Your relationship with food has come to feel like an eternal battle between rigid self-control and shameful surrender, turning every meal into an anxious ordeal where you rarely enjoy yourself, let alone feel nourished.

This cycle isn't about food or weight, but your bone deep belief that the little kid in you who loves Big Macs cannot be trusted, and that unlike “normal people,” you've lost the right to eat without authoritarian vigilance over him.

Staying mired in this pattern robs you of one of the most basic human pleasures—the simple joy of eating—and disconnects you from yourself, the people you care about, and from life itself, meal after meal, year after year.

Your path to freedom isn't through tighter control, but radical gratitude, approaching each meal, even those "forbidden" foods, as a chance to practice presence, curiosity, and appreciation for all of the ingredients that found their way here.

Years of mistrust won't be undone in a day, and though the old patterns will likely pull you back into the darkness from time to time, choosing self-compassion in those moments will help you keep inching towards freedom.

No matter what, you can always begin again with your next meal, turning off the distractions, gazing at what's before you with wonder, and saying it with feeling. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

It’s not your life that’s exhausting you, bro. It’s your avoidance.

For years, you’ve believed that when you feel tired, drained, restless, anxious, irritable, you have to step back, recharge, do a bit of recreational numbing in the name of “self care.”

Funny how all that “rest” only ever leaves you feeling more anxious and empty than before, huh? Weird how it reliably leads to even more avoidance. This vicious cycle has kept you from making sustained progress on what matters for damn near a decade.

Let’s be real. Very little of the exhaustion you feel is physical tiredness. It’s perfectionism playing a dirty little trick. It’s fear in disguise. And it cackles with delight when you buy into its cover story.

Whenever you start taking bold steps towards the life, work, and relationships you want, part of you gets spooked. Your body goes into overdrive, chest clenching, energy zapped. It’s like there’s a lil boy in there who feels scared and broken and unworthy when you start making moves, so he pulls the fire alarm.

A year from now, you’ll look back on this chapter and know the truth. Doing your work, steadily and imperfectly, grows your energy. The more you do, the more you’ll be able to do, and the lighter you’ll feel. Your sense of self-respect will grow. You will come to cherish the gifts of physical tiredness and true rest, just as you’ll grow ever warier of fear’s many faces.

But to get there, you cannot blast through the exhaustion with brute force. You cannot berate and belittle that boy within into submission. That’s a fear response, too. Besides, we’ve tried that, over and over, for a decade. Down that path lays depressive burnout of the worst kind. In a war with yourself, you will always lose.

Nah, the real trick is neither to flee nor attack. Hold steady at your center. Breathe into the places that demand your attention. And if you encounter the lil fella, ask what’s got him so spooked. Listen to him. Really listen. I bet he’d be willing to move forward together, knowing you’re no longer an authoritarian bully who doles out punishment and shame, but a friend.

You’re doing a lot to grow into your life right now. You’re doing so many of the right things, all at once. It’s little wonder you’re feeling overwhelmed, frazzled, with every fiber of your body screaming to run and hide. But now you know better. This isn’t exhaustion. It’s an invitation.

Keep going. It’s time to lean in. You don’t have to figure out the full picture today. Take a few deep breaths, then take the next small step. Write the next imperfect sentence. Cathedrals are built just like anything else. One brick at a time.

How do you want to live today?

Not tomorrow. Not someday. Not when you’ve finally “figured it all out.”

Today.

This is our fundamental freedom as humans—the power to choose our response to life. To decide what matters, then act on it, here and now.

But the environments we’ve built keep us numb to this power.

Our digital worlds keep us scrolling, consuming, reacting. Stuck on the hamster wheels of information hoarding or endless introspection.

So many seductive substitutes for life, while the real thing slips away.

Lightpage is a living notebook.

A notebook for those who cherish the gift of being alive.

A private space where you can hear your own thoughts and instincts, away from the noisy feeds and sycophantic chatbots. A quiet refuge where you can think for yourself and decide what matters.

Write, dictate, or chat. Pour in your grocery list, your grief, your goals. Use it as a dream journal, to write cheesy love poems, try out new recipes, or think through a tricky project at work.

Anything related to your pursuit of living well belongs in Lightpage.

As you fill it, your notebook gets to know you. It comes alive, too.

Each morning, it surfaces art, quotes, essays—connecting you to the wisdom of others who’ve walked similar paths. And every Sunday, it sends you a personal letter reflecting on the ups and downs of the past week, and how you might live more fully in the week ahead.

You can chat with the AI in Lightpage any time. It knows when to encourage you, and when to push back.

This isn’t another tool to optimize you. There’s no quick fix, no dogma to follow.

Lightpage is not the answer. It’s a place to dance with the question.

How do you want to live today?

One hundred.

That's how many manifestos I will write.

Why? Because it’ll be fun. Because it scares me senseless. Because I’m on a mission from God. Because I’ve been hiding in a labyrinth of perfectionistic over-planning. Because for ten months I’ve been yap yap yapping about how I wanna be The Manifesto Guy™ while barely writing any actual new manifestos.

Come on, bro. It’s time to live the new story. Leap of faith, baby. It’s time to write.

One. Hundred. Manifestos.

This quest might take six months (unlikely), two years (very likely), or a goddamn decade (oh lord). I don't know. It’ll take as long it takes. All I know is that I’m in it now. This is my covenant, consecrated here before this court of my dearest parasocial internet comrades. But mostly I’m declaring this for me. I’d sign it in blood if I could.

One. Hundred. Fucking. Manifestos.

I will write the manifestos I need to read. Manifestos that grab me by the shoulder and shake me free of the seductive copes of modernity, that shatter the comforting lies I’ve clung to, that make me giggle like a schoolgirl and roar like a dragon. I will be patient zero for the idea that manifestos are magic spells that, when cast with earnest zeal and a sly smile, help us remember that we are gloriously human and powerful beyond measure.

ONEHUNDREDMANIFESTOS.JPEG

I will write manifestos for startups and founders who strive to stand tall in this sterile world of spineless, focus-grouped brand promises. So too will I write manifestos for those ideal clients who haven’t paid me cash money (YET). Along the way, I will write manifestos for friends, for her, and for the causes, communities, and cats I love. Hell, maybe even for my avowed enemies. I will be an equal opportunity manifesto artisan.

*whispering seditiously in your ear* psssssssst. one hundred manifestos

I will write teeny tiny tweet-length manifestos and overwrought novella-length manifestos. I will write manifestos that are dreadfully serious and manifestos that are utterly ridiculous (possibly in the span of a single paragraph). I will uncork the stew of manifesto energy that has long bubbled beneath my fears and insecurities and let it flow freely. I will write in fits of revolutionary ecstasy, and let my work go before I feel ready. I will ship ship ship. Even when it scares me. Especially when it scares me.

Let’s fucking go. The Era of Manifesto Rob is officially upon us.

ONE HUNDRED MANIFESTOOOOOOOOOOS!!!!

Rob Hardy
April 1st, 2025
Tucson, AZ 🌵

Dear Rob,

Four months ago, I set out to publish a manifesto about perfectionism. My goal was to write something bold, powerful, transformative. You can probably guess what happened next. All of my own perfectionistic patterns came out of the woodwork, derailing the process at every turn. The harder I tried to write something smart, something that would inspire others, the more the entire project felt fake, forced, fraudulent. In a fit of frustration, I tossed my overwrought first draft in the trash. I gave up.

Somewhere within me, a voice said softly, “Try writing yourself a letter. Tell yourself what you need to hear. Trust me.” The voice felt wise and warm. Even though its suggestion scared me, it felt like the most honest path forward. With nothing left to lose, I started writing the letter, every morning, by hand. The more I wrote, the more the voice returned with new suggestions, each one truer and more frightening than the last. I kept writing. Kept trusting. After a month of following these inner trails, I’ve arrived somewhere unexpectedly beautiful. A valley. A glacier. Two jagged peaks. A raging whitewater. A choice.

The last 18 months have been the most turbulent and painful of your life, Rob. You lost your business. You lost a job and community you cared about. You lost anything resembling financial stability. You lost your best friend. You lost your health, putting on nearly 60 pounds. And most painfully, you blew it with the love of your life. You met the woman you were supposed to marry, and after you tried and failed to get your shit together, multiple times, you lost her.

It's somewhat true to say the world has beaten you down this year. Life has thrown you some curveballs. But it's more true to say you've beaten yourself down. You’ve performed one magnificent act of self-sabotage after another. And now here you are, living in your mom's RV, your relationship with her in tatters, as you struggle each day to put the scattered pieces of your life together again. If this moment were a crime scene, it would have your fingerprints all over it.

This thing we call perfectionism has played a central role in your downfall. You’ve tied yourself in knots trying to manage how people perceive you, especially the women in your life. But that’s not the whole story. No, your patterns of self-sabotage run far deeper than your need to appear perfect. They stem from your addiction to control, and your incapacity to hold true to your humanity when confronted with your own powerlessness.

I have some wisdom I'd like to offer as you navigate beyond this dark wood. But I want you to know this is your wisdom, your story. It's been buried in you all along. My role is simply to help you remember what you've always known, at the source of it all, beneath the fears that led us here. You should also know this letter wouldn't exist without the wisdom below. In order to write this, I've weathered turbulent new storms, including a near-death experience and an eviction notice. Through it all, I’ve worked daily to stay grounded in everything you're about to read. It hasn’t been easy, and I haven't been perfect. Far from it. But I kept moving, kept trusting, and that's been enough to get this transmission to you.

So if you're reading this, Rob, please know that you've already succeeded. Whenever you lose faith in your ability to live wisely, sanely, joyously amidst turmoil and heartbreak, I want you to remember, remember, that you already have. Whenever you feel yourself backsliding into shame or escaping into grandiosity, I want you to remember that you've already proven that you can honor your humanity, even in the darkest of moments. This letter exists as a cathedral to your experience, your strength, your hope. You can always return to this place to remember the truth of who you are.

There's one last seed I'd like to plant before we embark on this journey together, a mantra I’ll be returning to again and again. You are not broken, and the world is thirsting for your gifts. I know you don't believe that statement right now, and that's okay. All I ask is that you keep your mind and heart open, and that you trust me, just as I trusted that inner voice, as we put one foot in front of the other, step by step, crossing the stream, as the valley opens wide before us.

II - Patagonia

Remember that school trip we took to Chile, junior year, and those 10 days spent hiking into the depths of Patagonia? For years, you’ve told people about the strange connection you felt to that place, and how you yearned to return. Let's revisit it together.

Remember how you crossed a stream, barely up to your shins, to enter that sprawling valley, green and lush. Remember the four days and nights you and your fellows followed the river flowing through that valley, imposing mountains and evergreen forest surrounding you on all sides. How you slept outside one night beneath a shimmering blanket of stars. Remember how you awoke early on the fifth morning, and hiked to your final destination, the source of the river, that grand old glacier, nestled between two striking, snow-capped peaks.

Remember how underwhelmed you felt upon your arrival here, how restless. It was literally just a giant chunk of ice? We hiked all this way for… this? Others in the group seemed to be having a nice time, but your attention was pulled towards those jagged peaks high above. You wanted so badly to climb them, to get an eagle-eyed view of this place, this valley. With an epic destination in sight, standing on this glacier felt like a consolation prize.

