My own theory of 'Experience Relativity'

You experience people and the things around you as a function of your biomechanics

What I’ve realized over the past decade is that almost everything you experience is relative to your level of biomechanics (or how collapsed you are).

For example… there was this guy I thought was an arrogant prick 3-4 years back. And I met him a little while ago and didn’t understand why I thought that before.

Working 7 days a week felt like an unbearable nightmare in early 2020 when I was employed by a company and collapsing. Now I do it every week without thinking about it.

New Yorkers felt a bit cold and uncaring when I was younger. Now mostly I see people that are collapsing and suffering… who if I approach them are generally quite receptive and warm.

You just experience almost everything about this world in a different way depending on which side of the pendulum you are on…. collapsing vs. inflating.

Some context on the real theory of relativity

The theory of relativity is one of the pillars of modern physics. Developed by Albert Einstein in the early 1900s, it radically changed how we understand space, time, motion, and gravity.

At a high level, relativity says: space and time are not absolute—they depend on how fast you’re moving and how gravity is affecting you.

Imagine two people texting each other.

One person is standing still outside.
The other is on a fast train moving close to the speed of light.

Now here’s the key idea from relativity, first described by Albert Einstein:

Both people experience time normally for themselves — but they disagree about each other’s clocks

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What each person sees

• The person standing outside sees the person on the train moving very fast, so their clock appears to tick more slowly.

• The person on the train sees the person outside (and the entire Earth) moving fast in the opposite direction, so Earth’s clocks appear to tick more slowly.

Neither person is “wrong.”

Time itself is behaving differently for each observer.

That’s relativity.

How this relates to my theory of ‘Experience Relativity’

You see we’re used to thinking:

• Time = universal

• One second = one second for everyone

Relativity says:

• Time depends on motion

• The faster you move, the slower time passes relative to someone else

And for me biomechanics works in a similar way. We all think that we experience things in a consistent way during life.

For example if I meet a mean person today, I would generally assume that I would have the same impression of him five years ago.

But this would absolutely not be the case because we experience people relative to our level of collapse.

I might have thought he was a complete asshole five years ago, but now i’m a more confident and healthy person and so I see him as a good person worthy of being a friend.

Is that me being untrue to myself? No! It is me experiencing this person differently because my biomechanics are in a very different place.

How we see this impact society

Examples of this are all around us. For example college fraternities.

You’ll have a jock frat and a frat with nerds on the same campus.

A nerd visiting the jock frat’s party will think “damn these guys are all arrogant buttheads!” And he would not feel comfortable at all.

Whereas the ‘jocks’ who probably all consistently have decent biomechanics do not experience each other as being arrogant buttheads at all.

Rather those ‘arrogant’ characteristics seem ‘normal’ to them and so they judge the character of their fellow frat brothers on very different standards.

If, however, one of these frat brothers filed his teeth down and collapsed very hard in a year… he would begin to experience his fellow frat brothers more like the nerds do.

And same with the nerds… if one of them was to do this biomechanical process very intensively during a year studying abroad… he would probably come back looking at his fellow nerds very differently. Almost the way a jock would look at them.

This does not make him a worse person. Rather my point is that this is absolutely NORMAL.

What i’m saying is by far not rocket science.

We all intuitively understand this.

But till now…. you viewed these relationships as being relatively stagnant.

In your mind you kind of relegated yourself to experiencing life from your current level of biomechanics.

Leveraging the theory of ‘Experience relativity’

Some of you might be thinking.. “ok Ken what you’re saying makes sense, but so what? How is this actionable?”

So let me explain why I think this is an important theory to be firmly aware of as it impacts decisionmaking.

Lets take an example… when I was going up and down from 2014-17 I had a bunch of guys I worked with at Lazada that all knew me.

Some of them were more senior to me and probably assumed they were smarter or more capable. And the assumption generally is that if they were more capable back then, then they are probably more capable now.

But this, in my experience, would absolutely not be the case anymore.

These days I’m able to think far clearer and clock 12-14 hour days of hard focus with ease. When I saw some of these old colleagues the past few years they seemed slow to me. Slow in how they execute, slow in how they think, etc

.

And if they were to compete against me now… i’d put money down that they would experience what Jake Paul experienced when he fought Anthony Joshua the other day.

This would most likely leave them confused. They’d be like… “did Ken get better or did I get worse?”

And the reality would be that a bit of both happened, but mainly I got better.

The exact opposite happened in early 2014 when I had my teeth filed down by a dentist and I rapidly collapsed.

I still had it in my head that I was this Ivy league grad, ex-BCG consultant who’d run a 100+ person company at Groupon Ukraine… but the reality biomechanically was that i was at the capability level of a new grad who was mediocre at best.

And at some point that reality was shoved down my throat back then and i voluntarily demoted myself two levels at the time.

Putting relativity into action

It is very important to understand this relativity because if you don’t and you’re doing this biomechanical process… it is easy to assume that people that were better than you in the past are still better than you.

However with many of them that would no longer be the case.

So you need to be aware of this relativity and how it influences your decisions, etc.

For example:

• I might see a guy that I knew a decade back who had good biomechanics and was very good at his job. But in the interim he’s had braces and has experienced a fair bit of collapse. It would be a mistake for me to hire him thinking his value is what it was. It has sank considerably most likely.

• Someone might take a job at a far lower level than what they are capable of.

• Someone might choose a career that is far more conservative than what they would enjoy now that they are healthy.

• etc

Closing thoughts

This relativity stuff is something that you notice more and more the longer you’re in this journey in my experience.

You start to expect more from yourself and realize that you’re improving.

You’ll start to close the gap with people you thought were better than you. And then perhaps even pass them.

And it’s a bit confusing sometimes to be honest. Because oftentimes you’ll be encountering people who still have you mentally placed where you were.

It’ll be their instinct to treat you that way.

But you’ll realize that you’re effortlessly breaking out of what they consider your ‘norm’.

And so my message to you with this article is that “that is ok!” We do not need to fit into their perception of who we used to be.

We can redefine that shit even as they sit there complaining that “we have changed”.

And they’ll just have to deal with it… because in this game of life neurology rules.

Meaning you get away with pretty much whatever comes natural to you. And they’ll just realize that “this is the new you.”