What Jujutsu Kaisen says about the sense of self
20 July 2026
Most people know Jujutsu Kaisen from the flashy fights, the striking art, and the Gojo memes. It is easy to miss, under all that hype, that Gege Akutami built a pretty concrete idea about how a person works into his combat system. It is not just a backdrop for pretty scenes. The very way the characters find their place inside the rules of that world says something interesting about life, and not only in that Japan full of curses.
The first thing worth unpacking is ego. In the manga, ego does not mean pride or arrogance, it means something closer to a sense of self. You see it most clearly in Gojo's conversation with Megumi. Gojo explains to him the difference between risking your life to win and sacrificing yourself for victory. He tells him straight that to become the strongest you have to be, deep down, an egoist. You have to be greedy and want to win for your own sake. Megumi is too selfless, and that is exactly what blocks his potential.
When Gojo throws out his famous line, "Throughout Heaven and Earth, I alone am the Honored One," he is not doing it out of vanity. It is a paraphrase of the words attributed to the Buddha right after his birth. Gojo brushes against death and casts off every earthly attachment, fear, duty, mission, and through that he reaches an absolute focus on his own existence here and now. He understood the nature of cursed energy because he first fully understood himself, and he fought for his own sake.
The other pole of the same idea is Ryomen Sukuna. Sukuna is not simply evil, he is free from the constructs imposed by society. He eats when he wants, kills when he desires, and if something excites him he plays with it. He lives by his own whims, without looking at others and without comparing himself to anyone.
And here is the difference that says everything. Gojo names himself the Honored One. Nobody has to convince Sukuna that he is the King of Curses, because he does not care about the title at all, it is others who give it to him. Gojo announces his power, Sukuna simply is it. His sense of self flows from within and does not flinch even when he is taking a beating through an entire fight while everyone around has already written him off. So these are not two versions of the same pride, but two different relationships with the outside gaze. One needs to proclaim it, the other is untouched by it.
Here comes my favorite concept from the series, the domains. A Domain Expansion is, in essence, imposing your own inner world onto the outer one. And to do that a large amount of cursed energy is not enough. You need an unshaken sense of self. If you have doubts, if you do not know who you are, if you are trying to fit in with others, then your inner world is too fragile to manifest in reality.
When two domains clash, the more refined one wins. That is, the one whose "reality" is stronger and imposes its own rules on the opponent. And this is exactly the point where the domain stops being just fiction from a manga. It is the same thing as a "frame," frame control, known from the psychology of negotiation and social dynamics. A clash of domains is simply a clash of two people's frames. The one whose sense of self, whose rules, whose inner coherence is stronger, wins.
It is worth settling right away what winning means here, because it is not about reaching a goal or winning an argument. It is about whose certainty stays intact, and who begins to doubt what they used to hold as their own. The loser is not the one who did not get their way, but the one whose frame cracks and stops holding up their reality.
In that light Sukuna's domain is exceptional, because as one of the few it has no outer barrier. Sukuna does not need to cut his reality off from the rest, because he is indifferent to what the world thinks of it. He treats the whole world as his canvas, not in order to rule over it, but because his sense of self is so full that it needs no wall to defend it. This is not a hunger for domination, it is a complete lack of any need to prove anything to anyone.
And here it is worth clearing up one misunderstanding, because it is easy to fall into. A frame does not tell you what your goal should be, it only holds it. It is not about being the strongest in the sense of dominating, winning, or being on top. It is about your frame defending your values, whatever they are. You can want to be an altruist, to win the rat race, to become an unknown professor who reads books, or a priest, and it does not matter, because that is not the point here, which of them is better. It is also not a call to isolation. If your value is closeness, friendship, and being among people, then that is exactly the frame you hold.
Of course you have to change your mind sometimes, otherwise you would be a fool, but that change has to come from your own analysis of whether you are wrong, not from someone else's pressure. The outside world does not reset you, only you can reset yourself. And that is why the goal does not constitute the frame, the frame maintains the goal. Gojo lived for others and wanted to build the next generation, Sukuna lived only for himself and for the fight itself, and yet their domains were equally refined. Because it was not their goal that made the domain. It was how unshakably they stood by that goal.
In the real world people do not line up for one on one duels over who has the stronger frame. In reality, many people with similar beliefs form group domains, and those can be strong enough to break even the strongest individual frame. Examples of such collective domains are cultures, norms and social structures, beliefs about what counts as "normal," but also religions and trends. Their equivalent of the "sure-hit" is social pressure, ostracism, and the feeling of exclusion, plain FOMO.