Remember how the guide called the group to gather around him at the spot where the glacier ended and the river began. The source of the sprawling web of life through that valley. He proceeded to give a speech—one that he'd clearly given many times—about the water flowing from this spot. He said this is the purest water on earth, frozen for thousands of years, untouched by the hands of man and machine. He then invited each of us to dip our bottles in and drink.

Remember how you hesitated. You’ve been told never to drink untreated water from the wilderness. All week you’ve been using iodine tablets to purify river water for drinking and cooking. You feel your anxiety and restlessness spike, and you look around to see your fellows feeling the same. The guide sees this too, and he laughs deeply and warmly, without any hint of condescension. "Don't worry you guys, it's safe," he says, as he dips his own bottle into the clear blue runoff and takes an enthusiastic swig. The group relaxes. So do you.

You grab your Nalgene and plunge it into the water. Upon taking the first sip, something shifts in you. Remember. You can feel this ice cold elixir moving down your whole body, bringing each tired cell back to life after the challenging morning hike. You drink more, practically chugging now. You've never tasted something so delicious, so pure. You feel restored, alive, present. As you fill your bottle for a second time, you notice that your restlessness is gone. You look around and you’re struck by how beautiful this glacier is, this moment, this group of fellows. You no longer feel the need to escape to higher ground, and you’re grateful to be here. The journey up the valley was worth it.

Deep in yourself, you sense this water wasn't merely glacial runoff, but the source of life itself. Remember. You smile, eat a chocolate chip cliff bar, and get ready to hike back to the previous night's camp site.

III - The Peaks

If self-sabotage were an Olympic sport, Rob, you and I would have a shelf overflowing with medals and trophies. How many times have we had the ball on the five yard line, having made significant progress towards what we desire, only to fumble, again and again, in the most predictable of ways. The binge eating and compulsive spending, the perfectionism and procrastination, the ways we habitually go into hiding. Against our better judgement, we dig holes for ourselves instead of moving forward, and leap in. Again and again. It's why you believe you're broken. You have ample historical evidence.

Remember that glacier, how restless you felt in its presence. Remember how you yearned for something grander, to escape this uncomfortable, mundane moment, to climb those peaks. Those summits were steep, icy, and clearly dangerous, yet they called to you, seductively validating the story lurking behind your restlessness. Staring up at those frosted fortresses, daydreaming about the view from above, you began to believe the only way to feel okay in life is to seek the highest ground, to take as much control as possible. You felt so small in that valley, so vulnerable, with its limited visibility. The unease in your chest grows stronger as you move closer to the glacier. Once there, in that frozen place, you feel possessed by an irrational and urgent need to flee.

Those two peaks are shame and grandiosity, and they beckon when you believe you're broken. When you abandon the glacier to climb the peak of shame, you assert control by confirming and reinforcing the story of your brokenness. You say “Yep, I'm broken all right. No doubt about it. Might as well double down. I don't have much power in this world, but I always have the power to degrade and destroy myself while having a bit of fun. Now I am going to assert that power, and prove my brokenness beyond a reasonable doubt.”

And boy, Rob, you and I sure have collected a number of effective tools for self-destruction over the years. The binge-eating, those inhuman portion sizes of fried food growing ever larger and more sickening by the year. The binge-spending, your bank accounts dwindling and credit cards swelling, much like your bloated belly. The days, weeks, months lost to binge-watching Netflix to feel “alive,” and binge-scrolling twitter to feel “connected,” all while knowing, deep down, that what you’re really doing is hiding from life. You don’t believe yourself worthy of genuine aliveness and connection, so instead you overwhelm your senses with cheap, mass-produced facsimiles, all to make your stay on shame mountain slightly more bearable.

It's a good thing we never got into alcohol or heroin or whatever, because chances are we would have perished up there on the peak of shame. That's what happens to everybody who sets up camp there, eventually, regardless of which tools they use to destroy themselves. If you keep climbing it, you will die, for it is the most inhospitable place on earth. When you believe you're unworthy of life, and set out every day to prove it, it's only a matter of time before life takes you at your word.

Then there's the peak of grandiosity. When you choose to climb this peak, you believe the same story as before—that you are broken. This time, however, instead of seeking to validate the story through self-destruction, you now declare, “Sure, I might be broken, but I can fix myself! I have the power to make myself perfect. In fact, I must make myself perfect, because that's the only way I'll ever be worthy of this life. If I fail, it will only confirm that I am irreparable and irredeemable. So I have to give this everything I’ve got.“

How many times have we announced to ourselves and the world that we are finally going to get our shit together—with food, money, fitness, business, creativity, relationships—before embarking on some wildly over-engineered program of self-improvement, where you chase the explicit goal of being impeccable in every domain of life, all at once. When you climb the peak of grandiosity, you get to LARP as God for a little bit. And boy, you feel so fucking powerful up there, like you've finally figured it all out. But then one day, you lose your footing and the facade of perfection comes crumbling down. Life slaps you in your all-too-human face and reminds you that you are not God, and that no matter how hard you try, you never will be.

When this inevitable realization snaps the spell of delusional grandeur, you reliably retreat right back to the peak of shame and resume your self-destructive proclivities. You wallow in despair for awhile, applying the balm of brokenness to your whole being, before beginning the cycle anew. In a few weeks, or months, you hit a deeper rock bottom, and then decide, once and for all, that you are going to rescue yourself by attempting to be God again. “Last time was just a test run,” you say to yourself, unconvincingly. "But this time—this time—I’m going to do it right.” So you begin another tenuous trek up the opposing cliffside, before slipping upon a loose, icy rock and tumbling back down. Again and again. So it goes.

It's become a rather predictable cycle, Rob, riding this pendulum from shame to grandiosity, from one extreme to another, back and forth, back and forth. Truthfully, you and I have both become bored of it. The seductive allure of either climb has worn thin through the years. Besides, there’s something in us that wants to live, truly live, and we both know there’s no life to be had up on either peak. For we have ample historical evidence of this, too. Remember. Yet we keep finding ourselves there. We keep fleeing and hiding out of habit, all while hoping, praying, that we'll one day find a new path forward. Tick tock.

IV - The Valley

Six weeks ago, several days before scrapping the initial draft of the Perfectionism Manifesto™, my body staged a coup against the status quo. It’s 6am on a Saturday morning, and I’m making coffee in the RV when my chest begins to tighten. It starts around my heart, like a hand reaching up from the depths and giving a good squeeze. Just a nibble at first, enough to get my attention. But over the next half hour it slowly, violently clenches. The tension spreads from my heart to my entire chest, then my neck, back, and shoulders, ending in my jaw. It dawns on me this might be a heart attack, and that my life could end today, at thirty three. Tick tock.

I ask Perplexity what to do in such a situation. If I’m going to perish from this earth, I’m not going to spend my final moments scrolling through SEO spam hell. “Get your ass to the emergency room, bro,” the AI chatbot chides. “And whatever you do, do not operate heavy machinery in this state.” Ugh. Fine.

I skulk over to the main house and ask my mom to drive me to the ER, my chest tensing tighter still as I sit in her dining room, waiting to leave. After an EKG and X-rays and bloodwork and a bevy of biomedical tests, we await the prognosis. My mom hovers anxiously around the hospital bed, eyeing the monitor with my vitals. It feels as if she’s searching for physiological evidence of why her adult son has become so defective this year. Why is he so broken? She makes a comment about how surprisingly healthy I seem. The doctor arrives as an act of mercy. “Your heart is fine,” he says, “but we’d like you to stick around for another hour just to be sure.”

You tell your mom she can go home and get some breakfast. When she leaves, you notice a bit of the turbulence in your chest leaves with her. You spend 90 minutes scrolling twitter before the doctor returns and, once again, gives you a clean bill of health. You ask him what the hell you just experienced, and he shrugs. Cool. You choose to walk home. After a string of unseasonably hot days, winter has arrived in Tucson, and you delight in the cool October air, the sun on your face. You’re grateful to be alive.

Upon returning to the RV, you make another cup of coffee. Your mother walks in, carrying with her the same heavy-handed energy of concern. Why is he so broken? You feel your chest clamping down again, and blunder out something inarticulate about how her presence is stressing you out, and you can’t have her around right now. She’s clearly hurt, but she leaves you alone. You two hardly speak for the next six weeks. But a badly drawn boundary can still be an effective one. In the weeks ahead, you realize what’s happened here. Your immune system has rejected the story of brokenness, and created an opening for something new to take root.

Between the peaks of shame and grandiosity lies the valley of humanity. Through the valley flows a river, nourishing all life there. Trace the river to its source and you will arrive at that great glacial mass—a lifetime of wounds layered atop each other and frozen in place. This, more than anything, is what binds humanity together. From the moment we're born, we each begin accruing wounds, which will shape us in ways we’ll never fully understand. Some wounds are tiny, leaving but a pockmark in the glacial landscape, while others are seismic, creating a crevasse that will swallow anyone who steps there. No human, no matter how sheltered or steadfastly safe, makes it out unscathed.

Somewhere along the way, Rob, we learned we were broken, and that love is conditional. We learned that our brokenness is no one's fault but our own. We learned that the only way back into the grace of belonging is through the assertion of control–over ourselves, and over how we’re perceived. We even learned that powerlessness itself is a source of shame. In school we were praised for our sharp writing and insight, those delicious little morsels of validation becoming a source of fuel for the life ahead. We honed our craft of coping with these wounds through the application of intellect, building the edifice of our life on a shaky foundation of sounding smart on the internet. We even learned the trick of speaking about our wounds from a safe distance, our perceived “vulnerability” sparking more fires of validation. Hell, we’re in danger of doing the same thing right now, in this very essay. Oh the lengths we’ll go, you and I, to never have to feel, truly feel, the pain locked away in that glacial mass.

Can you be with your wounds, Rob? Can you give them the gift of your presence, without compulsively fleeing or fixing? Can you stay in the valley? Take a deep breath.

This morning, as I chip away on the first draft of this letter, I'm not feeling great. My throat is scratchy. I didn't sleep well, on account of our cat being an asshole. There's a dull ache in my temple that won't subside. I don't feel as if I have any wisdom for you today. I feel small, inadequate, helpless. If I can’t write something smart, what’s the point? Sitting here on this faux leather couch in my mom’s RV, the peaks of brokenness beckon. The inner critic says I should just give up, maybe go get some McDonald’s, while the voice of grandiosity urges me to go read three books about Jungian individuation and personal mythology before returning to the page.

I sense these voices in my body, how uneasy they are with the imperfection of the present moment, and my powerlessness to fix it. But I resist their provocations. I take a deep breath, sinking further into the couch, into myself, into the heartrending piano of Max Richter's score from The Leftovers. I feel my feet on the ground, the sun on my face. Putting pen to page again, I write the next imperfect sentence. Then the next. I take a sip, and feel okay, if only for a brief moment. I realize this draft is a chaotic swirl of ideas, unpublishable in its current form. But the goal isn’t to get it right on the first try. The goal is to keep moving forward, keep trusting, sentence by imperfect sentence. For this is my initiation into valley life, and the only way I can fail is to choose hiding over progress.

Two weeks later, I’m back in the dojo of the valley as I edit this messy, sprawling draft. Each subsequent section I revise feels more unwieldy and overwhelming than the last, and I frequently consider chucking it all in the trash. But in rare moments, I marvel at the startling clarity and poetic precision of the words on the page. Remember. It renews my trust that there’s something transcendent here. So I take my chisel and chip away the cruft with care and patience, and I see more of its final form, slowly revealing itself. Sun on my face, feet on the ground, deep breath, revising one sentence at a time.

