Yo amigos! Here’s the latest installment of The Lightpage Chronicles, in which I’m documenting the process of writing a manifesto for Lightpage in real time.
After a week of struggling to write something new, I just said “fuck it” and recorded this update as a voice note/podcast without any script or editing.
Anyhow, there’s a cleaned up transcript below if you’d rather read than listen. Enjoy!
transcript
What's up, homies. I'm doing this next installment of the Lightpage Chronicles as a little voice note podcast because I'm stuck in a self-imposed perfectionist hellscape. It's wild how the more I care about a project or the more I'm invested in getting a piece of writing "right" (whatever that means), that self-created internal pressure becomes this latent form of anxiety in my body. It creates this somatic sense that if I do anything that isn't perfect, I'm literally going to die.
Which is really suboptimal because a big part of this whole process is exploration. My whole thesis on writing manifestos is that if you try to write the perfect version you see in your head, it's going to come out flat. You have to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, see what actually resonates, see what all the raw ingredients are. That's how you find those pieces that resonate deep inside you and are therefore more likely to resonate with audiences as well.
It's really interesting that I know this about the manifesto writing process, but there's still something in me that resists showing the messy inner workings. So I'm just doing this voice note version to share where we're at.
Last week, Kasra and I did another deep dive exploration call. We went into it hoping to explore the new story aspects of Lightpage—what is the world that Lightpage is trying to bring into being? That's very much about creating the flip side of the old story coin: what is Lightpage pushing back against? What are the conditions, problems, and forces creating this layer of pain, anger, and frustration that this tool can hopefully help us resolve?
Funny enough, we didn't end up exploring that new story much. Instead, we got into the messy territory in between what I call "bridge territory"—how do we as imperfect humans live into and toward a new story, step by step?
The thing that emerged that feels powerful (though I don't know if this is the final language we'll use) is this idea of a "dojo for strengthening our humanity." Because the villain or compelling old story we identified is that the digital environments we inhabit make us less human. Or rather, they bring out the worst aspects of our humanity—they make us more anxious, rigid, fearful, angry, extreme, and black-and-white in our thinking.
In turn, that makes us less capable of navigating a complex world. It makes us less capable of showing up wholeheartedly in our relationships, less able to show up compassionately for ourselves. The environments we inhabit are degrading our ability to be human.
Kasra and I outlined a series of qualities—human muscles that serve as counterbalancing forces to these digital environments. Things like curiosity, play, compassion, presence, and expression. You can't just snap your fingers and be a fully, perfectly integrated human who magically expresses all these things. But you can strengthen them bit by bit. You can return to this practice of being present, being attuned to your curiosity, taking small playful steps without all-or-nothing thinking.
This is at the core of what Lightpage as a tool and its AI are programmed to do, which brings us back to that analogy of the dojo.
There's something really powerful about this distinction between a gym and a dojo. When we talk about strengthening certain muscles, the obvious metaphor is the gym. But gyms reinforce a lot of the old story energy we're pushing back against. Gyms are very transactional—you go there to solve a specific problem in a solo, isolated way. You go because you're feeling insecure, you want to feel better, you want to be sexier.
A dojo, on the other hand, is more of an integrated environment for physical and spiritual development. It's a place where you're in community with people. You're on your own journey, but you're on a path with a teacher, with a community, with a sangha. It's about a holistic approach to human growth, being part of a tradition, moving toward virtue.
That word "virtue" is interesting. While discussing human muscles (curiosity, play, presence, etc.), we also struck upon the classical virtues—prudence, fortitude, justice, and others. Those aren't quite the same as the human muscles we're after, but they're downstream of this dojo metaphor.
Something else that's been coming up for me: each of us has a choice in how we relate to the digital world, how we relate to the environments that shape us, and how we choose to shape the environments that will subsequently shape us.
One pushback I've heard is that our digital environments are so omnipresent. The problems they create are so large at a systemic level that a tool like Lightpage isn't going to come sweeping in and save the day. It might be a small part of an interconnected web of solutions, but it's not going to solve system-level problems with the snap of a finger.
But at the end of the day, what Lightpage is really pushing back against is individual helplessness in the face of these large systems that are degrading our humanity. Because while they might be doing that at scale, every individual still has a choice in how they relate to their environments and what environments they create.
That's one of the core aspects of being human—we create tools, those tools allow us to shape our environments, and our environments then shape us. There's an intriguing recursive loop there. We can take on learned helplessness, or we can recognize that the defaults aren't serving us and start shaping our environments differently. We can choose to live a more human life, to step into the dojo day after day, and to strengthen those muscles that help us live just a little bit more humanly than if we accepted the default.
I think that's the heart of what we keep circling around—that choice matters. The choice to build those muscles.
One recurring theme through every conversation we've had is that relationships are at the heart of what it means to be human. Whether friendships, partnerships, or romantic relationships, they give our lives deep meaning and help us develop into better versions of ourselves.
So there's this interesting layer where if you think of Lightpage as a dojo for being more human, what it's actually doing is strengthening the muscles that allow us to be better at relationships—and relationships themselves are the real human dojo.
We don't want to build an AI that substitutes for human relationships. The AI is not your friend or romantic partner. It's there to serve you, guide you, help you strengthen those muscles, and set out the path for being a better embodied human in the real world—to be in relationship with yourself, with others, with everything you do in a way that's more open, grounded, curious, playful, and present.
Nothing enriches human life more than being part of an interdependent web of relationships.
So there's something profound here about this lifelong practice, this path of stepping further toward the best aspects of our humanity, little by little, in this metaphorical dojo. So that we can grow our capacity to be in relationship with each other. That's at the core of what Lightpage is after.
In the context of the manifesto we're writing, I don't know that the word "dojo" or "human muscles" will end up being the final language. But it's directionally very exciting for both of us because it feels true to what we're both trying to do as we develop ourselves.
I'll leave it there for now. Thanks for listening. Catch you in the next one, which may or may not also come in voice note fashion. Later, friends.
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