Living in Superposition
The truth behind truth
I’ve been circling around this new piece with Tylenol as the unlikely entry point. First, the recent headlines about acetaminophen and autism, and then the story of 1982 when Tylenol was poisoned and Johnson & Johnson had to manage that crisis. What started for me as a marketing lens quickly opened into a worldview lens. Because the question isn’t just: How does a brand respond in crisis? The bigger question is: How do we respond to truth itself when the raw material of trust is already fractured?
We’re living in what Ken Wilber calls the post-truth era. Facts themselves are fraying, and while that sounds terrifying on the surface, I don’t think it has to be. Facts have always been another way of trying to cling to certainty, when life itself is never certain. The danger comes in how we deal with that awareness. Postmodernism at its best doesn’t discard rationality; it weaves in the esoteric while maintaining ethics intact. It allows us to explore stories and perspectives while remaining mindful of the harm that reckless rumor-spreading can cause. Where I think we’re stuck right now is in a pre-post fallacy. Instead of transcending rationality, too many people are abandoning it—trading science and reason for conspiracy theories, gossip, and the loudest emotional certainties. It’s not wisdom; it’s regression. And it leaves us begging for leadership that knows how to handle elusive truths responsibly.
That’s really what I’m interested in: what does it mean to take responsibility for elusive truths? Humans are always looking for certainty, some place to hang our hat, but what if the more honest move is to get comfortable with uncertainty? Quantum computing gives me a useful metaphor here. Superposition means that multiple possibilities can exist simultaneously, and only collapse into one outcome when acted upon. Medicine, by contrast, often tries to force one outcome—and in doing so produces side effects. I think learning to live in a state of superposition is a healthier approach. It’s not that outcomes don’t matter, but that we don’t panic and collapse into the first certainty that feels comforting. We learn to hold possibilities open longer, to trust emergence, to accept that there are no guaranteed outcomes.
That’s easier said than done. I see a lot of what Kim Barta describes developmentally, when kids run the house because their parents refuse to assert authority. The kids panic. They get loud and unfocused, not because they love the chaos, but because they don’t actually want to be in charge. That’s how the culture feels right now: a swirl of panic because no grown-up seems to be in the room. Someone with the actual capacity to hold complexity and esoteric truths ethically has not yet stepped into the role. Some of us may be able to handle that posture for our own lives, but scaling it up to run a country or navigate global politics is another thing entirely.
Still, this isn’t a call for readers to storm the stage of world politics. It’s more of a pledge for personal sovereignty. Most of us live surrounded by people who panic online, who weaponize rumors, who post opinions about opinions. The most meaningful work we can do is not to add to the noise, but to calm ourselves. To practice superposition, to hold multiple futures in mind, to expand our farsightedness. Life isn’t collapsing just because this particular path feels unstable. We don’t need to cling. We need to get better at mastering uncertainty.
That’s where my own framework on cognitive functions connects. I’ve mapped each function through the Gene Keys’ Shadow, Gift, and Siddhi lens. For Extroverted Feeling—Harmony—I named the Shadow “Drama.” Drama is spreading rumors, forcing opinions, manipulating boundaries, and withholding truth. It’s not conflict in the healthy sense; it’s just noise. It’s people hurling emotional rocks across the pond: “You stay over there, I’ll stay over here.” The Gift, by contrast, is genuine conflict: conversation that grows both sides, where emotions come to the table and get sorted into new shared values. Conflict requires listening, conceding, and redefining boundaries together. That’s what we lack at the collective level. We’ve mistaken Drama for authority, confusing emotional force with leadership.
So, how do we manage crisis when trust is fractured? By being vulnerable. By showing humility. By saying, “Here’s what we know. Here’s what we don’t.” By being fallible in public, instead of inflating into certainty. There’s a fear that if leaders admit they do not know, people will panic. But the opposite is true. Certainty-as-theater is what breaks trust. Vulnerability and grace are what restore it. I think about Rutger Bregman’s Humankind, which argues that people naturally self-organize. We don’t need to be corralled like sheep. We need leaders who trust us enough to give us space—and who extend faith first before demanding it in return. Trust begins inward. If I want the world to trust me, I have to model it first.
