Mechanism trace

For each rival explanation, spell out how it would leave a different fingerprint in the world.

For months you've felt flat about your work, and three explanations circle in your head at night: you're in the wrong career, you're burned out, or you're just poisoned by scrolling past everyone's highlight reels. They all feel plausible at 1am, and they all suggest very different fixes, from quitting to resting to deleting an app.

Mechanism trace is the move of spelling out, for each rival explanation, how it would leave a different fingerprint in the world. The cue is having multiple explanations that all seem to fit the same feeling or event. The operation: for each rival, ask "if this were the true cause, what else would have to be visible?" Wrong career predicts flatness even on good days doing your core craft. Burnout predicts the flatness lifts after a real two-week break. Comparison poisoning predicts your mood tracks your scrolling, day by day. What changes is that identical-seeming theories now point at different observable traces, so you know what to actually watch for. Don't run this move when the rivals genuinely predict the same visible world, because then no fingerprint separates them and you need a different kind of test entirely.