Modern Cynicism

Welcome

This is the theory to unify all existing fragmented ideas on human psychology. I’ve been working on this theory for the last six years, looking at human psychology but from the viewpoint of physics.

I’ve observed that everything around us that humans have created is ultimately limited by our own creativity. Think about it — in movies, aliens almost always end up looking a lot like us. Even AI systems are built as models of the human brain. If we could truly understand human psychology from first principles, we’d be able to grasp almost anything. When you pick up a new subject, it wouldn’t feel completely foreign anymore. You’d connect it easily to your existing mental models and learn much faster.

Human psychology is a huge topic, though. How do we make it something everyone can grasp? It’s similar to what happened with mathematics. In the early days, there were no symbols—everything was discussed verbally, so only a few geniuses could really follow it. Now school kids learn math. That democratization came when math was turned into a formal language with symbols. The same shift happened with communication and data after Shannon’s 1948 paper, which kicked off the Information Age. Before that, people built machines and networks mostly based on intuition.

I believe we can do something similar for knowledge itself. I view human behavior through the philosophy of data. At the heart of it, all human behavior can be explained using just three basic data operations:

• Data is stored somewhere,
• Computations happen on that data, and
• Data gets transferred from one storage to another.

Everything else — all the complex layers we see in society are basically abstractions we’ve built on top of these operations. They’re there to help us reduce the energy needed to carry them out.

Once you really get this pattern, you’ll start noticing it everywhere. In software engineering, economics, productivity advice, salary negotiations, even military strategies. It turns you into a natural generalist and critical thinker. You learn something once and can apply it across so many areas. And in today’s world with AI handling more and more low-level tasks, this mindset becomes especially powerful. It helps us move up the value chain into roles where we direct and manage, while AI takes care of the execution.

On the societal side, this feels like the fastest way for people from poorer backgrounds to catch up. We’ve all heard the usual advice — read books, work hard, and things will improve. But from my own experience, a lot of that doesn’t capture the real picture. The deepest knowledge often comes from lived experience, not from what’s written in books. Plus, we’ve split knowledge into separate subjects, making it hard to connect everything into one coherent way of thinking that actually leads to innovation.

My bigger dream is intellectual equality in society. Imagine a time when the child of a wealthy industrialist and the child of an ordinary farmer have the same level of intellect and can have meaningful discussions on equal footing with scientists or anyone else. There would be no institutional roadblocks standing in the way of social mobility, because upskilling wouldn’t depend on gatekeepers. For me, intellect means the ability to think for yourself — whether in academics, family matters, or dealing with tough situations at work. In the language of the theory, it’s about executing those three data operations efficiently: using minimal energy, achieving the maximum rewards, and hurting others as little as possible.

The effects of this could be felt worldwide, but they would be especially strong in places like India because of our large population. If we can implement these ideas, the level of innovation could skyrocket, helping India move toward becoming a true superpower on a scale similar to the Industrial Revolution. People talk a lot about AI’s impact these days, but I’m focused on unlocking the full potential of human minds. The same principles might even help us build better AI systems here — perhaps by getting the thinking layer right, we won’t need quite as much raw data, especially with India’s strong solar energy potential.

This is the heart of the theory — the unifying lens that ties so many fragmented ideas together. I hope as you read further, you’ll see the same patterns I do and feel empowered to apply them in your own life.