That’s how we’ve arrived here, Rob, at this cathedral to your spirit. Through trust and continued movement. Stone by sculpted stone. Tomorrow I’m sure I'll wake up and once again feel the impulse to flee this mess, this whole shameful season of life. But just as I’m learning to trust my inner voice, so too am I learning to trust future Rob. He will surely be tempted by those peaks, just as I have been. But I trust he will catch himself in a moment of clarity, and choose to stay present to his humanity for just one more minute, one more hour, one more day. I trust he can do it, because I am doing it right now. Take a deep breath.

I wish I could tell you, Rob, that the path of staying in the valley was easy and painless. But that hasn't been my experience. Dwelling in this place feels like a series of small deaths. For to be human is to be wounded, and to be wounded is to reside in a state of ambient grief for the parts of ourselves, so pure and full of hope, that were once betrayed and now lay frozen beneath the surface. There’s no avoiding pain or discomfort in this life. Any path you choose—whether peaks or valleys—will come with its own flavor of anguish. But you get to choose. Maybe it’s the only real choice we have. All I can offer is a reflection from my experience this year. When I choose the heartbreak of being human, life moves forward in tiny, imperfect ways, whereas when I choose the agony of avoidance, I get the brief thrill of control, all while life stalls and eventually calcifies.

In the years ahead, there are three things my heart desires above all else. To be a writer, a husband, and a father. In none of these domains is perfection possible, and in all of them, the only surefire way to fail is to believe that I'm broken and act accordingly. The day of the heart attack scare, my body closed the door on the latter option. Three days later, that inner voice invited me to start writing this letter. I see now that a power greater than myself has been guiding me down into the valley, up the river, and to the source. When I was afraid to stare my wounds in the face, it said “trust me, you’ll be okay.” And when I was afraid to drink, it said, “don’t worry, it’s safe.” The more present I become to my humanity and its limitations, the more grateful I feel to be here, in the mess, instead of up on those peaks. Tomorrow I’ll have to make the choice to stay grounded again. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. One day at a time.

The inner voice, however, has been suggesting something new of late. It says we can’t stay here on this glacier forever, communing with our wounds. Soon we must make the return journey home, back to the land of the living. It won’t be easy, the voice warns. Grab your raincoat.

V - The Return

As you hike back from the glacier, remember how the clouds start crowding out the sunny blue skies. A light drizzle begins as you arrive back at camp, then later that night, a downpour. You awake to the sound of pitter patter atop your tent, alerting you to the dreary day of hiking ahead. You don’t realize it yet, but these rains will not subside for the duration of your departure from the valley.

Remember how you trudged across that terrain whose ground had once been so firm, so supportive. But now each step requires three times the effort. Your foot sinks into the soft squishy grasslands, and you heave it forward with a muddy plopping sound. Left foot, right foot, left. One sludgy step at a time. Plip plop. Remember sitting around the fire at night, shivering, attempting to dry your socks and boots, only for them to be soaked through again five minutes into your hike the next morning. Remember how despondent you felt, how irritable, like this misery would never end.

Remember how you escaped into your head on those sullen slogs. How you directed your attention away from the landscape, away from your fellows, and gave it fully to your imagination. Remember how set you were on applying to the University of Denver's music conservatory. How you dreamed of a double major in jazz composition and music production. Oh how you delighted in this vision of becoming a guitar god with studio skills to match. Double trouble. Sure, jazz was still a foreign language to you, and you couldn’t read musical notation. Nor did you possess concrete plans to learn either. But those details didn’t matter as you conjured images of yourself shredding sophisticated bebop lines on an exquisite semi-hollow guitar you wished you could afford. You envisaged yourself behind a vast studio mixer, headphones around your neck, displaying the same technical prowess you’d seen from producers in documentaries about your favorite bands. Jazz virtuoso and studio wizard. A vision for the ages. This path is possible, even practical, if you apply yourself in the years ahead. But for today, its primary purpose is to help you escape.

Remember how, after three days of unrelentingly wet walks, you and your fellows arrive back at the stream. The one you’d initially crossed to enter the valley. What had once been a playful shin-deep romp is now a raging whitewater, waist or even chest deep in places. The sight of that ferocious threshold, standing so firm between you and the life ahead, snaps you awake. There’s no sleepwalking or daydreaming through this. Remember how the guide informs you that you’ll have to hold your backpack overhead as you cross, lest its buoyancy aid the rapids in sweeping you off your feet. You’re instructed to cross the river three at a time, with the strongest person upstream to break the current for those behind. It’s too dangerous to go alone, the guide says.

You cross the stream with two other boys, both named Will. A foot taller than either, you're the natural choice to lead. You want to lead. With your backpack and head held high, you wade in, water up to your knees, waist, chest. Remember how powerful you felt, that current working ceaselessly to knock you off center, while you stand resolute. Your biceps burn from holding thirty pounds awkwardly above, but your attention flows downward as you make one carefully considered, firmly placed footstep after another. Remember the visceral sense of aliveness as the three of you, lives bound together, the weight and responsibility of each step multiplied threefold, make the perilous passage back into the land of the living. The wild smiles on your faces as the water starts to recede. Remember. The sense of camaraderie, of accomplishment, as you and The Wills drop your packs on the other side and hug one another. Remember. You cheer on your fellows, trio by trio, as they cross the same threshold. That evening, as you all arrive back at basecamp—soaking, exhausted, laughing, happy—the rains stop. The stars come out again. Your socks dry completely around the fire that night.

Rob, you’re a gifted guy. Maybe that’s a weird thing to say in a letter to yourself that you’re publishing on the internet, but it’s true. Your ability to inquire inward, and articulate what you experience there, is a gift. So too are your vivid imagination, your ability to tell stories, and your heartfelt desire to make life better for all around you. When you get out of your head, and stop trying to manage or control the world beyond you, even your presence is a gift. When you’re at your best, not mired in a web of self-sabotage, these gifts flow naturally, like a river. Journeying to the source, drinking deeply, and returning to the world with dispatches from frontlines of your lived experience. That’s how you lead, how you inspire. Not by writing Flashy Manifestos™ with a bunch of smart-sounding jargon, but by going first, wading into uncertain waters, and softening the current for those who follow in your footsteps.

Like all gifts, however, yours come with a shadow side—those predictable patterns where they become self-defeating and inert. Like when you remove yourself from life to gaze inward, stuck in an endless solipsistic swirl. It’s a generational echo of how your mother eyed your vital signs in the emergency room, an anxious search for clues that might give you some semblance of control. Why is he so broken? You’re like an athlete who has a bad game, then gets way too obsessed with studying film, locking himself away in the dark, when he’d be better served by forgiving himself and getting back on the field. Likewise, when life gets hard, and the waters turbulent, you have the tendency to retreat into recesses of your mind, using the vividness of your imagination not as a source of fuel, but as form of cheap escapism. Whenever you do this, you become a ghost to the people around you, just as you were to your fellows on that soggy return journey, and just as you are to your mom right now. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

You never did become a jazz virtuoso, nor a studio wizard. That vision of the future forever remained a daydream, requiring more legwork, more tedium, than you were willing to endure. After two months of learning to read music and studying jazz theory, you got bored. It wasn’t sexy. It wasn’t fun. So you scrapped the plan to study music and pivoted to film. Nothing wrong with that, by the way. It was one of many stepping stones that brought us here. But it’s a pattern worth noting nonetheless.

Lately I’ve been catching myself daydreaming here in this RV. I’m imagining my new business taking off, with founders and startups hiring me left and right to write unreasonably spicy manifestos for them. And how delicious it would be if this business grew beyond me, beyond my lone-wolf paradigm, into a boutique agency of sorts, where I work alongside a handful of talented homies and we serve the largest, most ambitious startups in the world. Like before, this path is possible, even practical, if I apply myself in the years ahead. Step by step. Stone by sculpted stone. I can also use this vision to escape this season of life, this moment where everything has gone wrong. With rains pouring and resentments building, I can escape into fantasy, or I can stare reality in the face, then take one sludgy, imperfect step after another. The choice is mine. Take a deep breath.

On July 1st, 2024, I drive to an Episcopalian church on the east side of Tucson. I sit out in the parking lot for a solid dozen minutes, second-guessing myself, until I work up the gumption to walk into the annex building behind the chapel. In the center of the room are eight chairs, upholstered in rough red fabric, placed in a circle. This is my first ever meeting of Overeater’s Anonymous. The same inner voice that guided me towards writing this letter also led me here. Remember. I’m greeted warmly by a trio of elderly women, along with a middle-aged dude who will later become my sponsor. Earlier that week I’d gone off the rails with food, taken a brief trip up shame mountain, and found myself back in a familiar position. As I stare up at grandiosity, I know it is time for something new. Tick tock.

In that first meeting, and the many I attend in the months ahead, I’m struck by the candor of the shares. Here are people from backgrounds that could not be more different from mine, yet they can perfectly describe the topographical drama of my own inner landscape. These people know intimately the peaks of shame and grandiosity, the seductions of self-destruction and godliness. They detail their daily struggles, recount their rockiest rock bottoms, celebrate their small wins and steadiness amidst life’s choppy seas. Like me, these rooms contain ample historical evidence of brokenness. Yet there’s so much hope here. A joyful persistence pervades the atmosphere. And above all, there’s fellowship in these rooms. This is a place where our wounds, those frozen layers of pain, finally see the light of day, and where we experience genuine acceptance not in spite of our imperfections, but because of them.

At the end of the first meeting, we hold hands and recite the OA Promise: “I put my hand in yours, and together we can do what we could never do alone,” followed by an endearingly cheesy, “Keep coming back. It works if you work it, and you’re worth it!” There are hugs, large and warm, much as I embraced The Wills after crossing that raging whitewater. There’s no sleepwalking or daydreaming through this, Rob. It’s been raining hard for weeks, months, years. The most important task before you now is to return to the land of the living, and you can’t go it alone.

VI - Renewal

You are not broken, and the world is thirsting for your gifts.

Two days before Thanksgiving, as I’m writing the first draft of this essay, my mother marches into the RV unannounced. Outside of a few formalities, we’ve barely spoken in the month and a half since the heart attack scare. She hands me two pieces of paper, folded and creased, says "you’ve left me no choice," then walks away. It’s a letter. I read the first page, and it’s filled with one example after another of how broken I am, how I’ve destroyed my life by being financially irresponsible, and why I should be ashamed of both past and present Rob. Why is he so broken? Why won’t he let me fix him? It goes on to say, on the second page, that this living situation is no longer tenable. The letter ends with a formal eviction notice. I want you gone, she says.

As you read this letter, you feel your body bracing for the tsunami of shame that’s surely headed your way. You've spent years internalizing negative stories about yourself, accepting any and all evidence of your own brokenness, no matter how circumstantial or flimsy. And now you have it in writing—signed, sealed, delivered—from the very person whose love and approval you've always strived so diligently to be worthy of. Surely this wave will overtake you, and in the coming hours, days, weeks, you'll have to numb yourself into oblivion just to feel a spark of control. You have ample historical evidence. Take a deep breath.

