Here’s the scenario: you’re a celebrity at a social gathering. A stranger approaches, bearing the warm affect of familiarity. You don’t recognize her at all, but she seems to know you. You talk and she listens, probing you with deep curiosity. Is it sincere? It becomes clear she had brought a map — a representation of you — that to her may as well be the territory. She laughs at your jokes and the conversation is pleasant and then it ends.
The unfurling of her map marked the beginning of the interaction. As she traversed you, she overwrote some things, changing mildly standoff-ish to actually somewhat warm. Better looking in the photos. She formed new opinions too, venturing into uncharted territory — places kept secret from the public eye. You wonder, after all this, how much did the person she conversed with come to resemble you?
I’m no celebrity, and it’s likely neither are you. But we all have maps out there. These projections are often what stand in as t=0 expansion points. Think of them like the seeds from which new relationships sprout, waiting to be unpacked. Maybe I meet a person and the first thing I ask is his profession. Professor of economics, he answers, adjusting his glasses and rolling back stiff shoulders. This is my expansion point. I studied economics in college so I know he’s rational as any human can be, a true homo economicus, or so he believes, and a Keynesian to the bone. He’s an EMH maximalist and this flattens the world to him: everything has a price where supply meets demand.
I used to think about this a lot as an investment banking analyst fresh out of college. I hated my expansion point. I dreaded the “what do you do for work?” I’m an investment banker. Blehhh. I work in investment banking? Mildly better, still unpalatable. I felt hemmed in from the start, pinned to a caricature I would fight hard to blow apart, each and every conversation a parachute run away from this ill-fitting seed: investment banker. It was as if this was my most self-defining feature, and everything else branched from there.
It’s easy to see the bad in this, but there is some good. There are times when I want to attack MMT or vigorously champion the merits of Bitcoin and decry the airy dollar. If we could start on some firm ground, the fact that I studied economics and worked in investment banking, I could skip the part where I demonstrate I know how inflation and currency devaluation work, opting to cash in on my map & jump right ahead to the fruitful part of the conversation. How quickly can we get to mutually agreeable fertile ground?
At the extreme, imagine we all started with blank slates. In this world, I would need to build from simple arithmetic all the way to long-term debt cycles and Bretton Woods and beyond to convince someone to engage in a back & forth on Bitcoin. A world without maps demands too much re-tracing.
In both these extremes — the overdetermined and the blank slate — agency has been stripped. These are illustrative and that's not how it actually plays out. The space between holds more possibility.
Over time I got better at choosing my expansion points. Sometimes it meant letting the investment banking thing sit dormant, unexpanded. Other times it meant leading with it deliberately, knowing it would unlock certain conversations faster. The trick was learning to read the territory before unfurling any particular map. Each expansion point carried its own momentum, its own gravitational pull toward certain topics and away from others. The goal wasn't to hide — it was to optimize for signal over noise. Sometimes this meant making a direct line to settled territory as a waystation to wilderness exploration. Such navigation requires extreme attentiveness, not only to your own territory but to the other’s. You need to find a place to meet, comfortable enough to feel like stable ground, but not so firm that every step forward is predetermined. Shaky ground is where the GPS goes dark — hic sunt dracones — and real exploration, both personal and mutual, begins. Here, the territory writes the map.