Original Reality Theory

2.7 The Effort That Gives Back More Than It Asks

In April 2025, the author lived on Rua Frei Caneca in São Paulo, Brazil, and took his dog, Chico, for a walk in Praça Roosevelt almost every day. Along the way was a small square where people experiencing homelessness often stayed, in an area the city cleaned frequently. On one of these walks, he saw some of them opening trash bags and scattering the contents across the sidewalk. The conclusion came almost automatically: if they have rights, they should also have obligations. It seemed fair, logical, and, above all, obvious. The walk continued, but the sentence came along.

At home, the sentence began to bother him. He had observed a few minutes of those people's lives and, without knowing who they were, where they came from, or whether they had family, identification documents, or good health, had already produced a complete explanation. There was another detail: he would return to a home with a bed, a bathroom, food, and enough security to plan the next day; the person he was judging might have none of those things. Was he evaluating that person's behavior from their circumstances or his own? He decided to research the issue. He began with city policies and found social services, health care, public-space maintenance, housing, and projects replacing other projects. The more information he gathered, the larger the problem became. He had started by looking for an answer and found a system.

He then began to look at the same sidewalk from each participant's position. For someone sleeping there, the urgent need was to get through the night. For residents, it was safety and cleanliness near home. For shopkeepers, customers. For social-service professionals, a cause and also a livelihood. For politicians, a social problem that could cost them the election: if they offered housing, they would be accused of rewarding people who had not worked for it; if they did not, of abandoning people on the street. Each position was understandable from the standpoint that produced it, and together they produced a result almost no one wanted. The question changed from “who is causing this?” to “what kind of system makes people act in understandable ways and together produce what none of them wants?” It was no longer a question about the square. It was a question about human beings, and it was this question that, passing through politics, history, psychology, and physics, eventually led to Original Reality Theory. The author had not planned to write a theory. He was following a question that changed in scope with every attempt to answer it. The full journey is on the site's Origin page.

The previous sections prepared the reader to see. In 2.4, we changed our measuring scales and contexts; in 2.5, we encountered the cognitive matrix through which each person interprets the world; in 2.6, we learned to observe it in ourselves. What remains is the step that the story of the square illustrates better than any definition: sustaining a question. Recognizing one's own matrix does not, by itself, build a second one. That takes time, revisiting, making connections, and a willingness to reconsider what seemed settled. And it takes a reason. Why would anyone invest this effort?

The square already provides part of the answer. The author did not leave it with a solution for homelessness. He left knowing why solutions that address a single element often fail to reach the whole problem, and with questions capable of examining it through more relationships and fewer assumptions. That is the practical benefit of what the Introduction calls expanding the capacity for analysis: distinguishing an explanation sufficient for judging from one sufficient for understanding and acting.

The same applies at home. During an argument, a remark is taken as disrespect, and the response comes before any question about what was said, what was interpreted, and how much the day's fatigue influenced that interpretation. Someone who has learned to separate these layers is not automatically right, but can ask for clarification before responding to an assumed intention and discuss the actual problem instead of the perceived offense.

It applies at work, too. Deliveries are late, and the first explanation blames someone's lack of effort. The inquiry can continue: are requests arriving incomplete? Does the plan change midway through? Do two teams depend on information they do not share with each other? Perhaps the initial blame will prove justified. Perhaps an organizational problem will emerge that no amount of pressure would solve. In the square, at home, and at work, the movement is the same: from an immediate reaction to reconstructing the relationships that produced the situation. The result is not greater certainty. It is better questions before spending time, money, or relationships on the wrong explanation.

Sustaining this movement is not simple, and not only because of the theory. No one reads with life on pause: there is work, family, bills, and days when attention simply is not available. There are also digital environments that offer one topic after another, chosen in part by systems that learn from our behavior. Researcher Sophie Leroy showed that, when we switch tasks, part of our attention remains attached to the previous one, and experiments with personalized recommendations show that what we click on does not always match what we would like to cultivate. The next novelty does not complete the previous question. In an inquiry, by contrast, the relationship understood today is what allows another to be examined tomorrow. Preserving this thread is a choice the stream will not make for anyone.

There is, however, good news in learning research: interest does not have to be fully formed at the outset. Suzanne Hidi and K. Ann Renninger described how interest sparked by a situation can, through engagement, become lasting interest, and Matthias Gruber and colleagues showed that curiosity supports memory for what we learn. That is how it happened in the square: the first question was small, and interest grew with each answer that opened up another question.

Three resources help maintain the thread. The first is to have a question of your own: a doubt raised by an example, a statement that seemed absurd, a relationship you want to test in your field. Someone who works in construction might ask where an arrangement ends and its context begins; someone who works with people, what changes when the event is separated from its interpretation; someone with expertise in another discipline, where the boundary lies between an interesting analogy and a demonstrable correspondence. The question does not have to agree with the author. It needs to be clear enough to guide the reading.

The second is to mark where your thinking stopped. When closing the text, three brief notes are enough: what relationship I managed to reconstruct, what remains unanswered, and which question I will start with next time. Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer showed that intentions tied to concrete situations (“when I open the text, I will start with this question”) are more readily carried out than vague intentions. Days later, the reader returns to an ongoing inquiry rather than a vague feeling of having already understood everything.

The third is to take the concepts into situations the text has not presented and look for where they stop working. Finding a contradiction is a result, not a failure: the second matrix is strengthened both by confirming a relationship and by discovering its limits. Alongside these resources comes a limit the author learned through experience: intense curiosity does not eliminate physical and mental fatigue. A deliberate pause preserves the inquiry better than exhausted persistence.

Readers do not need to finish this journey wanting to write a theory. They may discover that, when facing a conflict, they can listen to an explanation without confusing it with agreement; that, when facing a recurring problem, they can look for relationships that a single cause concealed; that, when facing an appealing claim, they ask for evidence before adopting it. They may even conclude that ORT is wrong on some point and propose a better explanation. In all these cases, they will have moved from merely following someone else's reasoning to directing their own.

On the walk with Chico, the question that changed everything was not “why do they do this?” It was a smaller, more uncomfortable question: “why was I so certain?” From there came months of inquiry, sometimes accompanied by cinematic orchestral soundtracks that helped keep the enthusiasm alive, and pauses that served as reminders of the body's limits. These pages extend the same invitation, on each reader's own scale: find a question worth your effort and learn to sustain it. The premises that follow do not ask for allegiance. They are a shared starting point for an inquiry each person can pursue independently.

Summary for Reflection

• A quick conclusion can seem complete precisely because it ignores what is not known.
• Broadening the question transforms the search for someone to blame into an understanding of a system.
• An explanation sufficient for judging is not sufficient for understanding and acting.
• Interest does not have to be fully formed at the outset: it grows through inquiry.
• Sustaining a question requires preserving the point where reasoning stopped and finding the way back.
• A contradiction found when applying a concept is a result, not a failure.
• Expanding the capacity for analysis means beginning to direct one's own inquiries.

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