Take the most ordinary social pressure. You are supposed to dress like everyone else, watch what everyone watches, consume what everyone consumes, and hold an opinion someone has already prepared for you. The group rewards walking the beaten path and punishes questioning the status quo, and most often not because someone deliberately planned it, but simply because it is more comfortable for everyone at once. Today there is an added layer of algorithms that pump ready-made opinions, ready-made emotions, and ready-made divisions into people's heads, us against them. This is a collective domain in its purest form, only stretched across millions of people at once.
Most people simply let themselves be absorbed by it, and it happens without any clear coercion. The individual's frame dissolves into the group's frame so smoothly that in the end a person takes someone else's opinion for their own. He stops checking where he ends and the crowd begins.
Say you go against the current and start fighting the system head on. In effect you are then trying to lay your own domain over a collective one. For an individual that is exhausting and lost in advance, because the collective domain always has more energy. Worse, by fighting it you only feed it.
Here another concept from Jujutsu Kaisen comes in handy, the Simple Domain. When a sorcerer does not have a powerful enough ego to win a domain clash against a stronger opponent, he uses an anti-domain technique. The Simple Domain does not try to destroy the enemy's reality. It creates a small, personal barrier that neutralizes the "sure-hit." It is nothing other than ignoring the collective domain and lowering its importance. You do not fight the system and you do not try to impose your will on the world, but at the same time you do not let the system impose its rules on you. The outer reality still exists, its rules simply do not touch you.
Let us go back to that pressure from the previous section. Someone with a well set Simple Domain does not step into the middle to shout that everyone is wrong, because that is exactly what would feed the collective domain. He does something quieter. He passes all of it, the trends, other people's opinions, the algorithmic hints about what to think, through his own filter, and keeps only what he recognizes as his. He does not let someone else's opinion become his own along the way. From the outside he often looks as if he is calmly flowing along with the rest, though on the inside he does not budge, because he decided for himself what concerns him.
This does take considerable inner stability, though, because mass frames are designed to break individuality. And not every collective frame can be broken, and sometimes it is simply not worth it, the law for instance.
There is one trap here. If you simply lock yourself in your own head and decide that only you are right, it is very easy to cross the line between a strong ego and a complete detachment from reality, that is, delusion. So how do you tell a person with a strong frame from a madman?
The line rests on reality testing and on understanding what we are even trying to impose our domain onto. A strong frame changes or ignores subjective and social reality. Delusion is an attempt to change objective, physical reality. Characters like Sukuna do not ignore the rules of jujutsu, because even the strongest domain rests on the basic rules. Sukuna is powerful not because he disregards the rules of the world, but because he learned them inside out and bent them to perfection. An attempt to ignore gravity or physiology will always end with your barrier shattering.
And when everyone around tells you that you are wrong, pure logical analysis often fails, because both sides have their arguments. But a strong and healthy sense of self is not blind. It watches the world carefully, and when it makes a mistake it can admit it and adapt. A sick mind is rigid and cracks on contact with facts.
To sharpen this split between a strong self and delusion, I will run it through Karl Popper's three worlds. It is the cleanest filter for where a frame may be imposed and where it is already madness.
World 1 is the world of matter, of the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and energy. This world is completely immune to your ego and the state of your mind. Gravity acts on everyone the same. Trying to impose a frame directly on World 1 is already madness. Someone who believes he will fly by willpower, or that eating gold will give him magic powers, is doomed to fail from the start.
World 2 is the world of personal experience, emotions, thoughts, cognitive processes, and the sense of identity. It is the space where you should be absolutely sovereign. Here you build a strong sense of self and here you use the Simple Domain. This is where you decide how you react to outside stimuli and shape your values, beliefs, and inner peace. Imposing a frame in World 2 means that you know who you are and you do not let other people's fears and opinions destabilize your mind. You are the master of your own experience.
World 3 is the world of culture, institutions, social norms, language, art, and scientific theories, but also of ideologies and of what circulates on social media. These are objective entities that arose out of the human World 2 and began to live a life of their own. World 3 itself does not press on you directly, it always does it through World 2, through other people and through you yourself, and its tools are pressure, ostracism, and FOMO. That is where the collective domains live, and through that channel they try to absorb your World 2. But if you have a strong, stable frame in World 2, you can consciously filter what you take from it. You do not have to fight it. You simply ignore the part of it that does not serve you.
This whole world, domains, frames, ego, revolves around the same thing. Not around who hits harder, but around who knows who he is strongly enough that the rest of the world does not have to agree with him. The winner is not the one who imposes a frame, but the one who needs none. The strongest frame is invisible. It is like Gojo's Infinity, a wall that is not there, because nothing from the outside reaches you anyway. Gojo and Sukuna have this cranked to the limit, each in his own direction, one by proclaiming his power, the other by not caring about it at all. We play for the same thing, only more quietly and across a whole lifetime, usually without even calling it a fight.
And that is probably why this is so interesting to me, it is something more than a story about guys throwing cursed energy at each other. Because underneath, it is not really about curses.