To your surprise, the towering wave of shame never materializes. You feel steady, centered, and unambiguously okay. The seas are calm as you reflect on the many transgressions outlined in her letter. You acknowledge the blunders you’ve made and accept their consequences, while seeing clearly, for the first time, that your mistakes do not define you. You look back on the 46 days between the heart attack scare and this eviction notice, and you feel a sense of genuine self-respect. Though your mother assumes you’ve been holed up in her RV destroying yourself, you see that it’s been the exact opposite. You’ve been choosing, day by day, step by step, to dwell in the valley and build a life there.

You’ve been attending a 12-step meeting every single day. You’ve prayed, meditated, and talked to your sponsor daily. Instead of isolating yourself and hiding, you’ve been choosing connection and exposing your wounds to the light. You’ve been taking a walk every day, without headphones, to be present to yourself and the world around you. You’ve played a whole lot of pickleball. You’ve been working for a startup that hired you to write its whitepaper. Your finances are headed in the right direction, and both your physical and emotional health are sound. All the while you’ve been writing again, daily, after a year of creative stagnation. You’ve been trusting the inner voice, and penning a letter far more truthful than any Perfectionism Manifesto you could have conceived. One imperfect sentence at a time, you’ve been writing a new story of your life into being.

You are not broken, and the world is thirsting for your gifts.

On Thanksgiving Day, 2024, you complete the first handwritten draft of this letter. It feels oddly fitting that it should happen on this day. You send your mom a text saying that you’re grateful for all she’s given you, that you’ll be out of the RV by her deadline, and that you love her. She doesn’t respond, but that’s okay. Thanksgiving also happens to be day 60 of abstinence for you. 60 days without a single trip up shame mountain. You hold the shiny blue chip in your hands, and reflect on how grateful you are for this path of recovery, these fellows, and for every step and misstep that led to these 18 months of confusion and heartbreak. You’re genuinely grateful to be here, now, on this faux leather couch, sun on your face, pen in hand. A hummingbird flutters outside the window. You smile, and drink deeply from your bright blue Nalgene.

Rob, I won’t pretend to be some spiritually enlightened guru type over here. I’m still a fucking mess, and these last two months of valley dwelling have been a rainy slog. In years past, I would have suppressed or sidestepped the challenging emotions that accompany seasons like this. But now I have no choice but to feel everything, to face it head on. There’s anxiety, grief, anger, sadness, and heartbreak. In quantities I’ve never experienced before. Some days, it overwhelms me, and I’m lucky if I take a single step forward. On those days, I count it as a victory if I make it to bed without indulging in a bit of recreational self-destruction. But it’s getting easier to withstand these emotional torrents, and to stay grounded. It helps when I take a deep breath and remind myself that I don’t have to be perfect. I just have to take it one day at a time, and keep putting one foot in front of the other. Step by step, slowly.

I’ve been thinking a lot about water these last few weeks. The way it moves through the world—soft, pliable, yielding. Water never seeks approval or control, instead gracefully making its way around whatever stands firm in its path. Yet water is powerful beyond measure. Through its relentless flow, aided by time, it can turn mountains to sand. Water always flows from the heights of the heavens to the lowest depths of despair, nourishing all life it meets along the way. That is its nature, and perhaps mine, too. In my lowest season of life, the water has somehow, miraculously found its way to me. And now it feels like the most natural thing for me to flow around all obstacles, so that I may reach you with the same gift.

I have every reason to feel broken as I write this letter. But I don't. Mostly what I feel is a sense of serenity and acceptance. I am here, now. I am okay. Because I keep making the choice to be human. No matter what's happening in your life, Rob—no matter the turmoil, the confusion, the despair, and no matter the extent of your self-sabotage—I want you to remember that you are never more than one deep breath away from the truth. The water is safe to drink. Trust me.

In recovery meetings, we don’t share advice. Instead, we share our experience, our strength, our hope. I’ve tried my very best to do that here. The journey ahead will challenge you, Rob. But if you follow the river to its source, stay present and patient with your wounds, and keep making room in your heart for fellowship, then I have zero doubt you will be the writer, husband, father, and leader you were always meant to be.

Take a deep breath, and remember. Remember. You are not broken, and the world is thirsting for your gifts.

Rob Hardy
Thanksgiving Day, 2024
Tucson, AZ

dearest internet friend,

there is a grand conspiracy afoot. a subterranean struggle for the sovereignty of your spirit. the fate of human civilization hangs in the balance.

this is not a joke. (mostly)

the memes dominating our digital discourse are those of division, distrust, and despair. as the culture war chomps away at the social fabric, tribal nihilism is taking root in the soils of our collective consciousness. loneliness abounds, and helplessness hangs in the air.

but we're not here to wallow in the wreckage of our dawning dystopia. we refuse to join the chorus of calamity, the symphony of cynicism. because what you focus on, grows. darkness cannot drive out darkness. only light can do that.

that’s why we’ve spent years in our twitter laboratory incubating new memes. zestier memes. wickedly wholesome reality-bending memes of fierce friendliness and astronomical agency.

at our events and festivals, we transplant these memes from our heads into our hearts, from our screens into our souls. when embodied in community, these memes make magic, transporting us to the frontiers of life beyond the atomized confines of digital modernity.

as vibecampers return home, the memes will spread from their humble hosts into the wider world, where they will work miracles. for this is how we are planting seeds of the next golden age for humanity.

we are vibecamp, and these are the memes we live by:

DELIGHT IN THE DEPTH

in a world that flattens people into caricatures, we choose to marvel at the kaleidoscopic swirl of stories animating every human. we approach new interactions not with suspicion, but as an opportunity to revel in the exquisite subtlety and depth of whoever stands before us. and of course we extend this wholehearted wonder to the human in the mirror.

HONE YOUR REPLY GAME

unexpectedly intriguing conversation is the bedrock of our bliss. so we toss out the scripts and surrender to the spirit of improv. we “yes, and” our way into conversational jazz that none of us could play alone. we riff in the key of curiosity, tap our feet to the rhythm of rapport, and turn humdrum banter into a dance of mutual discovery.

EMBRACE EARNEST DISSENT

in the age of echo chambers, we champion the disagreeable misfits who sincerely stand up for themselves and their ideas. those who cut against the grain. vibecamp is a communal garden where earnest openness reigns supreme, and the overton window widens. so speak your truth, anon. just don’t be an ass, ok?

YOU CAN JUST DO THINGS

where others wait for permission, we acknowledge that trying something new is always on the table. you’ve got the green light to tinker around, try shit, and make things around you a wee bit better. whatever you want to see more of in your world, you can just start doing it. you can even start today!

LEARN, GROW, BUILD IN PUBLIC

we strive to push our projects forward with the garage door open. whether learning a new skill, creating art, or building a company, we strive to share our process and progress, our missteps and milestones. for this is how we attract allies and opportunities, and perhaps inspire passive onlookers into their own acts of agentic mischief.

MAKE FRIENDS, HAVE FUN, REPEAT

this is our central meme. our raison d’être. vibecamp exists to foster friendships and perpetuate play in a world that systemically squashes both. no matter what you’re striving towards—be it a quiet life of community, or a boisterous bout with the biggest problems of our time—a steadfast squad of heartfelt homies, paired with a playful disposition, will pave the way forward.

can you imagine a world where these memes animate your life, and the people around you? a world where depth is celebrated, play is prioritized, trust is assumed, agency is everywhere, and friendship is the foundation for our greater ambitions?

we don’t have to imagine it, because it already exists. vibecamp is a microcosm of this world, and we’re working, day by day, to broaden its borders well beyond our humble beginnings.

our invitation to you, dear reader, is to take the memes for a test drive. see how it feels to divert your attention from the digital dumpster fire, and focus on delightful conversation, earnest sharing, and friend making. pay attention to what stirs and wakes in you. savor it.

if you’re like us, you will soon feel called to live these memes more fiercely, in-person with your newfound internet homies.

in which case, we’ll see you at vibecamp. 🫡

There’s an essay making the rounds called The Age of Average. It’s worth your time to read it, but here’s the quick version.

Across our creative landscape, from media to fashion to architecture, there’s an inescapable, pervasive sense of averageness everywhere you look. And it seems to be accelerating. Creative works that inspire awe, and that speak to the depths of the human spirit, feel like an endangered species. It's so rare to spot them in the wild anymore. Instead, most everything we encounter is predictable, safe, sterile. Perhaps you’ve noticed it, too?

As writers, most of us are well aware of how the digital world pushes us to conform. For the past 10 years, centralized platforms and their algorithms have visibly rewarded writing that adheres to a narrow set of rules. We’re told that if we want to succeed, we have to write skimmable pieces with catchy headlines. We’re told we have to optimize for search engines and social media virality. We’re told to niche down, add value, and create a personal brand.

In the Age of Average, we’re led to believe writers get ahead not by caring about the subtleties of our craft or voice, but by transforming ourselves into industrialized assembly lines, so that we can churn out commodified work at scale.

It may not feel like it yet, but the Age of Average is nearing its climax. Generative AI will be the nail in the coffin. These new tools will produce average writing better, faster, cheaper. They will do it at a scale none of us can fathom. Soon our social feeds and search engines will be engulfed beneath a tidal wave of mechanistic mediocrity. It’ll be impossible to sift through it all. People will begin tuning out and retreating into quieter, safer corners of the internet, populated by the small handful of humans they trust.

In this fragmented digital landscape, the old playbooks for how to succeed on centralized platforms will stop working. Average writing will cease to spread, and producing it will no longer be profitable. In this new world, the only writing that will reliably cut through the noise, and reach people in their isolated corners of the internet, will be writing that’s thoughtfully crafted and unmistakably human.

To some, the word artisan feels antiquated, like an artifact of a bygone era. It brings to mind blacksmiths and butchers, sculptors and stonemasons, professions that seem to offer little guidance for our complex modern world. At Foster, we don’t believe in scrapping modernity for some naive, nostalgic return to the past. Instead, we believe the best way for writers to navigate an uncertain future and flourish—creatively, economically, and communally—is to combine modern tools with an artisanal approach.

We call this path The Artisan’s Way

Artisans root themselves in tradition, building on the great works that preceded them, yet aren’t afraid to innovate. They use the right tools for the job, including those on the cutting edge, yet don't allow trends or hype to cloud their vision or divert their path.

Artisans strive to produce singular work that could never emerge from anyone else, let alone a factory. They create work that’s durable, and that’s meant for humans to cherish. Artisanal writing, for instance, is worth revisiting again and again, because it gets deeper and richer with time.

Artisans don’t pander, telling people what they want to hear, but instead speak their truth and trust their taste. Artisans strive for mastery and sweat the details, but don’t chase perfection, because perfection is the domain of machines. In fact, like humans, it’s the small imperfections and inconsistencies that make a piece of work feel charming, captivating, alive.

Above all, artisans care about connection. Connection to themselves, to their craft, to their traditions, and to the places and people they serve. They don't treat themselves, their collaborators, or their customers as impersonal, economic units. Artisans understand that a creative life is a long game, and the only way to win such games is by honoring the humanity and dignity of everyone in the ecosystem.

In a world of atomization and disconnection, where the Age of Average surrounds us and dampens our spirit, we believe this approach is how we reverse the tides. We can choose the path of less, but better. We can reject the incentives nudging us to behave more like machines and factories. We can reclaim our humanity, approach our work as artisans, and focus not on shouting louder, but mattering more.

We can choose The Artisan's Way.

Rob.

You've spent the better part of a decade swinging back and forth between two soul-crushing beliefs about money: that you must be exceptional to be worthy of financial success, or that you have to abandon yourself and settle for mind-numbing drudgery to pay the bills.

