Bubble Theory

We live our lives inside invisible bubbles.

Not literal ones, but mental, social, and cultural ones. Bubbles of people, habits, values, and ideas: soft walls shaping how we think, what we want, who we become.

Most of us never even realize they’re there.

A bubble is your immediate circle. Not your family (they tends to be more of a constant, grounding force) but peers, co-workers, classmates, friends, even Twitter mutuals. They’re who you subconsciously model yourself after.

The thing about bubbles is that they define what feels normal.

• What’s worth chasing vs. what’s cringe.
• What counts as success vs. what you consider failure.
• What’s ethical, admirable, fashionable, smart.
• What's achievable and what you consider delusional.

The problem with bubbles is that you can’t see the borders from the inside. And because you don’t see the borders, it’s easy to mistake the bubble for reality.

The Illusion of Normal

When you’re surrounded by people who all want the same things, behave the same way, and measure success the same way, those playbooks start to feel like truth.

If everyone around you is optimizing for career prestige, then getting promoted feels like winning. If your group idolizes creative freedom, then working a 9-to-5 feels like prison. If your peers are optimizing for followers or funding rounds or building B2B SaaS, you start to think that’s what you should do as well.

We conflate proximity with truth and consensus with wisdom. We assume the desires around us are universal. But really, they’re just local. Your bubble creates a false sense of consensus – and that consensus can feel like objective reality.

But every now and then, the bubble pops.

You move cities. Switch jobs. Travel. Or sometimes, you meet someone who lives so differently from you that they might as well be from a parallel universe. They prioritize things you never considered, value what you ignored, and succeed at games you didn’t even know existed.

Then you realize that there’s no such thing as normal. What’s foreign for you is familiar for someone, and what’s familiar for someone is foreign to you.

Mimetic Machines

It’s tempting to believe that our ideas are original – that our goals, fears, and even definitions of a “good life” came from some deep inner truth. But most of us didn’t sit down one day and write out our values from scratch. Instead, they slowly leaked in through conversations, group chats, podcasts, or by simply observing people around us. Through osmosis.

If everyone around you is chasing financial independence, you’ll feel behind unless you’re stacking index funds and maxing out 401Ks. If your circle values intellectual ambition, you’ll feel compelled to read research papers on the weekends. If your peers are all starting something new, staying at a stable job starts to feel like cowardice.

We are less like free thinkers than we’d like to believe and more like fish admiring the curves of our bowl, or squirrels defending one tree, unaware there’s an entire forest – and beyond that, an entire planet.

The truth is that the range of human experiences is wide. It’s actually so freaking immensely wide that it’s impossible for us to imagine all the different ways that life could be lived.

The Infinite Gameboard

Somewhere in New York, there’s a high-achiever chasing promotions, juggling event invites, and maximizing their dating roster.

A couple timezones away, a digital nomad in Bali starts the day slow, works a focused few hours from a cafe, and spends the rest of the day unwinding at the beach.

Meanwhile, a monk in Myanmar lives in silence, rising with the sun, unaware of the existence of Instagram, dopamine hacks, or Andrew Tate.

In Lagos, a street vendor is working 14 hours to feed a family of seven. In LA, a teenager earns seven figures by lip-syncing online. In Kenya, a Maasai herder can’t read a spreadsheet but can read the weather like sacred scripture.

Every one of them are also living in their own communities and bubbles.

What matters to us and what we hold as sacred, they might not give a sh*t about at all. We’re all playing different games with different scoreboards.

Bubble Hopping

So, what does this all mean?

It means your bubble isn’t reality. It’s a zoomed-in corner of the human map, a pixel on the screen, one tiny simulation running on the vast hardware of human possibility.

There’s another version of you, thousands even, that could’ve existed. One who stumbled into a different friend group, read a different book at 19, moved cities instead of staying put. That version of you would have laughed at things you cry about now. Would have found your values absurd. And you’d do the same to them.

Most people will live their whole lives inside one bubble, never realizing it has borders. But once you start seeing the walls, you can’t unsee them. You also start to see other bubbles around you—foreign ones, absurd ones, fascinating ones. You might even step into one. Or two. Or a dozen.

So pop your bubble. Or at least poke it.

Read weird things. Travel. Talk to people who would normally annoy you. Try on new mindsets like new hats. Don’t immediately jump to conclusions about others.

There are entire continents of human experience your map doesn’t even show. Belief systems that would feel like fiction to you. Priorities that would seem insane. Entire games being played that you don’t even know exist.

Don’t mistake your bubble for the world, and stay curious about the possibilities.

And you realize: Oh. There’s more.