I think a 3-to-4 seed was planted when I came to question and then leave my religion in my late teens. Still, I’d say the bulk of the transition happened while building a startup in my 20s (which everyone said was dumb and would fail but, through perseverence, did not!). It took many years after that to spread into the way I could durably think about my close personal relationships.
My life as a Stage 4 native was very tricky. I didn't want to do anything reflexively or by default. I wanted to so thoroughly know everything, and so thoroughly know my personal values, and make immaculate choices at all times, and then essentially fix the world (from knowing and playing it more consciously than anyone else). Of course, none of this was very conscious to me at the time.
4.5
Two notable things were happening when I got my first glimpses of Stage 5. I was writing a book about interpersonal conflict and running an intellectual discussion club in San Francisco. In both contexts, I found myself doing the same strenuous mental move over and over: thoroughly investing my mind in how one perspective was right and good and useful, then switching to see how an entirely conflicting and contradictory perspective could be the same.
Eventually, after doing this enough, it became automatic. And it broke my whole world.
David Chapman has written about "stage 4.5" and its characteristic depression:
Between stages 4 and 5, there is a gap, a stretch of open ocean. One recognizes the limitations of rationality, but can’t yet work effectively in the meta-rational mode. Many people get stuck treading water here, trying to stay afloat, often not even able to see the dry land of meta-rationality on the horizon. With rationality seeming the only basis for meaning, they fall into nihilistic depression. This is sometimes informally called “stage 4.5,” although it is not a “stage” in the same sense as the others. It is not a workable mode of organization. However, its dysfunction is stabilized by spurious logic of nihilism. Some stuck there may be barely capable of everyday functioning. Others manage better, by recognizing the limits of rationality while continuing to use it effectively in practice.
Eventually, I lost interest in my group's "intellectual discussions" (which felt pointless and predictable). The book project felt futile as well. I wrote this on Twitter:
Can I be really real? Lately I’ve been in this slump obsessing about the limited capacity of the brain. Like we have this idea that we go through life accumulating knowledge, but we don’t really, we forget almost everything. And even when knowledge makes its way into long-term memory, we can only access the teeniest tiniest bit at a time. We have this false sense that we’re seeing the big picture, that it’s getting clearer and clearer - but we’re just seeing one tiny dot’s worth of knowledge, and then we see a different dot and forget the one we saw before.
I think this is what people mean when they say “well we’re only human.” They’re referring to our tiny capacity. Like we struggle our whole lives with simple 2-parters e.g. “love yourself and love others” - failing to consider our own well-being while caring for others, failing to see others while concerned for ourselves. Not because we’re immoral, but because we can’t actually see/do more than one thing at a time.
I think the natural way of things is like- when one idea proves inadequate to solve all our problems, we seesaw to the opposite side, adopting this new position as “right.” e.g. When we’re on the “love yourself” side of the seesaw, we’re prone to shout about how tending to ourselves is life’s #1 imperative - forgetting that empathizing with others is equally important, along with 26748648378 other important things actively holding up our lives.
Because of this, I think most change isn’t progress per se, it’s cyclical. e.g. An ideology is invented to solve a deeply human problem like fear of the unknown or getting people to contribute their fair share to a group. Then the ideology creates new problems - especially for those who never experienced the original problem it was invented to address - so it’s reversed or replaced. Until the original problem resurfaces, and the initial ideology is presented again to solve it.
I have a lot of compassion for all the generations that thought their thing was gonna solve all problems. I don’t love religion, but you can see how in many ways it was the best we could do - the way it fits into our human-sized context window and patterns onto our innate behavioral mechanisms.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I work on my book. In a basic sense, I think everyone already knows how to get along - that it really is just “love yourself and love others at the same time.” But we struggle to do that within our capacity. I have a strong drive to synthesize a model for interpersonal conflict that fits into our tiny brains and patterns onto existing impulses. But I also know that conflict is nothing new. We’ve long had much of the same information - we’ve just been kinda re-summarizing it and shuffling the pieces back and forth all this time. No model that fits in our head will have the amount of detail (context and clarification) to hold up to scrutiny and stand the test of time.
I don’t want to end this in such a cynical place, so I will acknowledge that in many important ways, the world *is* a much nicer place than it used to be! Motivated people do meaningfully improve their lives! Not all that’s good is lost. Maybe AI will even help.
In a way, realizing that change is so cyclical, that much of progress is limited by the brain’s capacity… is a bit of a relief. It gives “everything is already okay.”
(Maybe this is me getting old?)
Things continued like that for a while. I said some strange, contradictory things to people close to me which were not well-received. And I got really, really obsessed with explaining subjectivity and predictive processing to anyone who would listen — though again, this never seemed to land with the weight or recognition I'd hoped.
4.5 to 5
There are three things I can easily remember that helped pull me out of this trap.
I read a book called Nothing & Everything: How to stop fearing nihilism and embrace the void. This let me know I wasn't alone, and it encouraged me, for the first time, to see my situation with a valence of lightness and freedom vs. darkness and heaviness.
