The Best of Both Worlds Was a Lie

What Game Theory Tells Us About Growing Up

Psychoanalysis × Game Theory × Developmental Neuroscience

The Blonde Wig

Twenty years ago, a thirteen-year-old girl put on a blonde wig and became someone else.

By day she was Miley Stewart, an ordinary teenager. By night she was Hannah Montana, pop star and Disney product. The show lasted four seasons and sold everything that could carry a logo. But what made it stick had nothing to do with music sales. It had to do with a seductive idea about identity: that you could live two incompatible lives and never have to choose between them. The wig kept the worlds apart. You could be anonymous and adored, private and public, ordinary and exceptional. The theme song called it the best of both worlds.

Eighty-nine million people watched the finale. Then the wig came off — not just from the character, but from the girl who played her. What followed looked like self-destruction: the 2013 VMAs, the tongue, the wrecking ball. The commentary was predictable. She’d lost control, or Disney had broken her, or fame had done what fame does.

Almost nobody suggested that what she was doing might make sense.

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What if it did?

The Second Time You Have to Become Yourself

Peter Blos, a psychoanalyst who spent decades studying adolescence, noticed something that gets surprisingly little attention. Growing up isn’t a single process. It happens twice.

The first individuation occurs in early childhood — a toddler separates from a caregiver and begins experiencing herself as a distinct person. The second one arrives years later, and it feels nothing like the first. The body changes without permission. The hormonal architecture that regulated childhood gets dismantled and rebuilt. Parents start treating you differently without explaining why. The social world, which once tolerated your mistakes, begins watching with sharper eyes.

You become a different player in a game whose rules just shifted, and nobody hands you a new rulebook.

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Erik Erikson called this unstable interval a psychosocial moratorium: a culturally sanctioned pause in which commitment to any fixed identity is postponed so that exploration can happen. The adolescent tries on roles, aesthetics, values, loyalties — without yet being expected to settle into any of them.

The self is not absent during this period. It is under revision.

Both Blos and Erikson understood that the moratorium involves disruption. They expected it. They saw experimentation, contradiction, even a certain degree of chaos as part of the developmental landscape. In the psychoanalytic tradition, this isn’t treated as pathology. It is treated as a process — uncomfortable, necessary, and eventually productive.

But what neither of them asked, at least not in these terms, is whether that chaos might follow a logic.

What If the Chaos Is Rational?

Game theory, the mathematical study of strategic decision-making, offers at least two frameworks that reframe what happens during the moratorium in a way psychoanalysis alone doesn’t.

The first has to do with uncertainty. In game theory, there is a class of problems called games of incomplete information. These describe situations where a player doesn’t fully know the rules, the payoffs, or even the nature of their own capacities. The adolescent fits this description almost too well. The body changed. The emotional landscape shifted. The things that once worked — obedience, charm, performance — may still generate external rewards, but they’ve started feeling hollow. The payoffs of the old game haven’t just moved. They’ve become hard to read.

Under these conditions, one recurring finding of game theory is that a mixed strategy — deliberate variation of behavior rather than any single committed course — can outperform a fixed plan. This isn’t randomness for its own sake. It’s strategic protection. A penalty kicker who always shoots right will be saved. A poker player who always bluffs will be called. Under genuine uncertainty, predictability becomes the real vulnerability.

Decision theorists formalize a related idea through a problem called the Multi-Armed Bandit. Twenty slot machines, unknown payout rates, limited coins. Do you keep pulling the lever on the first machine that paid you, or do you try the others at some cost? This is the exploration-exploitation dilemma: the tension between cashing in on what you know and sampling to discover something better.

Developmental neuroscience lends empirical weight to this framing. The dual systems model, proposed by Laurence Steinberg and B.J. Casey around 2008, describes a documented mismatch in adolescent brain development: the socioemotional system, centered in the ventral striatum and responsible for reward sensitivity and novelty-seeking, matures faster than the cognitive control system in the prefrontal cortex. This asymmetry creates a measurable bias toward exploration. The organism appears, in this light, to be wired to sample before it commits.

None of this proves that every adolescent tantrum is strategic genius. But it suggests something worth taking seriously: the behavioral variation that adults typically read as incoherence — the teenager who was a pianist yesterday and wants tattoos today, the straight-A student who drops everything for skateboarding — may not indicate a broken person. It may indicate someone whose nervous system is configured, for this period, to keep searching.

The second game-theoretic framework illuminates something different.

Erikson observed that many adolescents, before they have any clear sense of who they want to be, develop a fierce certainty about who they refuse to become. He called this negative identity: the vehement rejection of roles that feel imposed, inherited, or suffocating. In Erikson’s own framing, this is a clinical observation without an implied rationality. The adolescent rejects because the identity is intolerable, not because the rejection follows a strategy.

But what if we look at this through the lens of game theory?

In strategic analysis, a dominated strategy is one that produces worse outcomes across every relevant scenario — an option so consistently bad that a rational player would remove it from the repertoire before doing anything else. You don’t need to know what you want to start eliminating what has become untenable.

The parallel is suggestive. When adolescents begin performing behaviors that are costly to their established image — shaving their head, rejecting everything their parents value, dressing in ways that provoke — these are not necessarily errors. They may function as something closer to what signaling theory calls costly signals: behaviors so reputationally expensive that they become credible precisely because of their cost. Talk is cheap. Anyone can say «I’m not that person anymore.» But when the cost of the declaration includes losing friendships, parental approval, or institutional backing, the signal becomes harder to dismiss.

