Subjecthood here is neither the abstract assertion “I make my own decisions” nor the forceful imposition of one’s will upon the world. It is a practice, and it begins not with choosing a goal, but with stopping:
Stop moving automatically along prescribed trajectories and feel the actual relation between yourself and the reality around you.
Stopping Automatic Movement
A person does not invent a route for themselves from ready-made roles: “what to become,” “where to get a job,” “what counts as a proper life.” Instead, they stop the external noise and enter into direct contact with reality.
What is discovered in this pause is not merely dissatisfaction, but a concrete mismatch, a gap between a person and their world:
- between what you see and what is conventionally regarded as real;
- between your abilities and the form of action available to you;
- between your meaning and the path offered by your environment;
- between who you actually are and the position you are forced to occupy;
- between a person’s internal structure and the form reality demands of them.
Examples from Everyday Life
Stopping does not necessarily look like a decision to “start a new life.” More often, it consists of brief moments in which automatic movement first becomes aware of itself:
- in the morning, on the way to a job they have long ceased to want, a person suddenly catches themselves unable to recall a single decision of their own from the past half hour;
- amid endless scrolling through a feed, a pause occurs and the question arises: “Why am I doing this?”;
- in a meeting where everyone agrees that the project is “successful,” someone notices that the metrics have been tailored to the reporting requirements;
- in a conversation, a person hears their own words and fails to recognize themselves in them;
- in the evening, reviewing the day, a person realizes that none of their actions were truly their own.
What I See ≠ What Is Conventionally Considered Real
At work, everyone takes it for granted that “we have a great team and everything is fine,” but you see that decisions are made behind closed doors and that general statements serve to legitimize them. Or everyone around you considers a position prestigious, while you see that it consists of actions you do not believe in. The external picture ceases to correspond to what you actually observe.
Abilities Exist, but the Form of Action Does Not
Someone who writes well does nothing at work but prepare reports from templates. A programmer who knows how to design systems is given tasks in which everything has already been decided for them. An artist sells their labor as an executor of other people’s layouts. The ability exists, but the surrounding arrangement does not allow it to become action.
My Meaning ≠ the Proposed Path
A lawyer interested in language and people who entered the legal profession because “that’s what you’re supposed to do.” A career ladder whose rungs lead to something the person never set out to pursue. A person follows every prescribed step and discovers that the destination to which they lead has nothing to do with their own meaning.
Who I Am ≠ the Position I Occupy
At work, a person plays the “team player”; at home, the “reliable partner”; in a chat, “one of us”; and in the evening cannot say which of the three is real. Or a person is forced to represent and defend a position they disagree with because it is their “role.” They cease to live as one person, work as another, and explain themselves as a third.
Internal Structure ≠ the Required Form
A slow, thoughtful person in an environment that values instant answers and loud confidence. A quiet person in a profession that requires constant self-promotion. A fast, impatient person within a bureaucratic procedure in which every step requires approval. The person’s very structure points in one direction, while the form demanded by reality points in another.
In every case, the mismatch is recognized not through a checklist of criteria but through a concrete bodily and meaningful signal:
A mismatch is the place where one’s own perception and the behavior demanded of one diverge to the point that maintaining the divergence begins to cost effort.
A Vector Instead of a Goal
A vector is not a goal selected in advance. It is a direction of change in the relation between you and the world. Specific goals are secondary: they are merely temporary points at which the vector takes form.
The mismatch can be reduced from either side of the relation:
- adapting oneself to reality by developing an ability;
- changing the reality around oneself by creating a product, a book, a language of description, one’s own environment, or a new social construction;
- rejecting an imposed form that forces an alien position upon oneself.
The subject is not obliged merely to choose from the menu provided. Its capacity is to reconstruct the very space of the possible.
The Criterion of Direction
Direction is not evaluated by the feeling that “things are getting easier.” The criterion is a reduction of the ontological divergence:
The right direction is the one in which I have to deny my own perception less and less, and become increasingly able to turn it into real action.
A sign of moving in the right direction is that a person ceases to live as one person, work as another, explain themselves as a third, and regard a fourth as the real one.
The Cycle of Practice
The practice is repeated because after every action, the person, the environment, and the mismatch itself all change:
Stop → enter into direct contact with reality → feel the mismatch → discern the direction in which it can be reduced → perform a transformative action → check against reality again.
More briefly:
Perception → distinction → direction → transformation → new perception.
Subjecthood is therefore not a status or a personality trait, but a connection that is continually renewed. A vector cannot be defined once and for all for an entire lifetime.
Formulas
The practice of subjecthood consists in stopping automatic movement, restoring direct contact with reality, discovering the mismatch between a person and their world, and moving consistently toward reducing it by transforming oneself, the environment, and the available forms of action.
And even more briefly:
Subjecthood is the capacity to feel a mismatch with reality and turn it into a vector for transforming reality.
The Unity of Projects as a Single Vector
Projects that appear to be different activities may be forms of one and the same vector. A book, Deconstruction of Reality, and Lex Humanitas are realizations of a single movement: a person feels the mismatch between living reality and the models substituted for it, and creates forms that reduce that gap.
The book, in this case, is not a distraction from the vector but an instrument for discovering it. By moving through their own life, a person sees a recurring gap: where meaning did not match what others saw, where an external model replaced reality, where there was no language for understanding what was happening. What is extracted from the past is thus not a record, but a direction for further movement.
Definition Through Practice
“Who I am” is determined neither by the name of a profession nor by a social category:
You are the one who notices the gap between model and reality and creates ways to make that gap visible, describe it, and reduce it.
