People ask me how I became so obsessed with the Kegan stages. This is that story. It will also explain a state that David Chapman calls "Stage 4.5" and why this is such a daunting and scary place to be.
First, it might help to give you just a little bit of background.
3 to 4
The Kegan stages refer to how our minds restructure in adult development, similar to how babies' and children's minds restructure in order to gain object permanence and theory of mind.
Kegan Stage 3 is the stage of socialization, where we learn to conform to the norms of our society. This is where we start to feel what others are feeling and internalize their expectations. Kegan Stage 4, by contrast, is the stage of self-authoring, where we develop our own values and belief system. This is where we become systematizers rather than just go with the flow.
If I try to trace the stage shifts through my adult life, I think a 3-to-4 seed was planted when I came to question and then leave my religion in my late teens. It continued to grow while building a startup in my 20s (which everyone said was dumb and would fail but, through perseverance, did not!). Managing people required thinking systematically (think: set roles and duties vs. being driven unconsciously by relational emotion). Still, it took years after that to durably hold my own belief system in the context of face-to-face rejection, especially in close personal relationships.
4
Once 4-patterned thinking became easy and automatic — I could durably look at the cultural and relational games being played vs. being unconsciously swept away by them — life was better in some ways and trickier in others. Shunning the unconscious conformity of Stage 3, I didn't want to do anything reflexively or by default. I wanted to so thoroughly know everything, and so thoroughly know my personal values, and make immaculate choices at all times, and then essentially fix the world (from knowing it more consciously than anyone else).
But the cognitive load of trying to piece together one accurate picture of the whole world was insane. The more I knew, the more there was to know.
4.5
Two notable things were happening when I got my first glimpses of Stage 5. I was writing a book about interpersonal conflict and running an intellectual discussion club in San Francisco. In both contexts, I found myself doing the same strenuous mental move over and over: thoroughly investing my mind in how one perspective was right and good and useful, then switching to see how an entirely conflicting and contradictory perspective could be the same.
I continually pushed myself to seek the truth in ideas that conflicted with my personal world model — even and especially when it really hurt.
Eventually, after doing this for much of my waking hours, it became automatic. And it broke my whole world.
David Chapman has written about "Stage 4.5" and its characteristic nihilistic depression:
Between stages 4 and 5, there is a gap, a stretch of open ocean. One recognizes the limitations of rationality, but can’t yet work effectively in the meta-rational mode. Many people get stuck treading water here, trying to stay afloat, often not even able to see the dry land of meta-rationality on the horizon. With rationality seeming the only basis for meaning, they fall into nihilistic depression. This is sometimes informally called “stage 4.5,” although it is not a “stage” in the same sense as the others. It is not a workable mode of organization. However, its dysfunction is stabilized by spurious logic of nihilism. Some stuck there may be barely capable of everyday functioning. Others manage better, by recognizing the limits of rationality while continuing to use it effectively in practice.
Eventually, I lost interest in my group's "intellectual discussions" (which felt pointless and predictable). The book project felt futile as well. I wrote this on Twitter:
Can I be really real? Lately I’ve been in this slump obsessing about the limited capacity of the brain. Like we have this idea that we go through life accumulating knowledge, but we don’t really, we forget almost everything. And even when knowledge makes its way into long-term memory, we can only access the teeniest tiniest bit at a time. We have this false sense that we’re seeing the big picture, that it’s getting clearer and clearer - but we’re just seeing one tiny dot’s worth of knowledge, and then we see a different dot and forget the one we saw before...
...I think the natural way of things is like- when one idea proves inadequate to solve all our problems, we seesaw to the opposite side, adopting this new position as “right.” e.g. When we’re on the “love yourself” side of the seesaw, we’re prone to shout about how tending to ourselves is life’s #1 imperative - forgetting that empathizing with others is equally important, along with 26748648378 other important things actively holding up our lives...
...In a way, realizing that change is so cyclical, that much of progress is limited by the brain’s capacity… is a bit of a relief. It gives “everything is already okay.”
Things continued like that for a while. I started to contradict myself a lot in conversation, which was confusing for people. And I got really, really obsessed with explaining subjectivity and predictive processing (the brain's process of constructing meaning) to anyone who would listen — though this never seemed to land with the weight or recognition I'd hoped.
