Your suffering isn't random. It has exactly five cogs. ⚙️ ⚙️ ⚙️ ⚙️ ⚙️

Naval Ravikant said something brilliant about David Deutsch's work:

"Good explanations are hard to vary."

When you look back on a truly good explanation, you think: "How could this have been otherwise? This is the only way this thing could work."

The iPhone is hard to vary. The aeroplane wing is hard to vary. The electric car design is hard to vary.

They're all constrained by reality itself: physics, aerodynamics, human hands. You can't just change them without losing what makes them work.

Here's what I realised after 30 years of debugging human consciousness:

Human suffering has exactly five shapes. Not four. Not six. Five.

The Five Hamster Wheel System isn't something I invented. It's something I discovered, like finding the periodic table of human programming.

Gain/Loss

Able/Unable

Right/Wrong

Support/Let Down

Attention/Ignore

Every pattern of suffering I've ever encountered, from Premier League players to Olympic athletes to struggling parents, fits into one of these five binary wheels.

I tried to find a sixth. I looked for years. It doesn't exist.

I tried to collapse them into four. They won't collapse. Each wheel is distinct, irreducible.

The framework is hard to vary because it's mapping to something real: the actual architecture of how childhood survival programming gets written into your nervous system.

When I show someone their specific wheel, they don't say "interesting theory." They say "Holy shit, you just described my entire life."

That's not because I'm clever. It's because the explanation is constrained by reality. It's hard to vary because it's true.

Naval talks about how good knowledge is fractal. You meet it at the level you're ready to receive it. You might get 20% the first time, 25% the second time.

That's exactly how "Glitch" works.

First read: you recognise your dominant wheel.

Second read: you see how your parents ran the same wheel.

Third read: you catch yourself spinning in real-time and step into admin mode.

The framework doesn't change. Your depth of understanding does.

If you're ready to see the five patterns that are running your life (not theory, but the actual code), grab the book here: link in bio

It's hard to vary because human programming is hard to vary.

Rob

P.S. The reason therapy often fails isn't because therapists aren't trying. It's because they're working without the map. They're treating symptoms without seeing the underlying wheel structure. Once you see the five wheels clearly, everything else makes sense. That's what "hard to vary" explanations do: they make the complex suddenly simple.

#consciousness #psychology #naval #selfawareness #trauma