Second, as long as nothing and everything was true anymore, I committed to looking in good-feeling directions as often as bad:
See the bad (depressed)
— Ann Pierce (@itsannpierce) September 8, 2025
See the good (deluded)
See the bad AND the good (wholeness) https://t.co/nq6Z0AoKmg
Third, I came across the Kegan stage framework through David Chapman's Meaningness blog. And just like that, I had words to explain what was happening me. The system painted a clear picture of the arc from where I was in Stage 4.5 to clarity, wisdom, and peace in Stage 5. It gave me a destination to steer towards.
5
There's something about Stage 5 that's hard to explain, but my friend put it like this:
Another way I think about kegan stages is that the core idea is constant - “what is good for me is good” - but what changes is the locus of identity.
A K2’s “me” is their ego.
A K3’s “me” is like, ego+superego.
A K4’s is like, integrated self over time.
A K5’s “me” is like, the world, sort of? The dynamic system of self plus other plus environment all over time?
Since Stage 4.5, I have found myself thinking at larger scales and across time. The larger view you take, the less you or your current problems matter. In Stage 4.5's nihilism, I found myself thinking things like: What makes humans so important? All of civilization has only been a blip in time.
It's sort of like if you imagine being one particular lion in the African savannah, going about your whole life, experiencing fear and loss and love. Then you imagine being a gazelle who is born and grows and faces many near-death experiences but lives and has a family and then is eaten by the lion, and the horror of all that. Then you imagine being an observer over all of it. Whose problems you care about is such a subjective thing. The farther you zoom out, the less any individual matters. Instead, you see the whole ecosystem just doing its thing. It feels wrong to even intervene.
In Stage 5, I still often think at scales so big that they drown out the immediate needs of myself and people I know, but it's by choice. I also choose to zoom in and live in the world and moment I'm in. And I really do see now that things can change for the better — not to mention that there is such a thing as better at all. It's just directional rather than precise.
At Stage 4.5, I felt like I was under a curse that banished me from normal life. Where I'd never again be understood. Where I'd never again find the motivation to act on my environment. But that's gone in Stage 5. Stage 5 feels light and free. I feel increased psychological distance from things that used to hurt me a whole lot, like what people think of me. But I can still choose to care about and participate in things.
It's hard to explain the moment-to-moment experience of Stage 5. A lot of concepts flash through my mind very quickly — similar to how I used to intentionally examine one perspective after another, except now it's much faster and burns way less calories.
It's harder to communicate now. It can be hard to get a thought out, because before I can speak all the words, I've already formed a handful of arguments against them. People generally find it confusing if you share these; it's much more normal to take one stance and stick with it, or to move slowly from one stance to another. I exert a lot of effort to censor myself to be understood by the other person. Sometimes it feels a bit like lying.
When you believe many opposite things (or feel uninvested in finding one truth), you run into the limits of language, because speaking or writing requires that you say things in a certain order, which can signal weight that may or may not be there. Even putting a concept into words can give it more solidity than you mean it to have. Sometimes I find myself complaining to someone about something, and they sympathize with me, and I want to say, "Oh no, I barely care about this, don't worry!" Again, it feels like my face and voice are kind of lying, since they're giving people a false impression of my overall state.
It's not that I never feel bad, because of course I do. But it's like a part of me can genuinely be having a bad time, but another part of me knows it's temporary or unimportant in the grand scheme. I'm aware that I could choose something else. So the bad feeling never feels completely real or all-encompassing.
Stage 5 is lonely. I find this the biggest con against it, and it's not a small one. For this reason, I don't recommend that anyone *try* to get to Stage 5 unless they're already struggling at 4.5 like I was.
I feel separated from people around me in a sense, and yet I feel closer to people overall (in this time and across time). I am emotionally touched by things very easily. I see the value in all kinds of people that I didn't before.
It hasn't been that long since I've been Stage 5 native, and I find I regress unintentionally at times. My sense is that I'm back in 4.5 when again I feel cursed and excluded, or when reading Twitter starts to make me mad (I feel like I'm “in it” and desire for people to change vs. feeling "outside it"/in a meta realm where I am observing people in their process). I used to also regress in the sense that I'd regain hope in a super-frame large enough to be perfect truth/to not require other frames, but this hasn't happened in a while.
I definitely lose my Stage 5 perspective when I am underslept or sick.
I am getting better at wielding other stage patterns by choice when they are more adaptive for the situation. For example, in 4.5, I felt disdain for 4-patterned thinking. I wanted to nitpick and burn down all the frameworks, because it bothered me to see other people take them as complete truths. But now I'm happily using 4-patterned thinking to create this site!
Why I love the Kegan stage framework
As my story was meant to illustrate, the Kegan stage framework gave words to a very confusing period in my life and showed me the way out. I think it can do the same for others, even if they are stuck in a different place on the map.
I've also gotten a ton of value from the stages-as-patterns way of using the framework, which among many things, clarifies situational misunderstandings and misalignments that are otherwise difficult to see.
As someone who has long been a fan of psychology frameworks — the MBTI, the Big Five, the Enneagram, attachment styles, etc. — it warms my heart so much to find one that explicitly supports being one truth among many. At Stage 5, I no longer believe in the "one truth" or the "one way" or the "one metric" to maximize — I think human cognition is too small for one such frame to fit — but the Kegan stage framework isn't claiming that. It's showing the way out.