I low-key felt like my life might be ruined. I also felt like I was becoming free. I couldn't make up my mind about which was truer, or about anything else. I was groundless. Everything was noise.
Beyond 4.5
There are three things I can easily remember that helped pull me out of this trap.
I read a book called Nothing & Everything: How to stop fearing nihilism and embrace the void. This let me know I wasn't alone, and it encouraged me, for the first time, to see my situation with a valence of lightness and freedom vs. darkness and heaviness.
Second, as long as nothing and everything was true anymore, I committed to looking in good-feeling directions as often as bad:
See the bad (depressed)
— Ann Pierce (@itsannpierce) September 8, 2025
See the good (deluded)
See the bad AND the good (wholeness) https://t.co/nq6Z0AoKmg
Third, I came across the Kegan stage framework through David Chapman's Meaningness blog. This landed like a cold glass of water on a hot day. Finally I had words to explain what was happening to me. Not just that, but the framework painted a picture of the arc from where I was to a place of clarity, wisdom, and peace. It gave me something to steer towards.
Zooming in and out
There's something about Stage 5 that's hard to explain, but my friend put it like this:
Another way I think about kegan stages is that the core idea is constant - “what is good for me is good” - but what changes is the locus of identity.
A K2’s “me” is their ego.
A K3’s “me” is like, ego+superego.
A K4’s is like, integrated self over time.
A K5’s “me” is like, the world, sort of? The dynamic system of self plus other plus environment all over time?
Since Stage 4.5, I have found myself thinking at larger scales and across time. The larger view you take, the less you or your current problems matter. In Stage 4.5's nihilism, I often found myself thinking things like: So what if the world ends? All of civilization has only been a blip in time. It'd just be the circle of life.
It feels sort of like this: imagine being one particular lion in the African savannah, going about your whole life, experiencing fear and loss and love, struggling to survive. Then imagine being one particular antelope who is born, grows, faces many near-death experiences but lives, has a family, and then is eaten by the lion. Feel the horror of that. Then imagine being an observer over all of it. Whose problems you care about is such a subjective thing. The farther you zoom out, the less any individual matters. Instead, you see the whole ecosystem just doing its thing. Should you choose to say the lion is bad and protect the antelope from it, new problems appear (overpopulation etc.). Knowing that, it feels wrong to intervene.
The trap of 4.5 is getting stuck in this zoomed-out view without the ability to zoom back in.
Truth and meaning in context
Fortunately, as 5-patterned thinking becomes more natural for me, the zoom works in both directions. I still often think at scales so big that they drown out the immediate needs of myself and people I know, but mostly by choice. I also choose to zoom in and live in the world and moment I'm in.
Even if the dream of constructing a complete and perfect map of the world (that will then solve all problems forever) is futile, truths can be "truer" than others within a context. And subjective meaning is real meaning.
At Stage 4.5, I felt like I was under a curse that banished me from normal life. Where I'd never again be understood. Where I'd never again find the motivation to act on my environment. But when I'm in (what I conceptualize as) a "more 5" headspace, I feel light and free. I feel increased psychological distance from things that used to hurt me a whole lot, like what people think of me. But I can still choose to care about and participate in things. I can see the ground and choose to land.
5
Stage 5 is rare, self-assessment is notoriously unreliable, and generally speaking, the kind of people who publicly claim to be Stage 5 are delusional weirdos or narcissists. So I want to keep myself in check as much as possible and not make crazy claims.
Without having been formally tested, I think of myself now as something like a 4.9 or baby 5, although I suspect there is still a lot of road for me to traverse should the circumstances of my life demand it.
(After writing the first draft of this, I started researching Susanne Cook-Greuter's Ego Development Theory, which is in the same academic lineage and extremely similar to Kegan but breaks down the phenomenology more finely. You'll find this "due diligence note" at the end of this post.)
At the end of the day, all I can really do here is describe my experience.
Most notably, a lot of concepts flash through my mind very quickly — similar to how I used to intentionally examine one perspective after another, except now it's much faster and burns way fewer calories.
It can be so, so hard to communicate. It can be hard to get a thought out, because before I can speak all the words, I've already formed a handful of arguments against them. People generally find it confusing if you share these; it's much more normal to take one stance and stick with it, or to move slowly from one stance to another. I exert a lot of effort to censor myself to be understood by the other person. Sometimes it feels a bit like lying.
