A short story about space.

From the founder

Hi, I’m Richard — a builder, pilot, crisis-line volunteer, and long-time observer of what happens right before people make decisions they later regret.

For years, I chased clarity through movement: travel, achievement, new chapters, new environments. I thought if I found the right place, role, or relationship, the fog would lift. Sometimes it did — briefly. But not reliably. Not in the moments that mattered.

Eventually the pattern became obvious: we don’t lack wisdom — we lose space. Under pressure, attention collapses. The body braces. Time shrinks. Experience compresses into a single storyline: urgent, dangerous, must act now.

And when you’re inside that compression, even good people do things they don’t recognize: send the message, take the bait, agree too quickly, quit too fast, stay too long. Not because they’re broken — because they’re narrowed.

What I wanted

I wanted something simple: a tool that could sit quietly beside someone late at night and say, “Here’s what’s actually happening underneath all of this.”

Not therapy. Not coaching. Not advice. A structured mirror — a pause between impulse and action — that restores enough space to choose cleanly.

What I eventually realized

While building it, something became clearer: the problem wasn’t just that we lacked good tools.

It’s that most modern environments are designed in ways that compress attention — notifications, urgency, social pressure, speed, performance, fear of missing out.

We are surrounded by systems optimized for reaction. Very few are optimized for clarity.

The deeper pattern

Across different fields — aviation, crisis work, decision science, contemplative practice — the same pattern appears:

When the body feels safe, perception widens.
When perception widens, options return.
When options return, behavior becomes aligned instead of reactive.

Clarity is not a personality trait. It’s a state condition.

And like any state condition, it can be lost, restored, trained — and designed for.

From a tool to a framework

Fog Room became the first expression of that idea: a small, private instrument that helps you see the structure of your inner world before you act.

But the larger intention behind PanoSight is not to create dependence on a tool. It’s to help people reliably recover space — in conversations, in conflict, in leadership, in relationships, in moments that actually matter.

In that sense, PanoSight is less a product and more a framework for how humans think clearly under pressure. Fog Room is simply the first instrument built on top of it.

The quiet goal

The goal isn’t to make people calmer. The goal is to make them harder to destabilize.

To increase the distance between stimulus and reaction — and restore the space where perception, choice, and meaning can happen again.

“Home isn’t just where you are. It’s the moment you can see yourself clearly — and trust what you see.”

If that resonates, you’re not alone — you’re just early.

One request: judge this by whether it returns space — not by whether you agree with my words.

Twenty years from now (inside cover, in my imagination)

This book is the field manual I wish more people had before they sent the message, made the trade, chose the partner, took the job, left the job, raised their voice, or swallowed their truth. It isn’t self-help and it isn’t philosophy — it’s a practical map of what happens to human perception under pressure, and how to reliably get your mind back. Over the years, I learned that clarity is not a virtue; it’s a condition. When the body feels safe, the world becomes legible again. When the world is legible, choice returns. The work is simple, but not easy: build space, widen the field, and act from what you can actually see. If any page in here helps you regain one clean degree of freedom in a hard moment, then the book did its job. — Richard