This is depression . Not sadness — sadness has energy in it, has grief, has the flow of loss. Depression is the absence of flow. It's the experience of being cut off from your own care, from the energy that makes action and engagement possible. You know that things should matter, but you can't feel that they do. You know you should want to get out of bed, but the wanting isn't there. The channels are closed. Summary: The Five Emotions
— Both channels open. Free flow. Present engagement.
— Vertical channel strongly activated. Care concentrated into enabling energy. Activated by perceiving potential loss.
— Horizontal channel strongly activated. Energy directed outward at the world. Sourced in fear.
Frustration
— Horizontal channel blocked. Energy building up with no outlet. Outward effort not producing change.
Depression
— Both channels closed. No energy flow. Disconnected from care. Grief: The Unwinding
Grief is not a sixth emotion. It's the process of unwinding the sequence — finding your way back from depression to love. That process involves reopening the vertical channel (reconnecting with care, even if what you cared about is lost), finding new ways to process the frustration (accepting that some things can't be changed while redirecting energy toward what can), letting the anger move through you rather than accumulating, honouring the fear as a signal that something mattered, and returning to the open, flowing state of love — perhaps directed at something new, or perhaps directed at the same thing from a different angle. Grief is not a detour from life. It's one of the most important processes in life. Every significant loss requires it. Every transition requires it. And it cannot be rushed, because each layer of the dynamic needs to be experienced and moved through, not bypassed.
Why Emotions Seem Irrational
One of the most practically important consequences of this model is that it explains why emotions seem to arrive without explanation.
The first two transitions — from love to fear, and from fear to anger — happen faster than conscious awareness can track . You can flip from open, relaxed love to full-body fear to outward-directed anger in milliseconds. By the time you become conscious of your state, you're already angry, and you have no idea why. It feels like the anger came out of nowhere. It didn't. It came from love, through fear. But the transitions were too fast for you to notice the intermediate steps. So the anger looks irrational — disconnected from any cause you can identify. The last two transitions — from anger to frustration, and from frustration to depression — work in the opposite way. They happen so slowly that you don't notice the change . The frustration builds over weeks or months. The depression sets in so gradually that you forget you used to feel differently. It's the boiling-frog phenomenon: the temperature changes so slowly that there's never a moment sharp enough to trigger awareness. This is why most people experience their emotional lives as chaotic, unpredictable, and fundamentally irrational. The fast transitions are too fast to track. The slow transitions are too slow to notice. But once you know the pattern — once you have the map — you can begin to trace the sequence in real time.
When you feel anxiety (which is unconscious fear — fear whose source you haven't identified), you can ask: what am I afraid of losing? When you feel anger, you can ask: what fear is beneath this? When you notice frustration building, you can ask: what outward expression is being blocked, and is there another channel? When you recognise the early signs of depression, you can ask: have I been frustrated for so long that I'm losing connection to my own care? The pattern doesn't change what happened. It gives you a way to navigate what's happening.
"Is my anxiety a medical condition or a rational response to an irrational world?" The dynamics-of-emotion model dissolves this binary. Anxiety is fear whose source is unconscious — you're perceiving a threat, but you haven't identified what it is. Sometimes that unconscious perception is biological (your body is signalling a deficiency or a danger). Sometimes it's psychological (you're detecting a pattern that your conscious mind hasn't registered). Sometimes it's social (the systems you live in are genuinely threatening, and your nervous system knows it even when your intellect is trying to rationalise). In every case, the anxiety is valid energy — it comes from care, through the vertical channel, and it's telling you something matters. The question is not "am I broken or is the world broken?" The question is: "what am I afraid of losing, and what can I actually do about it?" The therapeutic industry often treats anxiety as a malfunction to be suppressed. The political framing often treats it as a signal that should lead to activism. Both miss the structural point: anxiety is valid energy that needs to be traced to its source in care and then expressed through appropriate channels . Sometimes that means therapy. Sometimes that means action. Often it means both — plus the deeper work of reconnecting with what you actually love and finding ways to express that care into the world.
