The map is part of the territory

yatharth
Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:40:30 GMT

Note to reader: This post was written with Publish-first writing, where I publish the post first, then write it. It’s current status is Rough first draft (4/17).

My friend Jill is anxiously attached.

Of course, my friend Jill is just Jill, the full human person Jill.

But there is such a thing as “anxiously attached.” It is a specific term that came out of developmental psychology, from putting children in a room with a stranger and new toys, and seeing how they acted when their mothers left the room and later returned. In this experiment, childrens’ behaviour clustered into four clumps, one of which was labelled “anxiously attached.” That term has a lot to do with Jill.

Seeing the map of attachment theory as arising from the same territory that also includes human beings makes it easy to remember the relationship between the two things.

Individuals are full human beings, attachment styles come from a dev psych experiments, the two have a lot to do with each other.

I head that before GPS existed, we used paper maps.

Paper maps are part of the territory of the world. Some company out there produced these pamphlets, and they sent people out to scour the land, or copied their designs[1] from others who had.

Remembering this makes it easy to appreciate the map may be out of date, inaccurate, or imprecise, and yet it bears a useful correspondence with where you are.

For me, it makes looking at the territory (becoming aware of the 3-d space around my and what shops and roads I can see) and looking at the map feel not so different.

They're both actions available to me as one unified observer.

“Maps vs territory” as a concept left me quite disembodied. I felt vaguely aware that the paper map I am holding is not the same as the world around me, but I couldn't get my inner self to look at the world around me.

The world was hard and vast, and I always would rather rely on my book knowledge, which fit into neat text, and was fast and accessible.

I love attachment theory. But I always felt uncomfortable saying “X was Y,” when really, aren't people more complicated than that? Don't they exhibit disparate behaviours and contextual security?

And yet… I can look around a room and—with I suspect with sufficient cross-rater agreement and predictive value—clock people as anxiously-attached. The patterns in their facial tension just look very different. The way they hold themselves, and the way their voices sound, are leagues apart.

Something about remembering that maps are part of the territory collapsed the “map vs territory” distinction into just “the world,” and made navigating the truth of it easier.

The world simply has many objects—some map-like objects, some physically-around-me objects—and I can navigate those jointly.

This community’s headline metaphor—map ≠ territory—accidentally reintroduced an unhelpful Cartesian split. By insisting the map is NOT the territory, I made myself out as this disembodied knower hovering between two ontological layers: the Real World out there, and My Representations in here.

Reading Phenomenology of Perception by Merleau-Ponty completely dissolved this for. The map is a thing in the world. My body holding the map is in the world. My perception, already shaped by maps I’ve internalized, is in the world. There is just the world, containing objects of varying fidelity, some of which are map-like.

1. ^

To catch competitors copying them, map makers would insert fake towns. The most famous such paper town is perhaps Agloe, New York, made up in 1930s, propagated in unbroken transmission, and until 2014, you could type “Agloe” into Google Maps and see it open.

1930s, published by General Drafting Co.

2014, published by Exxon Mobile Corporation.

2014, published by Google LLC.

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