When you believe many opposite things (or feel uninvested in finding one truth), you run into the limits of language, because speaking or writing requires that you say things in a certain order, which can signal weight that may or may not be there. Even putting a concept into words can give it more solidity than you mean it to have. Sometimes I find myself complaining to someone about something, and they sympathize with me, and I want to say, "Oh no, I barely care about this, don't worry!" Again, it feels like my face and voice are kind of lying, since they're giving people a false impression of my overall state.
It's not that I never feel bad, because of course I do. But it's like a part of me can genuinely be having a bad time, but another part of me knows it's temporary or unimportant in the grand scheme. I'm aware that I could choose something else. So the bad feeling never feels completely real or all-encompassing.
Whether this is Stage 5 or Stage 4.9, it really is lonely. I find this the biggest con against it, and it's not a small one. I feel more separated from people around me in a sense, and yet I feel closer to people overall (in this time and across time). I am emotionally touched by things very easily. I see the value in all kinds of traits that I didn't before. Just being together, without speaking, means more to me than it ever has.
Where I'm at in my process, I find I "regress" unintentionally at times. My sense is that I'm back in 4.5 when again I feel cursed and excluded, or when reading Twitter starts to make me mad (I feel like I'm “in it,” being swept away, desiring for people to change vs. in a meta realm where I'm observing people in their process). I used to unconsciously or against-my-will "regress" to 4-patterned thinking in the sense that I'd regain hope in a super-frame large enough to not require other frames, but this hasn't happened in a while.
I am currently working on wielding lower stage patterns by choice when they are more adaptive for the situation. For example, I am happily using 4-patterned thinking to develop this site! The 4.5 version of me might be too cynical to use a framework like Kegan to tell my life story, but the "more 5" version of me understands that tools are valid within contexts. I could tell you about my life through thousands of different lenses, and we could glean different insights through each one. This is just the one I'm jamming on right now.
Hope for the hopeless
As my story was meant to illustrate, learning about the Kegan stage framework helped me a great deal with the nihilism I was feeling. I hope it can be valuable to others who find themselves in a similar spot.
I don't expect that everyone feeling nihilistic or depressed will benefit in the same way, though. If the despair is persistent, or if you ever feel like you might hurt yourself, please take care and see a mental health professional. The framework will still be here once you have better support.
What's really special about the Kegan stage framework, to me, is the way it encourages even itself to be viewed as one truth among many. This openness to many truths, given the right container, feels beautiful and rare and like something worth perpetuating.
*
Due diligence note: In hopes of nailing down a standardized phenomenology, I looked into Susanne Cook-Greuter's Ego Development Theory, which is in the same academic lineage as Kegan but describes the felt sense of each step in finer detail. Apparently people (+ all the LLMs I consulted) generally map EDT’s Stage 5 onto Kegan’s Stage 5. EDT’s Stage 4/5 even has this quote: “The more one explores, the more confused one may get... cynicism and nihilism can become a way to defend against the feeling of being adrift on a vast unknown sea unmoored and rudderless.” With EDT’s and Kegan’s Stage 5s aligning, EDT’s Stage 6, then, is considered “off the map” of Kegan.
One hiccup with this, however, is the population estimates. Kegan estimates less than 1% of the population is Kegan Stage 5, whereas Cook-Greuter estimates ~5% of the population is EDT Stage 5, ~1.5% is 5/6, and ~.5% is 6. Plus, if you read accounts of Kegan 5 like David Chapman’s it seems clear he’s touching EDT Stage 6 territory. So it seems you could reasonably align Kegan 5 anywhere between EDT’s Stage 5 to Stage 6, even though the phenomenology all along the way is quite different. (So what people could mean when they say “Kegan Stage 5” might widely differ.)
I actually think that *my* Kegan 4.5, the way I've described it, maps better onto EDT's Construct-aware expression of Stage 5/6, and what I've perceived as "more 5 than that" seems like EDT's Ego-aware expression of Stage 5/6. There are parts of EDT's Stage 6 that I relate to, but I do not feel the full sense of settledness that it describes.
I will expand on this, along with descriptive passages from EDT, in a later post.
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