The CLEAR Framework

Instead of trying to capture “who you are” as a fixed snapshot, we model how you engage with life across five modalities.

From a philosophical perspective, our principled take is that your existence, what happens to you, and your reflections and perspectives on those experiences inform your beliefs.

Those hold who you are.

We needed a principled framework to look at subjective experience cleanly, and still allow for N=1 personalization.

Create — Making new things, expressing yourself, bringing something into existence

Learn — Acquiring knowledge, building understanding, expanding your mental models

Explore — Curiosity-driven discovery, opening up to new possibilities

Act — Taking decisive action, executing on intentions, moving from thought to behavior

Recover — Rest, reflection, restoration, integrating experiences

Think of these as the five fundamental modes of human engagement.

At any moment, you’re operating primarily in one of these modes.

Across a month, you have a pattern.

It’s helpful to see where and how you’re spending your time and attention.

When it’s visible and measured, it’s more easily managed.

It’s: *which modes have you been existing in, and how does that affect your sense of self? *

What are your patterns?

The Pillars of Self

Modalities are only half the picture.

• Physical Health
• Mental Health
• Emotional Health
• Spiritual Health
• Recreational Health
• Intellectual Health
• Family & Relational Health
• Community Health
• Financial Health
• Career Health

We call these the Pillars of Self.

Look at the CLEAR Activity View dashboard again. You’ll notice that CLEAR time applies across the Pillars of Self.

Here’s the insight: your engagement pattern differs across pillars, in different seasons of life.

You might be in Create mode at work (building a new product) while stuck in Recovery mode emotionally (processing grief).

You might be thriving in Career Health while neglecting Recreational Health. (Ahem too much of me lately admittedly)

This creates a high-fidelity representation of how you’re actually living—not a static label, but a dynamic map of your engagement across all the domains that matter.

The Problem of Measuring Subjectivity

Now here’s where it gets interesting.

How do you measure something inherently subjective?

If I ask you “how aligned do you feel with your best self today?” on a scale of 1-10, that number means something different to you than it does to me.

Most systems treat this as a bug. We treat it as a feature.

Our philosophy:

Not compared to others.

Not against some external benchmark.

Against yourself.

You yesterday.

You last week.

You last month.

All you, over time.

Clarity maintains three “views” of you—your Self:

Becoming — Your trajectory, the direction you’re moving, the Self you’re becoming

Telos — Your Target Self, your best self you’re working toward

The magic happens when we compare these.

Are your actions moving you closer to your Telos? Or drifting away?

(In a future article I can show you how we get into the calculations)

The question isn’t “which mode is best?”

You also engage across different domains of life:

Clarity tracks the intersection: CLEAR modes × Pillars of Self.

This is where the Self-Model architecture comes in.

Aligned Actions

This brings me to a feature I’ve loved since we introduced it:

Aligned Actions.

Here’s how it works:

You journal. You reflect. You capture your day in whatever way feels natural.

“I spent two hours helping my sister move.”“I skipped the gym to finish a report.”“I finally had that difficult conversation with my manager.”

But do you ever go back to your journals?

In my experience, not frequent enough if ever.

In Clarity, what you capture gets distilled into our frameworks and evaluated against your target self.

Since Clarity holds a model of your Being, Becoming, and Telos, we can more precisely come to identify Aligned Actions from your journals over time.

Not “is this action good” in someone else’s standards.

Not “is this action productive” by someone else’s standards.

But—is it aligned with your Telos? Your purpose?

This is where agency and gratitude connect to the technical architecture.

Agency in Clarity means: You define your target self. You set the criteria for alignment. The system doesn’t tell you who to become, it helps you track whether you’re becoming it.

Gratitude emerges naturally from our daily gratitude practice and tending to your Belief Garden intentionally.

When you see your aligned actions accumulating over time, even small ones, you start to appreciate your own progress.

And as your habits align with your desired identities (who you want to become, your Target Self), then in real life you’re more likely to enjoy the habits themselves.

At least, that’s been the case for me.

Why This Matters for AI Personalization

Here’s the thing most AI teams miss:

They try to personalize based on behavior.

Clicks. Time spent. Purchase history.

But behavior is downstream of belief.

What you do is shaped by what you believe—about yourself, about the world, about what’s possible and what matters.

We go the other way in our design philosophy of Clarity.

We start first with a high-fidelity representation of the user at the belief level, to personalize everything downstream. We have a very sophisticated engine for evidencing beliefs.

The question we’re asking: Is this action aligned with who you want to become?