Beneath this pattern lives a scared little boy who learned that love is conditional, that money equals worth, and that no matter how hard he tries, he's never enough.

The cost of staying stuck here isn't just a lifetime of financial fear and shame, but a betrayal of your deepest desire, which is to be a husband and dad who can be counted on to keep his family safe.

When you shift from "how can I prove I'm worthy" to "how can I use my gifts to serve others," you start a new conversation with money that leads somewhere beautiful: work that feels good, deeper connection with everyone in your life, and the kind of compounding security that money alone could never provide.

The path forward is messy and uneven—some days you'll serve effortlessly, others you'll spiral into perfectionistic unworthiness, and sometimes you'll have to do boring shit to pay the bills; it's all part of the journey.

You're building something magnificent here, but remember that you can only stack one brick at a time, and you do that by showing up with humility, gratitude, and the simple practice of asking "how can I help?"

1. because the calvary is not coming

2. because you are the calvary

3. because you’re done letting this dysfunctional world tell you how to live

4. because the stories we tell are self-fulfilling prophecies that create the world we inhabit and therefore it’s your responsibility to start telling a better story right this instant

5. because if you don’t, the terrorists will win

6. because the terrorists have won, and now someone needs to terrorize them a lil bit, as a treat

7. because re-inventing yourself is the only sensible strategy in a world that’s changing faster than any of us can comprehend

8. because you’re done playing small

9. because you’re exhausted from pretending to be more impressive than you actually are

10. because steve jobs was right when he said “everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you.”

11. because it beats whatever the hell is on netflix these days

12. because what got you here, won’t get you there

13. because deep down you know you’re a mythical being awaiting your next quest

14. because when they said the Eternal Tao that can be named is not the Eternal Tao, you were like “challenge accepted”

15. because you’re on a mission from God

16. because there’s a 0.0027% chance it’ll go more viral than mr. beast’s nonsense

17. because even if no other human reads it, you will be better for having written it

18. because the tech bros can’t keep getting away with this

19. because we can’t let the communists win

20. because capitalism has gone too far

21. because capitalism hasn’t gone far enough

22. because real technofeudalcommunoanarchism has never been tried

23. because you were forced to grow up too soon

24. because it’s time for you to grow up now

25. because you’ve been inspired by a handsome bald guy on the internet

26. because the old world is dying as the new world struggles to be born

27. because the old you is dying as the new you struggles to be born

28. because people like us do things like this

29. because you’ve spent years Healing Your Trauma™ and now realize that it’s mostly been a way to hide from life and your deepest desire is to start living again

30. because it'll piss off exactly the right people

31. because it’ll break the spell of complacency and piss you off

32. because you’re mad as hell and not going to take this anymore

33. because that tantalizing vision of the future has been stuck in your head for years, and writing it down and hitting publish starts making it REAL

34. because you’re ready to live the question instead of merely asking it

35. because your granpappy fought for your freedoms in [insert war here] and you’ve finally realized what a gift that actually was

36. because the default way you rage against tyranny is turning you into a tyrant yourself, and you refuse to allow that to happen

37. because you’re determined to prove your mother/father/high school guidance counselor wrong

38. because blaming your parents hasn’t been getting you anywhere and it’s time to forgive them and move the fuck on

39. because the seeds of the next great revolution will begin in a google doc passed around between friends

40. because you’ve got nothing to lose

41. because you’ve got everything to lose, yet the cost of not writing it is still higher

42. because you’re haunted by the stories of the world you inherited, and writing a manifesto is kinda like performing an exorcism

43. because you’re profoundly, utterly bored

44. because it’ll stir up vital, ancient energies that have lain dormant for far too long

45. because it will summon your arch nemesis

46. because you believe in giving yourself second and third and fourth chances

47. because you want your kid(s) to grow up with a model of what courage looks like

48. because cynicism is cowardice in disguise

49. because your worst sin is that you have betrayed yourself for nothing

50. because you want to respect the person staring back at you in the mirror

Hi friends!

So a bit of quick housekeeping.

I've officially split "manifesto musings" into its own Substack. All the writing here is going to riff and expand on this thesis.

1. the stories we tell about ourselves, others, and the world become self-fulfilling prophecies

2. too many of us are building lives, companies, futures in the quicksand of stories that no longer serve us

3. humanity’s most profound gift is not raw intelligence, but our capacity to dream, speak, and live new stories

4. writing a manifesto uproots old stories, and plants the seeds of new narratives that can bring us back to life

5. choosing to live into a new story, however imperfectly, is the most courageous thing a human can do

One of the ways I've been refining and living The Thesis™ for myself is writing micro-manifestos. Specifically, I've been attempting to write tiny six-sentence manifestos that actually move me. Which, as it turns out, is insanely difficult for a verbose fella like myself.

But I've written a handful now, and I'm genuinely excited about this format and potential of it. Feels super accessible, lower stakes, more enjoyable.

Here's the first six-sentence manifesto I wrote last month, about my lifelong struggle with food. This piece is simply entitled "Every meal is a miracle."

Your relationship with food has come to feel like an eternal battle between rigid self-control and shameful surrender, turning every meal into an anxious ordeal where you rarely enjoy yourself, let alone feel nourished.

This cycle isn't about food or weight, but your bone deep belief that the little kid in you who loves Big Macs cannot be trusted, and that unlike “normal people,” you've lost the right to eat without authoritarian vigilance over him.

Staying mired in this pattern robs you of one of the most basic human pleasures—the simple joy of eating—and disconnects you from yourself, the people you care about, and from life itself, meal after meal, year after year.

Your path to freedom isn't through tighter control, but radical gratitude, approaching each meal, even those "forbidden" foods, as a chance to practice presence, curiosity, and appreciation for all of the ingredients that found their way here.

Years of mistrust won't be undone in a day, and though the old patterns will likely pull you back into the darkness from time to time, choosing self-compassion in those moments will help you keep inching towards freedom.

No matter what, you can always begin again with your next meal, turning off the distractions, gazing at what's before you with wonder, and saying it with feeling. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I've been reading this every morning as a ritualized reminder, and saying something akin to grace at each meal, and it's been cool to watch a lot of old patterns of authoritarian control over food start to soften. Increasingly convinced that gratitude practice has legit healing powers.

Anyhow, that brings me to my main announcement. I'm teaching a pair of workshops over the next month to guide homies through the creation of their own six-sentence manifestos.

The first is next Friday, June 27th, at 3pm est. This one is about using micro manifestos to get unstuck in life. It'll help you declare independence from a pattern/circumstance that frustrates and stifles you. Whether you're feeling stuck with work5, relationships, health, spirituality, or anything else, this workshop will help you create a charge of emotional energy that unsticks you. Register here.

The second is on Tuesday, July 22nd at 6pm est, and it's part of my friend Christina Ducruet's Creativity x Fear event. For that one, we'll be using the six-sentence format to ditch the stories and insecurities that stifle our creative work, and step into a more fluid, free, enjoyable relationship with creativity. If that's your jam, you can either register for the entire six week experience, or just my workshop.

So yeah, that's all I got. Hope to see y'all at a workshop soon, and holler if you have any questions.

In November of 2022, Foster Collective began rebuilding its media strategy from scratch.

We had two goals in mind—become more adaptable in a turbulent world, and be the change we want to see in internet media. This essay lays out the more beautiful future we imagine for writers, along with our playbook for co-authoring that future.

Our plan is to break many of the rules that have come to define the status quo of digital media, and we want to be fully transparent about how we’re doing that and why. Although this strategy is custom-tailored for our organization, we believe most aspects of it can be adapted to suit solo creators, content marketers, and indie media companies.

So if any of this resonates, please feel free to borrow, remix, and adapt anything you see here. Then come join us out on the frontier.

The future we’re fighting for

We don’t know what the future holds for writers, or for organizations like ours. Nobody does. The media frontier stretches out before us—vast, uncertain, unknowable. But the thrilling thing about frontiers is that they’re malleable. Early explorers and expeditions always wield outsize influence on the new worlds built in their footsteps. As we enter this new era of media, each of us wields more power than ever to question the status quo, and model new paths forward.

With that in mind, we’ve woven a few core beliefs into our strategy, in the hope that they’ll help us nudge the media landscape in a healthier and more human direction.

We believe.

• The future of internet media is less, but better. Time and attention are precious, finite resources. How we spend them determines the quality of our lives. We believe media practitioners have a responsibility to treat time and attention as sacred, refusing to churn out commoditized filler content or algorithmic bait, and instead only ask for attention when we have something to say. Likewise, as generative AI fills the internet with unfathomable amounts of noise, we believe audiences will come to trust and cherish the creatives who most respect their time.

• The media economy of the future will disproportionately reward perspectives that AI can't replicate. For us, that means a shift towards writing that’s personal, honest, courageous. It’ll be less about projecting expertise and authority on generalized topics—something which AI increasingly excels at—and more about individuals weaving the threads of their own experience into stories that could otherwise never exist.

• The future of internet media will be fluidly collaborative. Individual expression is vital, but writers and creatives are capable of so much more, both artistically and economically, when working together and sharing resources. Emerging technologies will give us new tools and norms for collaborating, sharing in the economic upside, and maintaining our freedom from exploitative institutions and paradigms.

• The future of internet media will be pluralistic. Our current landscape floods our collective consciousness with simplistic, emotionally-addictive narratives that fuel division and distrust, while alienating us from the vibrant complexity and diversity of our world. We believe the future of internet media will break echo chambers by allowing competing and compelling perspectives to live alongside one another. When those perspectives originate from individual humans, instead of generalized caricatures, it will begin to break down the emotional barriers that keep us from seeing each other and working together towards a more beautiful world.

Whether or not these beliefs are objectively “true” is besides the point. This is the future we want for ourselves as writers. Everyone in the Foster Collective has endured years of frustration with the status quo of internet media. It's part of what brought us together. So we’ve decided to bake these beliefs into our strategy, and we will act as if they are true. Perhaps it’s naive. But it’s never the cynics who change the world for the better. It’s the dreamers and doers. The following playbook is for people, like us, who understand the optimistic path is the more challenging one, but choose it anyway.

Foster's self-renewing media strategy

Here's our new strategy in a nutshell. In 2023, we're shifting away from a traditional content marketing playbook, where we publish one essay per week about the craft or business of writing. And we’re pivoting to being a scrappy, self-renewing digital magazine that features personal perspectives across a diverse range of topics. We're breaking free from the insular "writing about writing" space, and betting big on showcasing the humanity of our writers.

The most important part of the strategy is that it’s cyclical and spacious. Every six to eight weeks, we will release one new edition. Each edition will center around a core theme that's alive for us, and will feature a handful of personal essays from writers within and beyond our collective. With every edition, we’ll be running experiments and trying things that excite us, and when a publication cycle comes to an end, we’ll have time to reflect, retool, and get ready to start anew. Every new edition is another opportunity to be the change we wish to see in digital media.

There are three counterintuitive principles that make this strategy ideal for the unknown frontiers that lie ahead:

• Publishing cyclically to maximize opportunity for experimentation and renewal

• Going niche-less to create media that’s vibrant, diverse, and unmistakably human

• Creating fluid playbooks to meet our changing needs amidst a shifting landscape

Following these guidelines, we plan to publish eight editions in 2023, and wrap up with a retrospective at the end of the year. But for now, here's the full story behind each of the three principles above.

