Someone tells you they have not felt like themselves lately.Perhaps nothing obvious has gone wrong. The job continues. The family continues. Or perhaps something has changed, but the change does not seem large enough to explain the feeling. Something is missing, and they cannot name it, and neither can you.
What has happened may be smaller and stranger than a crisis. Something they care about has quietly lost the place where it used to live. Adventure that belonged to a role that no longer exists. Care that belonged to a person who no longer needs it in the same way.
The value did not change. The room it lived in closed.
I began calling these orphan values.
Seven months ago, I wrote The Architecture of Becoming from inside that question. The essay began with the roles I had built across a life—technologist, artist, publisher, partner, researcher—and the recognition that each gave different parts of me somewhere to live.
It ended in the future tense. My thesis research would test whether a measurable version of the idea held up empirically.
On July 30, that sentence changed tense.
Data collection closed on the second wave of the Orphan Values study, conducted as part of my psychology thesis at Harvard Extension School. The first wave produced 752 approved responses from U.S. adults between 40 and 75. Eight weeks later, 529 eligible participants returned and did it again.
The data are in. The planned analyses have been run. I know more than I did when I wrote the original essay.
I am not sharing the findings today. They first need to make their way through thesis writing and formal review.
The middle of the story
Research is usually told from one of two places.
At the beginning, there is the origin: the observation, the question, the conviction that something important has not yet been named.
At the end, there is the result: the headline, the chart, the clean conclusion.
Almost nobody writes about the middle.
It is a strange thing to spend years developing an idea and then design a study whose entire purpose is to give reality the right to disagree with you.
The middle is where an intuition has to become specific enough to be wrong. Where language becomes measurement. Where assumptions become documented decisions with dates attached. Where the idea that felt entirely yours gets tested through people whose lives will not arrange themselves neatly around it.
It is a strange thing to spend years developing an idea and then design a study whose entire purpose is to give reality the right to disagree with you.
Before data collection, orphan values could remain elegant in my head. Then hundreds of people named the values that mattered to them, mapped those values across the roles they actually live inside, and returned weeks later to do it again.
Their lives were more varied, more constrained, more contradictory, and more inventive than my original formulation could anticipate. I expected to see roles such as parent, partner, friend, manager, and caregiver. I did not expect quite so many variations of “dog parent.”
Many participants also wrote in the optional comment boxes, although nothing required them to. Those comments were not part of the preregistered confirmatory tests, but they made the abstraction feel lived: behind every row in the dataset was a person considering how what mattered to them did, or did not, find expression in ordinary life.
Their participation was an act of generosity. It also changed my relationship to the idea. The question stopped belonging only to me.
From being right to being accurate
The most important shift may be this: I feel less attached to being right and more attached to being accurate.
Accuracy requires patience. It means keeping the questions specified in advance separate from the patterns discovered later. It means accepting that any hypothesis may be unsupported. It means resisting the temptation to tell a cleaner or more triumphant story than the evidence can carry.
It also means allowing for an answer that may be conditional, incomplete, or stubbornly gray.
The findings now move into thesis writing and formal review. The methods, calculations, interpretations, and limitations all need to be examined before I translate them into a public account.
When I do share the results, I want to present each one with its uncertainty attached, and to be explicit about what a first study can and cannot establish.
For readers interested in the research itself rather than the experience of conducting it, I have written a companion note at StarkMind: What Happens to a Value With Nowhere to Live. It goes further into the instrument, the two-wave design, the preregistration, and a question the work may eventually raise for human-AI interaction: what happens to our values when technology begins rearranging the roles that carry them? The full thesis (with its methods, results, and limitations) will ultimately be published. My longer-term goal is to develop a research-informed structured reflection exercise based on the OVI that helps people examine how their central values are expressed across their current life roles. It would not be a clinical test, diagnosis, or basis for individual treatment or major life decisions. Establishing those uses, if they are appropriate at all, would require substantial further validation.
The Architecture of Becoming was about building rooms for the parts of ourselves that needed somewhere to live.
Bringing the study to data lock taught me a different kind of becoming: letting something I built be tested, narrowed, revised, or overturned by what the evidence actually shows.
It is one thing to build a room for an idea. It is another to open the door and let the evidence in.