I saw this post on X that mind fucked me for about twenty minutes.

It's this diagram showing how Alice has a model of Bob, Bob has a model of Alice, but then there's this deeper layer where Alice has a model of Bob's model of her, and Bob has a model of Alice's model of him. This recursive nightmare where nobody's actually interacting with reality, they're all interacting with their models of models.

And buried in there somewhere is the actual person, getting smaller and smaller as the models stack up.

This is the most dangerous form of self betrayal that exists. Not the obvious kind where you compromise your values for money or status. The invisible kind where you slowly morph yourself to match someone else's incorrect model of you without even realizing you're doing it.

You meet someone. They form an opinion about who you are based on limited data, maybe one conversation, maybe a few interactions. That opinion is almost certainly wrong because they're filling in massive gaps with their own projections, biases, and past experiences that have nothing to do with you.

You sense their model. You feel the version of you that exists in their head. And some part of you starts performing to that model instead of operating from your actual self.

You do this because model matching feels like connection. When someone expects you to be funny and you're funny, when they expect you to be serious and you're serious, when they expect you to care about their problems and you care about their problems, there's this instant social reward. Their model gets confirmed, they feel understood, you feel accepted.

Except you're not being accepted. The model is being accepted. And every time you perform to their model instead of your reality, you're training yourself to disappear.

Most people are walking around performing to dozens of these models simultaneously. They're one version of themselves with their parents, another version with their partner, another version with their friends, another version at work. And none of those versions are actually them because they've all been shaped by other people's expectations.

The question "who are you really" feels impossible to answer for most people. They've spent so long model matching that they've lost contact with whatever was underneath all the performance. They know they're supposed to have some authentic core self, but when they go looking for it, there's just more models all the way down.

I have less than ten friends. That's not an exaggeration or some edge lord flex. Literally less than ten people I'd call friends, and they know me through and through.

I'm extremely hard to reach. I don't answer calls or messages most of the time. I don't share insights unless directly asked and even then I'm selective. I rarely give direction or advice. People think I'm being difficult or mysterious. I'm not. I'm just not performing availability.

Most people make themselves completely accessible because they think that's what friendship or connection requires. They're always available, always responsive, always willing to engage with whoever wants their attention. They treat their time and presence like it's infinitely abundant.

Then they wonder why their relationships feel shallow. Because they're giving everyone access to the same performed version of themselves. There's no distinction between people who actually matter and random acquaintances. Everyone gets the same level of engagement, the same surface performance, the same model.

Model matching compounds over time. You perform to someone's model once, they update their model based on your performance, then you perform to the updated model, which makes them even more confident their model is accurate, which makes you perform even harder to maintain it.

You end up in this feedback loop where the distance between who you actually are and who you're pretending to be keeps growing, but the other person becomes more and more convinced they know you perfectly. They'll say shit like "I know you better than you know yourself" while interacting with a performance you've been running for years.

I've watched this destroy relationships more times than I can count. Two people who genuinely liked each other initially but spent so much time performing to each other's models that they eventually realized they were in love with people who didn't actually exist. All that intimacy was built on mutual performance art.

I've never liked people that everyone has access to. The ones who are the same with everyone, who perform their personality on demand for whoever shows up. There's something deeply unappealing about that kind of universal accessibility. It signals that the person hasn't figured out who they actually are because they're too busy being whatever each audience needs them to be.

Same thing with women. The ones I get the most stimulation from are always extremely private, mysterious, hard to access. Not playing games or bullshit.

There's this magnetism that comes from being legitimately hard to reach. Not because you're manufacturing scarcity or following some social strategy. Because you've built a life that's actually engaging enough that you're not desperate for external validation through constant availability.

"Just be yourself" is simultaneously the most important advice and the most useless advice anyone can give you. It's important because model matching will absolutely fuck your life if you let it become your default operating system. It's useless because if you've been model matching your entire life, you have no idea what "yourself" even means anymore.

The solution isn't trying to figure out who you are through introspection or journaling or therapy, though those might help. The solution is putting yourself in situations where model matching becomes impossible.

Go somewhere where nobody knows you. Do something you've never done before. Put yourself in contexts where people have zero preconceptions about who you're supposed to be. Force yourself to respond to reality without the comfort of performing to anyone's expectations.

What emerges in those moments is closer to your actual self than anything you'll find by thinking about it. Because your real self isn't some fixed identity waiting to be discovered through contemplation. It's how you operate when there's no model to match to.

People often feel most like themselves when traveling alone or starting completely new chapters in life. The models haven't formed yet. They're forced to respond authentically because there's no established performance to fall back on.

But you can't just reset your entire social circle every time you want to feel real. Eventually you need to learn to operate authentically within established relationships, which means you need to stop model matching even when the social reward for doing it is right there in front of you.

This requires something most people aren't willing to do: deliberately disappointing other people's expectations of you.

When someone expects you to be agreeable and you're not. When they expect you to care about something and you don't. When they expect you to perform emotional labor and you refuse. Every time you break their model, there's this social friction where they try to force you back into the box they built for you.

Most people can't handle this friction. They'd rather betray themselves than deal with someone's disappointment or confusion about who they're supposed to be. So they keep performing, keep matching models, keep getting further from anything real.

The people who break free from this aren't the ones with the strongest sense of self. They're the ones willing to be misunderstood. They're the ones who can handle someone being wrong about them without feeling compelled to correct the misconception through performance.

They understand that being known accurately by people who actually see them is infinitely more valuable than being liked by people who only see their performance. They'd rather have three people who interact with their reality than three hundred people who interact with their model.

When you stop performing availability, stop model matching, stop being the same person for everyone who wants access, something interesting happens. The people who actually resonate with your reality find their way to you. And the people who were just in love with your performance fall away naturally.

Your circle gets smaller but infinitely more real. Less performance, more substance. Fewer models, more reality.

Surround yourself with people who can see the real you. Not people who love your performance or appreciate your model matching skills. People who consistently see through your bullshit and call you on it when you start performing.

If you don't have people like this in your life, you will gradually disappear into your models. You'll wake up at forty realizing you've spent decades performing to other people's expectations and have no idea who you'd be if you stopped.

The alternative is choosing to be real even when it's uncomfortable, even when it breaks people's models of you, even when it creates friction in relationships that were built on mutual performance. Choosing signal over noise, substance over performance, reality over models.

Your actual self isn't hiding somewhere waiting to be discovered. It's what shows up when you stop matching models long enough to let it emerge. When you're willing to be seen as you are rather than who others expect you to be.

Stop performing to other people's incorrect models of you. The version of you that exists in their head isn't your responsibility to maintain. Let their models break.