Need, Want, and Desire
The emotions are the energy. But what directs that energy? What determines which way the care flows, what the fear is about, where the anger is aimed? To answer that, we need to understand the triple of need , want , and desire . Most people use these words interchangeably. In this framework, they name three genuinely distinct things — distinguished by where they originate and where they're resolved, relative to the plane of perception.
Needs originate and are resolved inside the envelope of the self. Food, water, sleep, physical movement, cellular nutrition, neural integration — these are all needs. They arise from within your body and are satisfied within your body. You can't purchase a need's resolution from outside; you have to do the internal work.
No pill makes your muscles stronger — your cells have to do the actual building. No transaction gives you sleep — your nervous system has to do the actual resting. Needs are non-negotiable. They aren't a basis for negotiation because they must be met regardless.
Wants originate and are resolved outside the envelope of the self. The car you want to buy, the job you want to get, the social status you want to achieve — these all live in the world outside you. They're created by external forces (advertising, social comparison, cultural norms) and satisfied by external transactions (purchasing, achieving, acquiring). Wants are the domain of marketing: someone else identifies something outside you and convinces you that you need it. But you don't need it — you want it. The distinction is important because wants are inherently negotiable in ways needs are not. You don't actually need that car. You might want it intensely, but the intensity is different from the non-negotiability of a genuine need.
Desires originate and are resolved at the boundary — in the relationship between self and world. This is where life actually happens. Desire for connection, for meaningful work, for creative expression, for intimate relationship, for community — these aren't inside you (they require another) and they aren't outside you (they can't be purchased or acquired). They live on the plane of perception itself — in the interface, in the between-space, in the crossing-point where self meets world. Desire, in this framework, is transpersonal. It doesn't really matter whether the boundary is between you and one other person, or between you and your family, or between your community and the ecosystem. The nature of desire is scale- invariant — it's always about the quality of the interface, the between-space, the relationship.
The Triple in Practice
You go to a kickboxing class. The need is for physical movement and muscular development — that's internal, cellular, non-negotiable if you want to be healthy.
The want is for this particular gym, this particular instructor, this particular schedule — that's external, specific, substitutable. The desire is for the play, the sparring, the dance of interaction with another person — that lives in the relationship, the between-space, and couldn't be satisfied alone. Why Confusion Between These Causes So Much Suffering Advertising works by making you think a want is a need. "You need this car. You need this phone. You need these shoes." You don't. They're wants — external, transactional, substitutable. But if you believe they're needs, you'll feel the non- negotiable urgency of a need when they're absent, and you'll spend resources
(money, time, attention) on resolving them as if your survival depended on it. Conversely, much suffering arises from treating desires as wants — trying to purchase what can only be received through genuine relationship. Loneliness isn't solved by buying more social media engagement. Meaninglessness isn't solved by acquiring more stuff. The desire for connection, for mattering, for genuine creative expression — these are boundary phenomena. They live in the quality of your relationships, and no transaction can substitute for them. Perhaps most importantly: the culture you live in has systematically trained you to orient around wants (which generate economic activity) and to suppress or ignore desires (which require genuine relationship and don't generate profit). The entire architecture of consumer capitalism is built around converting your desires into wants — taking the genuine longing for connection and selling you a product that promises to satisfy it but can't, because the longing lives at the boundary and the product lives outside you.
"Who am I really, underneath the aesthetics, the curated profiles, the labels?" This question is a desire question, not a want question. Your identity doesn't live inside you (that's just your biological needs) and it doesn't live outside you (that's just your curated presentation). It lives in the between-space — in the quality of your actual interactions with the world. You discover who you are not by introspecting in isolation and not by performing for an audience, but by engaging genuinely with people and situations and noticing what emerges in the between-space. The reason cycling through aesthetic labels (dark academia, cottagecore, etc.) feels hollow is that aesthetics are wants — external, purchasable, substitutable. Identity is a desire — it lives in relationship, and you can only find it there.
Deeper Desires Resolve Surface Desires
Desires have depth. There are surface desires — "I want to go to the movies tonight" — and there are deeper desires underneath them — "I want to have a meaningful evening with someone I care about." Deeper still: "I want to be in a relationship where genuine shared experience is normal." Deeper still: "I want to live in a way where my engagement with the world feels alive and connected."
