Karma Theory begins from a simple view of life: a person moves through the world as a trajectory, but does not merely pass through it. Every interaction changes something—another person, a relationship, an organization, a physical object, an institution, a body of knowledge, or the conditions from which later events unfold. Some changes disappear quickly. Others persist, propagate, branch, combine with later events, and continue to shape future trajectories long after the initiating interaction has ended. This essay develops that intuition through five questions: Where do I come from? Who am I? Where am I going? What will I leave behind? How should I choose? The first four belong to the descriptive core of Karma Theory. They treat the present as an inherited causal state, the self as an evolving trajectory, the future as a probability distribution over reachable paths rather than a predetermined destiny, and a life as a source of causal traces that can outlive the person who produced them. The fifth question is explicitly normative. It connects the framework to a personal philosophy of freedom and happiness: good decisions should, absent sufficient compensating value, avoid unnecessarily and irreversibly shrinking the set of valuable future options. The term karma is used here as a technical and literary name. The framework makes no claim about rebirth, moral reward and punishment, cosmic accounting, or a metaphysical karmic force. Its subject is causal consequence: how completed interactions remain present in what the world has become.
Kai Wang (2026) studied this question.