The Lives

What you are watching. Reality (green, in each dimension's color) draws left to right and locks in. The current forecast (gold dashed) extends from the playhead to age 90. The four prior forecasts fade behind it. A new forecast is committed every 2.5 years. The fan of forecasts is the graveyard of imagined futures — what this person believed about their life, then revised, then revised again. The running $H_t$ metric is happiness — the expectation gap $\sum_i \lambda_i(i_t - E_t^i)$. Full joy is $J = A(S_t) + \beta \cdot H_t$, where $\beta$ is Expectation Sensitivity, a personal parameter not modeled here.

All of these are fiction. Every archetype shown here was constructed to illustrate how life events shift state variables and rewrite expectations over time. None are calibrated to actuarial data or empirical studies. The Baseline is the cultural script — what an average life is supposed to look like. The others are stylized paths designed to make the mechanics visible: watch what a Series B does to a founder's wealth expectations, or what forced retirement does to an athlete's sense of purpose. Switch between them and watch what happens to the four dimensions. You can be anything, but you can't be everything.