That leads to the following question: how do we distinguish between transcending rationality and abandoning it? Transcendence doesn’t deny what’s in front of us. It asks: what else is happening here, and how might this change? Rationality moves linearly: cause → effect → fixed identity. Trauma gets interpreted as “this is why I am this way, and therefore I’ll always be this way.” Transcendence sees the cycle: this is how I became, and here is how I can adapt. Whales evolved from hippo-like creatures not because of an upward curve of progress, but because the water offered food. Adaptability is the real engine, not linear growth. Humans, too, adapt. And right now, rationality alone can’t nourish us. We need subjectivity, interiority, plurality. To abandon rationality, though, is to bend truth to personal desire, to fuel cults and ideological bubbles, to weaponize feelings as fact. Post-rational leadership holds the tension. It balances incentives. It models vulnerability. It honors subjective purposes without harming others’ health or opportunities. Rationality becomes a tool, not a throne.
Then comes the practice of superposition itself. How do ordinary people live without panicking for closure? For me, it’s courage work. The panic for certainty comes from fear of identity collapse. We cling to being “a good person,” when in fact we’re all inconsistent, biased, desirous, fluid. We are already elusive. The work isn’t to become fluid; it’s to accept that we are fluid. Panic is clinging to the surfboard. Superposition is surfing. Fear, prejudice, and entitlement form the foundation of the drama triangle in this scenario. Fear clutches identity. Prejudice universalizes a tiny slice of experience. Entitlement demands certainty from reality. Instead of panicking, I widen my perception. I go toward what I don’t know—not to become certain, but to build confidence in navigating uncertainty. It’s small daily moves: noticing when a story tries to collapse my choices, using AI without losing my autonomy, choosing presence instead of doom-scrolling, creating one real thing to collapse my own wavefunction with intention.
But what about authority? If no grown-up is in the room, what does leadership look like without sliding into dogma? Here, I think in terms of dependence, independence, and interdependence. With no authority, people regress to dependence. With rigid authority, independence gets crushed. Mature authority models interdependence. It appears as a coach, guide, or challenger. It roots itself in sovereignty, like Viktor Frankl in the camps—inner freedom intact despite atrocity. It surrenders to emergence without submitting to victimhood. There’s a difference between surrender and submission. Submission abdicates. Surrender acts fully, then releases outcomes. Washington in Hamilton teaches people how to say goodbye: I do my part, then I step away. That’s authority without dogma.
Which leads to dosing truth responsibly. Truth isn’t an all-or-nothing declaration; it’s a dose. A big dump creates backlash. A manipulative trick breeds cynicism. Responsible dosing means sharing experience honestly, asking real questions, and offering just enough to move the conversation forward. Parenting is the simplest case: “Please pick up your toys; this room belongs to all of us.” “It hurts when you hit me.” Those are truths, not capital-T Truths. They set boundaries without becoming rigid. They insist where my experience gives me authority, but they also leave space for listening. My job as a parent is twofold: to take care of them and to enable them to take care of themselves. Replace “kids” with “teams” or “citizens” and the principle holds. Authority is situational—step in where I have experience. Step out where I don’t. Minimize harm without promising certainty.
All of this leans on the subjective lens as a fundamental skill. Personality preferences shape how we see and act. Introverted Thinking optimizes systems. Extroverted Feeling aligns people and values. Neither cancels the other. The Enneagram reveals our ego’s reflexive moves under stress—why someone may steamroll or withhold. Development adds time: earlier and later, not higher and lower. Kids push boundaries. Teens test strategies. Adults integrate, but often forget they’re still carrying a teenager inside. These lenses don’t exist to sort people into bins. They help me know how to guide and how to dose. They help me understand when someone is clinging to a story, and why, so I can meet them with compassion and nudge them toward healthier patterns.
That’s the pledge: not to clone myself in others, not to demand sameness, but to listen where they stand, to guide with the smallest sufficient dose, and to let them practice sovereignty in their own way. If I’ve sprinted further down this developmental path because of trauma or luck, it’s not a badge. It’s a responsibility. I turn around, and I help.
So when I talk about living in superposition, I mean this: if post-truth is our weather, then skillful uncertainty is our craft. I offer trust first. I treat reason as a tool. I practice courage in ambiguity. I model sovereignty without clutching. I dose truth, not dump it. I use my subjective lens to guide, not to game. I hold multiple futures without fear, then I pick one I can stand behind, and I act. The rest I leave open. Multiple possibilities stay alive until I collapse them with care.
That’s how I try to live. That’s what I mean by Living in Superposition.