Slow, cyclical publishing for ongoing renewal

As the world of media changes, our goal is to joyfully change alongside it. It’s far too easy to stay locked into rigid old strategies, either out of fear of change, or out of institutional inability to move quickly. Pivoting a media organization towards anything new or uncertain is no small task, especially when the existing structure disincentivizes change.

Back when we were publishing weekly, it always felt like running on a treadmill, with little time to catch our breath, let alone question our strategy or consider new experiments. We poured all of our collective energy into getting the next piece out the door. Then the next one, and the next, ad infinitum. Most of us come from content marketing backgrounds, so we’ve had the dogma that consistency is essential drilled into us. Yet when we prioritized weekly publishing above all else, it felt like we were trapped in a prison of our own making. We all yearned to be innovating and taking editorial risks, but the structure we’d built robbed us of the mental and emotional resources to do it.

The most radical thing about our new structure is that it gives us ample breathing room. Spaciousness is the secret ingredient. Every publication cycle comes with natural intervals for planning, intense work, reflection, and rest. Instead of forever jogging on the treadmill at a brisk pace, we now do intervals and sprints, while consistently checking in with our legs and vitals.

This cyclical structure creates the opportunity for ongoing reinvention, without throwing away the work we’ve done in the past. We’re viewing each edition as a standalone media asset, which we can keep using and repurposing even as our organization evolves. And evolve we will. Working cyclically will speed up our ability to run experiments and create iterative feedback loops based on real-world experience. It will allow us to orient everything we create around what feels most alive in the present moment. We’ve all experienced what it’s like to stay chained to an editorial strategy that feels stale and uninspired. But now, every six to eight weeks, we get another chance to try something new, courageous, or fun.

This structure lightens the emotional burden of change, and makes us feel safer in taking risks. And it creates a reliable rhythm, where we always have the opportunity to reorient towards what's most alive.

In week one of a new publication cycle, we’ll kick things off with an editorial meeting. We’ll ask, “What excites us right now? What could we experiment with? What’s something crazy enough that it might just work?” Then we get to go all-in on that direction for a few weeks. Because none of these changes are permanent, our ideas don’t always have to be perfectly safe, logical, or conform to what anyone else is doing. If an idea genuinely excites us, that’s reason enough to take it seriously for a month or two. This structure lightens the emotional burden of change, and makes us feel safer in taking risks. And it creates a reliable rhythm, where we always have the opportunity to reorient towards what's most alive.

In the final week of a cycle, after publication and promotion, we’ll run a debrief meeting where we’ll ask, “How did it go, and what did we learn? What signals is the world sending us? What surprised us? What could we try next time?" This is an opportunity to be honest with ourselves and each other. We will inevitably fall short of our lofty ideals and ambitions. Some of our experiments will fail completely. It’s important that we don’t sweep those instances under the rug, but instead study them and learn. For us, the thing we’re most afraid of is not failure or looking silly. We’re afraid of playing it too safe, and going back to the “best practices” that perpetuate the status quo. And so we’re committed to trying again and again, and learning as much as possible from every new experiment.

To sum it all up, we believe that slow, cyclical publishing opens up a world of adaptive possibility. Each cycle is an opportunity to experiment and take risks, And as we increase the number of ideas we try, we’ll increase the amount we learn about the emerging media frontier, which will help us adapt and thrive as an organization.

Going niche-less to create unmistakably human media

The prevailing wisdom is that to succeed in internet media, your work must be hyper-niche and specialized. It’s all about finding a singular, narrow market to serve, then adding as much specific value as possible. For years, this has been the most reliable strategy for earning attention in our competitive digital landscape. That recipe applies equally to solo creators, content marketers, and indie media companies. Niche down or perish, the story goes.

Since our founding in 2020, Foster has been operating in and around the “online writing” niche. It’s a media subculture largely catering to affluent knowledge workers, and the landscape is dotted by countless “how to” guides for aspiring writers. How to write authentically. How to get more email subscribers. How to choose the right newsletter platform. And so on. The "niche down and add value" strategy worked for us early on, and helped get us to where we are today. But truthfully, the space is now awash with content, much of it indistinguishable from the rest. And that was true even before generative AI entered the scene.

What happens when AI begins producing educational, value-adding content just as well, if not better, than humans can? What happens when the vast majority of internet subcultures are flooded with “authoritative” advice and generalized perspectives? What happens when following today’s best practices turns you into tomorrow’s commodity?

We've been sitting with these questions over the last few months, and the one ideal we always come back to is that Foster is an organization for humans, by humans. And humans, by our nature, are never just one thing. None of us can be defined by a niche we belong to, and our value doesn’t hinge on the practical perspectives we share. We all contain a multiplicity of identity and personality traits, and we’ve all experienced a life that is uniquely our own. What’s not commodified, and never will be, are those individual perspectives. AI is only as powerful as the datasets it’s trained on, and your unique experiences, perspectives, and stories don't live on a server. The only place they exist is within yourself.

As the world changes, we believe our greatest strength will be the full expression of the diverse perspectives drawn from our community. The Foster Collective has been populated by fascinating humans since day one, and now we want our media strategy to reflect that. We believe that by breaking away from "adding value" to a specific niche, we will begin to create unmistakably human writing. Writing that couldn’t ever come from a machine. And our bet is that over time, that media will begin to attract even more diverse writers into our community—people who we’d never reach by following the traditional niche playbook.

AI is only as powerful as the datasets it’s trained on. Your unique experiences, perspectives, and stories don't live on a server. The only place they exist is within yourself.

Our playbook for going niche-less has three ingredients. First, every new edition we publish will center around one theme, which we’ll choose based on suggestions and input from the community. In other words, we don’t know what the next seven editions will cover. Instead of enforcing an editorial agenda from the top-down, we’re creating a bottom-up emergent strategy that reflects what’s most important to the humans within our community. Second, once we’ve landed on a theme, we’ll put out a call for submissions, asking not for authoritative how-to content, but for personal perspectives and stories around that theme. And third, we’ll work to select pieces that feature differing perspectives, or that outright disagree with each other. Our goal isn’t to present simple, easily-digestible narratives. We don’t want to tell our readers what to think, but instead trust them to navigate the ambiguity and complexity of each theme for themselves.

Our bet is these ingredients—the theme, the perspectives, the tension—will make any given edition feel radically human compared to content produced by AI. When readers crack open a new edition, they’ll know they’re about to experience thoughtful, personal writing around a specific theme. They’ll also know it will be a bit messy and surprising. In a world overflowing with predictable, cookie-cutter media, we believe this combination of novelty, diversity, and humanity will become Foster’s greatest asset. We will lose out on the precision and safety of niche marketing in the short run. But in the long run, we trust this strategy will result in work we’re proud of, and help us attract more fascinating humans with stories to tell.

Creating fluid playbooks to navigate an uncertain world

As we were defining this strategy, we realized our goals as an organization are not static, and that we don’t always have to center our media operation around the same metrics. Our cyclical structure means we can optimize each edition around whatever’s most important for Foster right now. And as we run different plays for these editions, we’ll begin accumulating a library of playbooks that can help us flexibly navigate uncertain terrain.

Perhaps that sounds obvious, but it blew our minds. When we were publishing weekly, we ran the basic content marketing playbook we're all used to. We measured traffic, new email subscribers, and new customers for our writing assistance product. And sure, those are important metrics. But if that’s all our media team ever optimized for, edition after edition, we’d be doing a disservice to the complex, evolving organism that is Foster.

This insight landed right in our lap, like a gift from the media strategy gods. As we were brainstorming ideas for this first edition, Foster also raised a new round of funding. Prior to closing the round, our most important organizational goal was to become financially self-sustaining as quickly as possible. We had one year of runway, and needed our media efforts to generate immediate cashflow. In that context, optimizing for traffic, subscribers, and customers made perfect sense. But we’re not in that position anymore. Now we can channel our energy towards longer, more strategic games. And we can use each new edition to tackle different aspects of our long-term vision.

Our goal is to flourish in a future whose rules have not been written yet, and to help write those rules. That’s why we’re firm in our convictions, but ultimately optimizing for fluidity by collecting and testing multiple strategies.

At the beginning of a new publication cycle, during our editorial meeting, our core team will decide what’s most important for Foster right now. That may be acquiring new customers, attracting partnerships, promoting our seasons or retreats, recruiting contributors, expanding into new niches, experimenting with new monetization strategies, or simply having fun. Once we’ve come to consensus on a core focus for the edition, another set of questions emerges:

• Given our goal, who’s the best person to lead and edit this edition?

• What types of writing should we curate? Should we keep it internal and feature writers in the collective, or seek out guest contributors?

• What niches or subcultures should we target? Who does this media need to reach for this to be a success?

• What marketing and promotion strategies work best for this goal? How can we be precise in reaching the right people?

• How can we tailor our messaging and CTAs for this, so that next steps are abundantly clear to readers?

• Should we directly monetize this edition? If so, how? If not, what does success look like?

For example, in this current issue we decided to focus on attracting high-quality contributors—the writers and editors who populate our community and collectively edit the writing submitted via the Foster extension. Basically, we’re looking for a handful of ideologically-aligned homies who want to be part of our world for years to come. That’s why these essays feature our personal beliefs and stories so heavily. We’re trying to *find the others—*that small handful of writers who see the future the way we do, and who want to co-create it with us. And that’s why the only real CTA’s we’ve included here point people to the Foster contributor application, instead of our main product. It was a strategic choice, based on what we need right now.

You can see how a process like this, where we make bespoke editorial, marketing, collaboration, and monetization decisions for each edition, will lead us to trying lots of different tactics. Over time, we believe this will generate a collection of playbooks and tools that will help us be adaptable and fluid. In lean times, we’ll be able to run plays designed for immediate growth and revenue. In abundant times, we’ll optimize for experimentation and long-games. When we’re launching a new season or running a writer’s retreat, we’ll have playbooks for that. No matter what the world throws at us, we should be able to reach into our belt, and pull out the appropriate tools for the job right in front of us.

This requires more collective brainpower than executing on the same strategy with each new edition. And it may lead to friction and disagreement amongst our core team. But we’re convinced that any grand strategy we spin up today, no matter how perfect it may seem, will eventually become a liability when trying to navigate a world that’s changing as fast as ours. Our goal is to flourish in a future whose rules have not been written yet, and to help write those rules. That’s why we’re firm in our convictions, but ultimately optimizing for fluidity by collecting and testing multiple strategies. It’s like a set of Legos we can use to construct whatever we may need as we journey further onto the frontier.

An invitation to join us on the frontier

There’s plenty more we could say about this new strategy, specifically around how it’s allowing us to experiment with marketing and non-traditional leadership structures. And perhaps we’ll write about those in a future edition. But for now, these three ideas—spacious cyclicality, niche-less humanity, and fluid playbooks—are the most essential aspects of how we’re navigating the strange, uncertain new world in front of us.

Generative AI tech is here to stay, and it is going to change media and culture in ways none of us can predict or control. We're all living on the frontier now. But with this strategic foundation, we're confident that Foster will always be able to adapt, evolve, and thrive, no matter what may come. We also believe it will help us do our best work, lead by example, and leave the digital media landscape better than we found it.

If you're a writer or an editor who'd like to join us in co-creating a more beautiful media future, the best way to get involved is to join our contributor community. But for anyone else, we hope some of the ideas in this essay sparked something, and that you now feel more empowered to navigate the world to come.