The IDM's claim is that deeper desires are more encompassing — they span more time, more relationships, more possibility-space. And a crucial practical insight follows: when you make choices from the deeper desire, the surface desires tend to resolve themselves. If you're in touch with the deep desire for genuine connected engagement with life, you'll naturally find yourself making choices that produce meaningful evenings, real conversations, and experiences worth having. You won't need to anxiously optimise each individual decision ("should I go to the movie or the restaurant?") because the deeper orientation — care for the quality of the relationship — will guide you toward choices that serve both. This is analogous to playing pool. An expert doesn't just sink the current ball — they also position the cue ball so the next shot is set up. If you're making choices from a deep enough level of desire, each choice sets up the next one naturally. Life flows. If you're making choices from surface wants only, each decision is isolated, anxious, and disconnected from the larger pattern. The practical discipline, then, is: when you face a choice, pause and ask — what's the desire underneath this? And underneath that? How deep can I go? The deeper you can identify the desire that's actually driving the situation, the wiser the choice you'll make, because it will serve more levels simultaneously.
The Path of Right Action
The dynamics of emotion give you a map of your inner energy. The need/want/desire triple gives you a map of what's driving you. Now: how do you actually choose ? The framework offers two guides to choice, corresponding to two of the three aspects of inner experience:
Thinking is a guide to choice through prediction . If I take this action, what are the likely outcomes? Does my rational understanding of the situation suggest that this choice will produce results aligned with what I care about? Thinking operates on form and structure — it can model the situation, trace consequences, weigh alternatives.
Feeling is a guide to choice through intuition . Does this feel right? Not in a vague, hand-wavy way, but as a genuine signal from the part of me that processes information in a distributed, holistic, faster-than-thought way. Feeling operates on quality — it can sense whether something is coherent or off, trustworthy or suspect, aligned with care or subtly against it, in ways that thinking alone can't always articulate.
The path of right action is the discipline of using both together. Not just thinking. Not just feeling. Both, in integrated dialogue, each informing the other. Thinking alone is limited. It can model the known, but the future always contains unknowns that exceed any model. Feeling alone is limited. It can sense the quality of a situation, but without rational structure, it can be swayed by trauma, bias, or projection. Together, they cover each other's blind spots. Thinking gives feeling something to test against. Feeling gives thinking something to explore when the data runs out. When both thinking and feeling point in the same direction — when your rational assessment and your intuitive sense converge on the same choice — you have the strongest possible basis for action. That convergence is what effective choice feels like: not certainty (certainty is a fantasy) but coherence across multiple modes of knowing. The smart person acts on what they can see. The wise person acts on what they can envision — using the integration of thinking and feeling together to perceive possibilities that neither mode alone could reach. There is one further claim: there is always a choice that serves all parties . The path of right action includes the principle that in any given situation, there exists a choice that is genuinely win-win — that doesn't require sacrificing one person's wellbeing for another's. This doesn't mean the win-win choice is always easy to find, or that it looks like what anyone initially expected. But it exists. And the deeper your access to your own desires (not just surface wants), and the more integrated your thinking and feeling, the more likely you are to find it.
The Basal Motivations: Creating and Experiencing
Underneath needs, wants, and desires — underneath even the dynamics of emotion — there are two fundamental orientations of every living being, which the
IDM calls the basal motivations : to create and to experience . Everything that flows from self to world — every expression, every action, every choice — is an act of creation. You're putting something into the world that wasn't there before: a word, a gesture, an object, a relationship pattern. Everything that flows from world to self — every perception, every sensation, every moment of learning — is an experience. You're receiving something from the world and integrating it into yourself. These two flows — creation and experience, expression and perception, outward and inward — are the most basic possible description of what it means to be alive. Every organism, from a single cell to a human being to a community (understood as a collective self), is creating and experiencing continuously. And the quality of life — the degree to which life feels worth living — is directly related to the quality of these two flows. Am I creating things that genuinely express what I care about? Am I having experiences that genuinely nourish me? The word Landry uses for the state where both flows are fully engaged — where you're creating skillfully and experiencing richly, in an ongoing exchange with the world — is self-actualisation . Not in the vague self-help sense, but in the precise sense: the actual-ising of the self, the making-real of what you are through what you create and what you experience. And this applies at every scale. A community is self-actualised when it is creating together (building, making, governing) and experiencing together (sharing, celebrating, learning) in a way that genuinely expresses collective care. A civilisation is self-actualised when its creative outputs and its experiential richness are in balance and mutual support.