These micro-ruptures are not proof of breakdown. They are, at minimum, consistent with the logic of an agent pruning a strategy that no longer serves her and making the pruning visible enough that the social environment is forced to update its expectations.

The Spotlight That Never Turns Off

«Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.» The line is often attributed to Gabriel García Márquez. That three-layered architecture historically gave the moratorium room to breathe. You could experiment in private, fail in contexts that forgot, and try on versions of yourself that never became permanent record.

Social media has compressed those layers into one. What scholars call context collapse — the merging of all audiences into a single undifferentiated public — means that mistakes are now archived, searchable, and permanent. When everyone’s life carries a degree of public visibility that used to be reserved for celebrities, the cost of breaking away from an established identity goes up. Performing a costly signal, randomizing behavior, experimenting with roles that might not work — all of this becomes riskier when the audience never leaves and the algorithm rewards consistency.

The moratorium hasn’t disappeared. But the price of playing it has risen.

Why Not All Chaos Leads to Growth

And this brings us to a necessary distinction. Not all chaos leads somewhere.

Wilfred Bion, a psychoanalyst whose thinking about early mental life has shaped much of contemporary clinical work, described a relationship he called container and contained. Raw emotional experience — anxiety, sensory overload, unprocessed affect — does not automatically become knowledge. It needs a container: a mind, a relationship, a family capable of receiving the turbulence and transforming it into something thinkable.

Without that container, exploration doesn’t become a moratorium. It becomes free fall.

This matters because the variables involved are genuinely complex. Temperament, relational history, quality of attachment, social scaffolding — all of these determine whether a given period of disruption produces growth or disintegration. The same behavioral surface — volatility, contradiction, dramatic shifts in self-presentation — can signal either development or collapse, depending on the structures underneath.

Not every adolescent who experiments finds her way. Not every moratorium resolves. The game-theoretic lens we proposed doesn’t change that reality. What it does is challenge the assumption that the chaos itself is the problem. Sometimes the chaos is the search. Whether the search produces anything depends on what’s holding it.

The Wig That Fit

In 2023, Miley Cyrus released «Flowers.» It spent eight weeks at number one. In February 2024, she won her first Grammys: Record of the Year, Best Pop Solo Performance.

We don’t know Miley Cyrus. We don’t have access to her internal life, her relational structures, or the architecture that held — or didn’t hold — her moratorium. It would be clinically irresponsible to treat her trajectory as a case study.

But as a metaphor, her story is hard to resist. A girl who had an identity built for her before she could choose one, who spent a decade in what looked like chaos, and who emerged — provisionally, as far as we can tell — into something that appears more integrated, more self-authored, more settled. If we map the dual systems model onto that trajectory, the sampling phase looks less like dysfunction and more like the system running its search program. The shift from exploration to exploitation happened not because someone demanded closure, but because enough information had been gathered.

In 1945, Jacques Lacan published a logical puzzle about three prisoners. Each wears a disc on their back, black or white. Each can see the other two, but not their own. The one who deduces his own color goes free. The solution is not introspection — the prisoner can’t see himself. What he can do is watch the hesitation of the others. If they don’t move, their pause becomes data about what they see on his back. He discovers his identity not by looking inward, but by reading the world’s response to his presence.

Lacan didn’t know game theory — Nash would publish his equilibrium concept five years later, Harsanyi’s formal treatment of incomplete information wouldn’t appear for decades more. But the problem Lacan constructed is, structurally, a game of incomplete information with sequential inference about hidden types. He got there from the other side of the map: not through mathematics, but through logic and psychoanalysis. Two disciplines, working independently, converged on the same insight: that identity is not a private discovery but a strategic reading of how others respond to what they see in you.

Identity is not a private discovery but a strategic reading of how others respond to what they see in you.

That, in a way, is what the moratorium is. A stretch of time in which the self, still forming, watches the world react and gradually begins to recognize its own contour.

Sometimes this happens in a therapist’s office. Sometimes in a rehearsal room. Sometimes it happens on a stage, with a former child star performing the demolition of someone else’s brand, clearing space for something that doesn’t have a name yet.

Twenty years ago, a girl put on a wig and became two people. The show called it a gift. It wasn’t. There was never a best of both worlds. There was only the slow, messy, occasionally brutal work of becoming one.

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Want to Go Deeper?

At The Crossover Project, we care about the rigor behind the mix.

On psychosocial moratorium and identity:

Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and Crisis. W. W. Norton. The foundational text on psychosocial moratorium, negative identity, and identity formation.

On the second individuation:

Blos, P. (1967). «The Second Individuation Process of Adolescence.» The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 22(1), 162–186. Why adolescence is a second separation, not a continuation of childhood.

On adolescent brain development:

Steinberg, L. (2008). «A social neuroscience perspective on adolescent risk-taking.» Developmental Review, 28(1), 78–106. The dual systems model that explains why the adolescent brain favors exploration.

On identity as intersubjective inference:

Lacan, J. (1945). «Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty.» A logic puzzle that turns out to be about how identity is inferred through interaction.

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What Is The Crossover Project?

This article is part of The Crossover Project — a space that takes the logic of the video game crossover and applies it to human thinking. We don’t seek comfortable synthesis or a single truth. We seek friction. We don’t pretend to resolve life’s contradictions. We learn to hold them.

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