Good luck out there on the frontier. And Godspeed.

-The Foster Media Team

For the last year, I've been weaving together a new philosophy of marketing, designed to radically reshape the emotional landscape of the internet. Like all marketing, it aims at finding and creating new customers, specifically for solo and creator-style businesses. But beneath the surface, non-coercive marketing is a trojan horse, designed to regenerate trust, connection, and empowerment in a world where all three are increasingly scarce.

This essay is a primer on the underlying principles and mechanics of non-coercive marketing. It's meant to be a high-level overview that contrasts traditional marketing with the non-coercive approach. I won't be getting into implementation details or examples here, but rest assured that's all coming soon. I've been integrating this into my business throughout 2022, and the early results are promising.

Much of this philosophy is built on the shoulders of giants. On the marketing side, I've been deeply influenced by Andrè Chaperon, Seth Godin, and Derek Sivers. On the emotional side, Joe Hudson's work has reshaped my inner world, and Charles Eisenstein has inspired me to think deeply about systemic problems, and to work towards a more beautiful future. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Michael Ashcroft, who first introduced me to non-coercion, and whose own business success started me down the path of unlearning everything I thought I knew about marketing. Without these folks, non-coercive marketing wouldn't exist.

However, other parts of the non-coercive marketing philosophy are new, experimental, and risky. I see it as a vast and wild frontier that we've only begun to explore. In other words, this approach is not for marketers seeking to maximize certainty, control, or comfort. Instead, it's for people who've never felt at home with traditional marketing, and who are tired of trying to force themselves to fit inside that mold. It's for people who are brave enough to venture out into the frontier, try things that might not work, and iterate towards a way of doing business that enriches our lives, our customers' lives, and that leaves the world better for future generations.

Make no mistake, that's what non-coercive marketing is aiming at. This isn't just a more ethical, feel-good way to sell shit. This isn't just slapping a friendlier coat of paint on traditional marketing. It's a radical rethink from first principles, meant to start the dominoes toppling towards a more beautiful future.

Giving the golden rule an upgrade

A few months back, I shared the origin story for non-coercive marketing. I stumbled into it by accident after working through some toxic emotional patterns in my relationship with food. Learning to trust myself in that context, and no longer using force against myself, created some surprising side effects. I began to notice the ways distrust and coercion lurk beneath the surface of the marketing world. It was there all along, but I was only able to see it once I started healing my relationship to self.

The key ingredient in non-coercive marketing is the golden rule. We should market to others the way we'd want to be marketed to ourselves. But, as I discovered in my own journey, when we're at war with ourselves, and when we treat ourselves in shitty, coercive ways, we often end up treating others that way without realizing it. Self coercion and distrust are the emotional water our society swims in, and our external world reflects that. Turns out, when your inner world is full of conflict, and when your actions are rooted in insecurity and distrust, the golden rule isn't worth a whole lot.

This is why I increasingly center my work around ideas like Deep Okayness. The more we turn our attention inward, and start unwinding the ways we're at war with ourselves, the more non-coercive marketing becomes natural and intuitive. It becomes second nature to treat others with the utmost dignity and respect, and to fully allow them to make their own decisions without manipulation or force. When you've made peace with yourself, the golden rule gets a whole lot more powerful.

Here's what I'm getting at. Without the inner work, the principles of non-coercive marketing might appeal to you intellectually, but they will be hard to implement, let alone maintain over the long term. The more turmoil resides within, the more it will find ways spill out into your external world. That's why I use the word "philosophy" to describe non-coercive marketing. It isn't just a set of strategies for building a business and finding customers. It's a seismic shift in how you relate to yourself and others, which will influence not just your business, but every facet of your existence. In other words, non-coercive marketing is a way of being. It's a philosophy for life.

The principles of non-coercive marketing

The non-coercive marketing philosophy is a living, evolving tapestry of ideas, which is why I've been so hesitant to share it. As I explore the frontier myself, I inevitably find new pieces of the puzzle, and new clues for how it all fits together. My understanding of non-coercive marketing is far clearer today than it was six months ago, and I'm sure it'll be clearer still six months from now.

But I've come to realize that keeping this all to myself, in hopes of perfecting it before release, is both a bit delusional, and a disservice to the cause. So I'm trying to get it out into the world, however imperfect and incomplete, so others can run with these ideas, and expand the edges of the map. The more people we have exploring the frontier, the faster our collective wisdom grows, and the faster the dominoes start toppling.

So for now, here's my best attempt at articulating the whole philosophy in one paragraph.

Non-coercive marketing places full authority and trust in people. It creates the conditions under which they can make empowered decisions for themselves, and do so in their own time. It doesn't seek to persuade, manipulate, or pester people into a decision that's already been made for them. It merely opens new doors, tells the truth about what's behind those doors, then surrenders the outcome, trusting that the right people will step through when they're ready. In that way, non-coercive marketing is a leap of faith, rooted in the idea that if you stop trying to control people, and encourage them to be their own authority, you can build positive sum relationships that lead to organic and mutually-enriching transactions. This relational shift is also at the heart of how we begin healing the emotional wounds lying beneath humanity's many problems.

That's obviously a bit of a word salad (lol sorry), so I'm going to break this out into nine underlying principles and directives, then explore each one in depth. Here are the principles.

1. Optimize for aligned, empowered customers

2. Surrender control, and embrace emergence

3. Cede authority

4. Treat people as ends, not means

5. Enough is enough

6. Play long games

7. Tell the truth, even when it's scary

8. Create invitations, not ultimatums

9. Trust fully and unconditionally

For each of these, I will share a few insights into the dark underbelly of traditional marketing, and then contrast it with how non-coercive marketing operates. Let's rumble.

Optimize for aligned, empowered customers

Traditional marketing's job is to create a steady stream of new customers. But it rarely, if ever, differentiates between types of customers, or the emotional states under which someone makes a purchase decision. Because traditional marketing doesn't make this distinction, it often focuses on quantity over quality. It seeks to create as many customers as possible, regardless of who they are or how you do it.

Non-coercive marketing is about creating customers who are both aligned and empowered. An aligned customer is someone who is delighted to have done business with you. It's likely they could have purchased something similar elsewhere, but because of their interactions with your marketing, they feel a sense of connection, resonance, or even belonging, and actively choose to transact with you instead of anyone else. An empowered customer is someone whose choice to transact comes not from insecurity, but from self-trust. In other words, it's a "fuck yes" decision for them, made from a place of wholeness.

When you optimize for both alignment and empowerment, you end up with the highest calibre of customers. People who take your work seriously, who tell their friends, who keep buying for years to come. In other words, non-coercive marketing is aimed at creating true, lifelong fans. If you're invested in the 1,000 True Fans model, as I am, non-coercive marketing is designed to create far stronger, deeper bonds than anything possible through traditional marketing.

Surrender control, and embrace emergence

Traditional marketing is about creating as much certainty as possible. It's about trying to make transactions happen in a reliable, systematic way, on your timeline. As a result, traditional marketing is replete with formulas and step-by-step systems. It's built on the idea that you can funnel humans through a specific set of steps to achieve your desired outcome. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that this can and does work if your goal is to create customers, instead of aligned and empowered ones.

Non-coercive marketing is rooted in an uncomfortable truth. Emotional connection, resonance, and trust—the ingredients for aligned, empowered customers—don’t follow a reliable formula. Each person who enters your world is a unique individual, with their own distinct emotional landscape, and at a different moment in their journey. A handful of people may be ready to make an empowered transaction with you in any given moment, but the vast majority will not be there yet, and there's no single path that will move them, as a group, to that place of empowerment. It will always be an individual journey.

Non-coercive marketing is about creating the conditions under which emotional connection and trust can happen in their own time, and their own way, with each individual. It's about creating a delightful world with many possible paths, and giving people the freedom to navigate it in the way that best suits them. In this model, when and how transactions occur is mostly out of our control. Instead, they are an emergent byproduct of a system that is far more complex and uncontrollable than we can imagine.

Cede authority

Traditional marketing is rooted in authoritarian tendencies. It's about setting the agenda from on high, and exercising as much control over people as possible. The company/marketer starts from the assumption that they are the ultimate authority in what’s best for "the market," then use all sorts of emotional tools to keep people on the “right” path. That’s what a funnel is. It's a series of steps designed to capture your attention, then keep you moving towards a decision that's been made for you. It's about persuading you to want whatever the company has decided you should want. Traditional marketing, in other words, tries to strip people of their agency, and their ability to make meaningful, well-considered decisions for themselves.

Non-coercive marketing starts from the position that trying to control people is unethical. Full stop. It also recognizes the vast complexity and diversity of humans, and the futility of believing you can ever have the right answers for anyone else. Lastly, it recognizes that operating from a belief that you're smarter, wiser, and more well-considered than others is self-defeating, because it reliably leads to disconnection and resentment.

Non-coercive marketing strives to empower people to be the utmost authority in their own lives, instead of constantly searching for an external authority to validate them. It's about trusting people to make the best decision for themselves, even if they choose a competitor, or they don't buy anything at all. In traditional marketing, any outcome besides a transaction with you is a failure. In non-coercive marketing, any empowered decision, or non-decision, is a success.

When you cede authority, and you trust people, it creates emotional ripples in the world around you. You begin to be seen as the most trustworthy option in said market. Even people who choose not to transact with you will feel warmly towards you, and generate word of mouth. And for the people who do choose to transact with you, they will do so from a truly empowered place. The transaction will be more meaningful to them, and lead to deeper, longer-term relationships.

Treat people as ends, not means

In traditional marketing, people are viewed as means to an end. They exist primarily as the fuel for transactions. This is most apparent in traditional marketing's obsession with data and optimization. When you're dealing with data, it's easy to depersonalize the marketing process, and treat people in ways that violate the golden rule. But it's easy to justify, because you have goals to reach and conversion rates to juice. After all, you're not dealing with people, but abstractions and numbers that are infinitely malleable.

In non-coercive marketing, we treat everyone who enters our world as an end unto themselves, even if they don't, and never will, transact with us. In other words, it's about recognizing that everyone is a unique individual with inherent uniqueness, agency, and worth, and then acting accordingly.

P.S. Here's some further reading on this rule.

Enough is enough

The ideology of modern businesses is that if you're not constantly growing, you're failing. If you’re not 10X-ing your revenue, your followers, your impact, you’re irrelevant and unworthy of being part of the conversation. In modern business, there is no such thing as enough. Infinite growth, at any cost, is sacred. (Mind you, this also happens to be the ideology of cancer.)

Traditional marketing is the foot soldier in the war for infinite growth. Its primary tool is weaponized insecurity, and convincing people they aren't enough as they are. It's an industrialized machine, churning out stories about how our emotional needs will finally be met once we have the perfect phone, car, house, vacation, business, productivity system, and on and on. But as any ardent consumer knows, believing these stories, and chasing enoughness through consumption, is the road to emptiness and despair.

Put simply, we live in a world where businesses are built on a foundation of "never enough." They fuel this never-ending hunger by convincing consumers they are "never enough." This is the emotional death spiral at the heart of modern capitalism.

Non-coercive marketing starts from the assumption that you, as the business owner and/or marketer, are already enough. It acknowledges that while growing businesses can be fun, challenging, and meaningful, it's not a requirement for wholeness or self-esteem. Oftentimes the most courageous, life-affirming choice you can make is to break free from mimetic expectations around growth, and choose to define enough for yourself, and actually enjoy it once you get there. That's the ultimate gangster move.