"Does life have inherent meaning, or do I have to create all of it myself?" The IDM's answer: this is a false binary. Meaning is neither purely "out there" waiting to be discovered (that's treating it as a need — internal and given) nor purely "in here" waiting to be constructed (that's treating it as a want — external and acquired). Meaning is a desire — it lives at the boundary between self and world, in the quality of the interaction. You don't find meaning by looking inside yourself in isolation. You don't find it by acquiring external things. You find it by engaging with the world in a way that is genuine — creating what you actually care about creating, and being open to experiences you didn't plan. Meaning emerges from the quality of the flow through the plane of perception. It can't be purchased, and it can't be manufactured from nothing. But it can be cultivated by anyone willing to attend to the quality of their engagement with reality. You're not building a philosophy castle in a quicksand pit. You're cultivating a garden in real soil. The soil is real. The garden requires real work. And what grows — if you attend to it with genuine care — is genuinely alive.
Joy and Pain: The Phenomenology of Potentiality The dynamics of emotion, the need-want-desire triple, and the basal motivations all converge in two fundamental experiential states that the IDM defines with unusual precision.
Pain is the perception of a decrease in the potentialities available to self.
Joy is the perception of an increase in the potentialities available to self. These definitions may sound abstract, but they are extraordinarily concrete. Consider physical pain. When a knife cuts your hand, it interrupts the flow of tissue, blood, and nerve signals. Functions that were available a moment ago — gripping, writing, feeling texture — are now unavailable. The body registers this loss at every level: the neuron that can no longer send its signal, the hand that can't grip, the person who realises they can't go climbing tomorrow. The decrease in potentiality is not just correlated with pain — it is the pain. And the pain persists until function is restored, and ceases when it is.
Now consider emotional pain. Your partner breaks up with you. All the potentialities that existed because of the relationship — starting a family, sharing holidays, having someone who understands your victories and defeats — are now gone. The perceived decrease in potentialities available to self is enormous. This is why heartbreak can feel as devastating as physical injury — in terms of the potentiality structure, the loss may be greater. Joy works in reverse. You meet someone new and the relationship has genuine potential. Your future opens up in ways it didn't before. Or: your team wins the game, and the celebration is rich precisely because you're sharing it with others — the coming-together of community creates potentialities that exceed the sum of the individuals. The increase in potentialities available to self is the joy you feel. Several crucial implications follow: Joy and pain are not opposites.
They are conjugate aspects of intensity — of the degree to which you are genuinely in interaction with the world. You can experience both simultaneously (the bittersweet experience of a child leaving home involves genuine loss and genuine gain of potentiality at the same time). And the experience of one does not cancel, earn, or guarantee the other. Pain does not "earn" future joy. Extreme joy does not "tempt fate" and invite pain. Their relationship is statistical, not moral or causal. Gratitude is a perceptual skill.
If joy requires perceiving increases in potentiality, then you must actually notice the increase to experience the joy. Someone so fixated on what they lack that they can't register what they have is depriving themselves of joy that is genuinely available. Gratitude is not sentimental positivity — it's the disciplined perception of actual increases in potentiality. This is why contemplative traditions across cultures emphasise gratitude as foundational practice. Hedonic adaptation is structural. The richer your life already is, the harder it is to experience further increases as proportionally significant. When you already have enormous potentiality, incremental additions are small relative to the whole. This is why material wealth has diminishing returns on happiness, and why people emerging from genuine deprivation often experience ordinary life as joyful. A life without pain is not a good life. It's a disengaged life — one in which potentialities are neither opening nor closing because the person has withdrawn from genuine interaction with the world. The IDM suggests that a fully alive life will inevitably include both joy and pain, because genuine engagement means potentialities will both open and close. The goal is not to eliminate pain but to develop the integrity to remain in interaction regardless of which way the potentialities move.