Chud Vectors: A Mathematical Interpretation
Origin
In a world saturated with distractions and frictionless pleasure, our population has not only become weaker as a whole, but–relative to those at the dawn of humanity–significantly chuddier. Many of you have likely heard the term in passing:
“Dude, you’re such a chud.” “Bro, lock in and stop being a chud.” “He has no girls–he’s lowkey a chud.”
But what exactly is a chud? Am I a chud? Are the authors of this article chuds?
These are all valid questions. In this essay, we aim not only to define chud, but to formalize it: to identify its underlying components and propose a mathematical framework for measuring degrees of chudness using vectors, eigenvectors, and principal component analysis (PCA).
Chuddism
At the time of writing, I am in South Korea traveling with my best friend and co-author, Rishab Bhatia. During our stay–from Seoul to Busan to Jeju Island–we encountered Buddhism not just as a religion, but as a lived philosophy. In conversations with devout practitioners, one theme was common: an intense, coherent sense of purpose–spiritual, personal, and practical.
This exposure led us to wonder what is the antithesis of a life structured around meaning?
Chuddism was our answer.
To explore this further, Rishab and I interviewed many chuds and studs. Some conversations were insightful; others were painful. Still, consistent patterns emerged. Chuds exhibited high levels of escapism, weak real-world social ties, and heavy dependence on digital media. Relationships–both platonic and romantic–were often mediated through screens rather than forged through shared physical presence. Excessive reel consumption may generate a shared sense of brain-rot camaraderie, but rarely produces the affection, trust, or understanding that characterize genuine human connection.
We could list many more observations, but for the sake of precision, we condense our findings into a single definition:
Chud: a person perceived as chronically disengaged and maladapted–marked by excessive escapism, poor physical and social habits, lack of purpose, and difficulty forming meaningful real-world relationships.
From Labels to Vectors
While this represents progress in the study of chudness, we wanted to take the idea further. One of our most interesting findings was that chudness consistently appeared on a spectrum. Many individuals described themselves not as chuds outright, but as having “chud-like tendencies.”
This suggested that chudness is not a binary condition, but a continuous quantity. From this, we concluded that being a chud is better modeled not as a label, but as a vector–with both direction and magnitude–whose components correspond to distinct behavioral tendencies in a shared lifestyle space.
Chud Basis Vectors
We identify seven primary basis directions spanning the chud subspace:
The Escapist Eigenvector: Obsessive interest in cartoon or fictional realities designed to replace base reality.
The Sedentary Null Mode: Failure to engage in planned physical activity at least twice per week.
The Social Decoupling Axis: Fewer than seven hours per week of in-person social participation (classes, clubs, sports).
The Romantic Singularity: Inability to form meaningful relationships with the opposite gender, both sexual and non-sexual.
The Nutritional Entropy Vector: Consumption of highly processed, low-nutrient foods on more than four days per week.
The Doomscroll Attractor: More than eight hours per day spent on non-productive media.
The Purpose-Null Principal Component: Lack of direction or coherent long-term purpose.
A Mathematical Approach
Intuition
We model Chud as a vector in a seven-dimensional lifestyle space. The above basis vectors represent distinct axes–escapism, inactivity, isolation, nutritional decay, media saturation, relational failure, and purposelessness. While theoretically orthogonal, they are strongly correlated in practice.
An individual’s daily habits define a state vector, whose components represent magnitudes along these axes. Applying PCA suggests that chudness is largely explained by a small number of dominant modes. Excessive fictional immersion tends to co-vary with media overconsumption; inactivity loads heavily onto social withdrawal; and lack of purpose acts as a global scaling factor.
The closer one’s state vector aligns with the leading eigenvector–the archetypal north-star chud–the better a low-rank approximation of their life becomes.
You don’t need every component to be non-zero to be chud-like; you only need sufficient projection onto the dominant modes.
The Chud Decomposition
Let $x \in \mathbb{R}^7$ denote an individual’s lifestyle state vector, with normalized components corresponding to the seven chud axes. We approximate chudness as:
$$\text{Chudness}(x) \approx \sum_{i=1}^{k} \lambda_i v_i$$
where $v_i$ are the principal eigenvectors of maladaptation and $\lambda_i$ their respective loadings. Empirically, $k \ll 7$: most chudness is explained by only a few dominant components.
As $|x|$ grows and its direction aligns with the leading eigenvector, the individual converges toward the archetypal Chud. For simplicity, we assume orthogonality, though in reality binge-watching and existential drift exhibit strong positive covariance.
Conclusion: The Orthogonal Complement
With clarity on the chud subspace, we can finally articulate its opposite. The life we wish to lead is characterized by a vector lying in the orthogonal complement: the anti-chud.
De-chudding is simply Gram–Schmidt for life–iteratively subtracting chud components from your state vector until the normalized residual lies entirely in the orthogonal complement: the anti-chud direction.
In practice, de-chuddification involves identifying behaviors that load heavily onto dominant chud modes, reducing their magnitude, and reallocating that energy into orthogonal activities: physical movement, in-person social interaction, meaningful effort, and long-horizon goals. Over time, repeated subtraction and reinforcement cause the life vector to converge toward anti-chud.
This process requires honest self-reflection and identity-based habits aligned with the explicit goal of removing chudness. Start going to the gym or pick up a sport–it enforces discipline, improves nutrition, and creates legitimate social contact. Say yes to the trip: money recycles, but the window for real-world experience only narrows. Talk to strangers for the sake of curiosity and connection; active listening outperforms bravado in both friendship and dating. Replace doomscrolling with intellectually generative pursuits–history, psychology, science. Become so obsessed with long-term improvement that life itself becomes the game.
Optimization, in the end, is minimization of projection onto the chud subspace. Define the orthogonal complement, and anti-chud will follow.
Jeju Island
Buddhist Shrine