The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 4,828 atoms across 8 types and 2 molecules
Values-based decision-making: the process of using a ranked hierarchy of one's own values as a filter for difficult choices, where decisions are made by determining which option best serves the highest-ranked values, and where the decision becomes principled rather than arbitrary when one knows their own values and their hierarchy
Values alignment: the degree to which daily actions serve deeply held values, creating energy, motivation, and a sense of meaning through autonomous self-regulation rather than controlled self-regulation
Values misalignment: the structural contradiction between personal values and daily actions that produces chronic energy drain, psychological discomfort, and physiological stress through continuous self-regulation demands
Vitality: the experience of energy available to the self that can be directed, sustained, and recovered from, specifically generated through autonomous self-regulation rather than controlled self-regulation
Moral injury: the psychological distress that results from actions, or the lack of actions, that violate a person's moral code, producing symptoms including shame, guilt, loss of trust, and existential disorientation
Values as compass: the conceptual framework where core values function as directional guides rather than endpoints or goals, providing orientation and agency under pressure by focusing on movement toward values rather than achieving specific outcomes
Values check-in: a recurring structured self-assessment practice conducted quarterly that audits behavioral patterns, maps emotional signals, and analyzes gaps between stated values and operative behavior to ensure priorities remain aligned with who you are becoming
Sovereign choice: the capacity to direct one's own life according to standards that have been examined and endorsed rather than standards that have been inherited and never questioned
Eudaimonia: the condition of a human being who is functioning well, living in accordance with their deepest capacities, and expressing excellence or virtue in activities that constitute their life, achieved through values alignment and authentic self-expression
Boundary: a line of demarcation between what is yours and what is not yours that defines your domain of responsibility, your limits of tolerance, and your conditions for engagement
Fusion: a state in which individuals become enmeshed with the emotions and needs of others, leading to a blurring of boundaries and a loss of individuality where you cannot tell the difference between your anxiety and your partner's anxiety
Emotional boundary: a psychological boundary that defines whose feelings you carry, determining whether you can sit with a friend who is suffering without absorbing their suffering as your own
Cognitive boundary: a psychological boundary that defines whose thoughts and beliefs you treat as authoritative, distinguishing between 'I have evaluated this and reached a conclusion' and 'I have imported someone else's conclusion without evaluation'
Wall: a complete barrier that blocks all input or output, creating isolation rather than selective filtering
Genuine boundary: a statement about what you will accept and what you will not, combined with the willingness to enforce it, with three components: clarity about the limit, communication, and enforcement
Cognitive overload: a state where the total information demanding processing exceeds available working memory capacity, causing performance degradation and qualitatively worse decisions
Extraneous load: the unnecessary complexity imposed by how information is presented or organized that consumes working memory capacity without contributing to germane processing
Energy boundaries: practices that protect high-value cognitive work from being drained by low-value obligations by recognizing differential energy costs of activities
Emotional contagion: an automatic, pre-conscious neurological process by which people mimic and absorb others' emotional states through facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements, producing corresponding emotional experiences and influencing subsequent behavior and cognition
Empathic distress: emotional response that activates the anterior insula and anterior midcingulate cortex, producing aversive feelings of overwhelm and decreased capacity to help, resulting from feeling another's pain as if it were one's own
Strategic ignorance: the deliberate decision not to know something because the cost of knowing exceeds the value of the knowledge, representing resource management rather than anti-intellectualism
Ambient information: the constant background stream that modern devices produce (notifications, badges, counters, previews, auto-playing content) that appears because platforms have an economic incentive to capture attention, not because you requested it
Performative information: content consumed to maintain a social identity rather than to inform thinking, driven by self-image rather than genuine epistemic need
Anxiety-driven information: content consumed to manage emotional states rather than to acquire knowledge, where the information itself is almost irrelevant and the act of checking provides brief anxiety reduction