Non-coercive marketing also starts from the assumption that everyone you interact with, from business parters to potential customers, is enough. Sure, we all carry layers of pain, insecurity, and emotional baggage. It comes with being human. But beneath it all lays a center of inherent goodness and wholeness. As non-coercive marketers, we don't agitate insecurities or spin up new ones to make the sale. We strive to see the inherent enoughness of everyone, and speak directly to that part. That's at the core of how we enable empowered decisions—by speaking to people as if they are already enough, and giving them the time and space to start trusting that it's true.

Play long games

Traditional marketing is obsessed with short-term results and revenue. It's about hitting specific targets this month, or this quarter. It's about defining the numbers that matter, and getting those numbers up as quickly as possible. And because of the built-in expectations around infinite growth, traditional marketing is often characterized by lurching from one short-term campaign to another. Forever.

This is another area where traditional marketing's focus on data creates unintended negative consequences. Data is blind to the emotional states of individual people in your world. Even if your marketing efforts are working beneath the surface, and people are moving towards deeper trust and empowerment, it won't be reflected in an analytics dashboard. This often leads to reactive tactical changes that prioritize short-term revenue and growth at the expense of long-term relationships.

Non-coercive marketing recognizes that the vast majority of people who enter your world are not currently ready to transact with you from a trusting, empowered place. As such, it optimizes for long-term relationships and friendships. It's about building a world that people want to inhabit, and travel deeper into, over the long term. It's about being a constant and generous presence in your space, and in the lives of the people around you. And it's about making sure that when someone reaches the place of an empowered decision, whether 10 minutes from now or 10 months from now, they know exactly how to transact with you.

Tell the truth, even when it's scary

Traditional marketing is about saying what's necessary to make the sale. Often, this leads to omitting inconvenient facts, or bending the truth. Some common examples are over-promising and hype, wearing inauthentic masks, artificially inflating one's expertise and experience, creating false illusions of scarcity, etc. There are all sorts of reasons traditional marketing leaves people with buyer's remorse. But selling people a false bill of goods, even in subtle ways, is one of the worst culprits.

Non-coercive marketing is about radical honesty. It's about being courageous enough to say what's true, even if it's unpopular, unflattering, or dredges up insecurities. It's about leaning into full authenticity and openness, because that's how you stand out, find the others, and build deep relationships in a world where most marketing is inauthentic performance art.

That means telling the truth about who you are, where you come from, where you are in your journey, and what matters to you. If you’re not an expert, say so. If your beliefs differ from others in your space, say so. It means telling the truth about the products and services you’ve created, how they work, and why you made them. And it means being honest about who your work is for and not for, and what kinds of results people have achieved and might realistically achieve. And if you're uncertain, or you can't make a specific promise, it means telling the truth about that, too.

The goal of non-coercive marketing is to give everyone who enters your world all of the information they might need to make an empowered decision. No hiding. No inflating. No bullshitting. Just truth.

Create invitations, not ultimatums

Traditional marketing and sales are about making the sale now. If you've looked into the mechanics of creating “offers” and "sales messages” you know it's about pulling people’s emotional levers, and stacking the deck so much that it short-circuits their decision making faculties, and makes it hard not to say yes in the moment. Being on the receiving end of a well-calibrated offer feels like an ultimatum, where if you don't say yes, saying no will create ripples of pain through your life. Traditional marketers do this because it's all viewed as a zero sum game. If they don't get you across the finish line as quickly as possible, some other marketer might extract those precious resources in your wallet first. Can't have that, now can we?

Non-coercive marketing, by contrast, doesn't create emotional pressure, but actively seeks to relieve it. If what you're selling has some kind of time-bound component—live events, cohorts, etc—some pressure is inevitable. But otherwise, non-coercive marketing never puts you in a place where you have to make an emotional snap decision. Instead of offers and ultimatums, non-coercive marketing runs on invitations. An invitation is friendly, open-ended, and positive sum. It doesn’t try to persuade you to take an action that may not be right for you. It merely shows you a new door you can walk through, on your own time, if you genuinely want to. It’s saying “Here’s a thing I made, and here’s the truth about what it is. If you vibe with me, you can come join this party at any time. If you don’t, that’s cool too. I still respect you!”

Trust fully and unconditionally

Non-coercive marketing, above all else, is rooted in trust. That's the bottom line of this whole philosophy. In nearly every way, traditional marketing operates from a place of distrust, while non-coercive marketing always defaults to trust, even when it's scary.

Trust is an inherently vulnerable act, because it's about assuming the best from other people, and acting accordingly, even though we can never have enough information about anyone or their motives to feel fully safe. If there wasn't real potential for getting hurt, trust wouldn't be required. It's a leap of faith that allows this entire non-coercive system to work its emotional magic. When we put our full, unconditional trust in someone, that's what creates the feeling of empowerment. And that's what creates the conditions under which people become more trusting and trustworthy themselves. That's how we bridge the trust gap. By being brave enough to go first.

So trust yourself fully. Trust that you are enough, and that you will always be enough, no matter what happens with your business. Trust that the truths you tell about yourself, your products, and your business will reach into the world, and resonate with the right people enough that they want to become customers. Trust that if you show up and play the game from a place of joy and connection, the game will reward you with ever more joy and connection.

Trust others fully. Trust them to encounter your truth and be able to evaluate it for themselves. Trust them to make empowered decisions for themselves without an ounce of emotional coercion or manipulation. And trust that ditching the need to control and manage everything can indeed get you more of what you want in both your business, and your life.

That's non-coercive marketing in a nutshell. And I sincerely believe that, once it seeps into fabric of the internet. it will begin to change everything.

A quick note for those inspired to make the leap

Traditional marketing, as I've laid it out here, is a bit of a cartoon villain. Non-coercive marketing, by contrast, is a platonic ideal. But in truth, none of this is quite as binary or black and white as I’ve made it out to be. It’s more of a spectrum. Every marketing decision you make can be more trusting or less trusting. It can be more coercive or less. And therein lies the key to beginning to shift towards non-coercive marketing, if you feel called to explore this path with me.

It’s taken me the better part of two years to start unwinding my attachment to control, and start trusting myself and others. And I still have work to do there. So painting this as some overnight transformation would be a lie. But what I do know is that tiny changes, and tiny leaps of faith, add up over time. Every time you decide to trust a little bit more than you did yesterday contributes to a more beautiful future.

I

Navigating the modern internet feels like trudging through a hostile wasteland. The search and social algorithms, ostensibly designed to give us what we want, keep us trapped in the shallows, gorging on an endless supply of junk media that never quite satiates. Danger seems to lurk around every corner—with new grifts, scams, and hucksters sprouting up every minute. All the while, our emotional lives are under constant assault, as the outrage and despair of the culture wars seep into everything.

The modern internet overwhelms us, disheartens us, and distracts us from what matters most. But most alarming of all, it erodes our ability to trust—in others, in ourselves, in institutions, in humanity, and in the future. The scary thing about losing trust is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we suspect the worst, it creates a downward spiral, where we end up co-authoring the future we most fear.

This essay started out as something simple and lighthearted. It was meant to be an invitation to build a more nourishing internet together. And while it still is, I've realized the stakes are so much higher. With our world spiraling into a series of interrelated crises, the internet is our highest point of leverage. Networking together billions of people can be a blessing or a curse. It can compound our problems, making everything much worse, much faster, which appears to be our current path. But the internet can also reverse the tide. It can create the spark that heals individuals and communities, and it can be the conduit that allows those regenerative sparks to ripple through our reality.

It may not feel like it, but each of us gets to choose how we relate to this technology. We get to choose how we'll use it, each and every time we log on. Increasingly, I believe these are choices that matter. Not just for ourselves, but for building a more beautiful future.

II

I've found it helpful to think of the modern internet, and its pervasive hostility, as a Russian nesting doll.

On the outermost layer, you have the observable phenomena. The mountains of clickbait and spam. The raging culture wars. Scams as far as the eye can see. Open up the doll, and on the next layer you'll find a set of "best practices," or culturally agreed-upon rules for how to "win the game." Follow the best practices, and you'll learn to manipulate attention, hijack emotion, game the algorithm, and squeeze money out of everything. One layer beneath the best practices, you'll find a set of assumptions and stories about how the world works. A narrative tapestry of zero-sum thinking and survival of the fittest ideology. And at the core of it all, the innermost layer, is fear. That basest and most primal of emotions.

Each of these layers give us clues for how to better understand the internet, and start nudging it in healthier directions. We can observe the phenomena that rub us the wrong way, and get curious about where they come from. We can discover the best practices driving those phenomena, and experiment with subverting them. We can untangle the stories driving the best practices, and hold them up to sunlight to see through their plot holes. And most importantly, we can examine the emotions underlying our own internet behavior. Because when fear is in the driver's seat, it reinforces every other layer of the nesting doll. Only by pulling a weed at the root do you prevent it from growing right back.

The beautiful thing about the internet is that it's still a wild frontier. The physical frontiers of our world are largely mapped and tamed. But the digital frontier is endless, and it's always open to settlers seeking better ways forward. We are all free to venture forth, follow our curiosity and aliveness, direct our attention in new ways, and find the others. We are free to trust our intuition when it says "things can be so much better than this." And we are free, in every moment, to open up the nesting doll, and be the change we wish to see.

III

My favorite book title, by a long shot, is "The challenges we face as individuals and societies, and becoming who we need to be to face them." The book itself is solid. But the title alone resonates through every fiber of my being.

I think a lot about this puzzle of "becoming who we need to be," and what's required to evolve individually and collectively. The simplest ingredient I've found, and perhaps the most impactful one, is environment. The environments we inhabit matter a great deal. In ways both harmful or healing, our environments can shape our behavior, our beliefs, our emotional life. They can bring out the better angels of our nature, or lead us into the depths of hell. Whether physical or digital, our environments are integral to who we're becoming.

An oasis is a small patch of fertile ground in an otherwise inhospitable environment. It’s a refuge from a dangerous, untrustworthy world. A place where one can let down their defenses, nourish themselves, and rest. It's a place to connect with fellow travelers, and perhaps find a sense of camaraderie and belonging. Oases give us the breathing room to experience the fullness and richness of our humanity. In an oasis, we have the safety, space, and resources to begin blossoming into more fully realized versions of ourselves.

In the natural world, an oasis forms wherever abundant nourishment springs up from the depths of the earth. In the digital world, by contrast, an oasis forms whenever someone allows the abundant gifts of their soul to flow unimpeded by cynicism and fear. In other words, whenever you find an oasis in the wilds of the internet, it's the result of courageous choice. Someone peeled back the layers of the nesting doll, ventured out onto the digital frontier, and started living from their conviction that things can be better.

IV

The internet is already dotted with oases. They exist across niches and subcultures, and across platforms. Some oases are personal and non-commercial, while others are businesses. A digital oasis can look and feel like anything. It can be as simple as a one-page website, or as endlessly complex as a multi-layered, multi-player world. The unifying characteristics of oases—what binds them all together— is that they're authentic expressions of someone's humanity and creativity, and they treat internet visitors as cherished guests, rather than resources to be exploited.

A digital oasis creates the same feeling as its physical counterpart. We're all travelers, wearily making our way through the digital wasteland. When we stumble into an oasis, it feels unexpectedly safe and nourishing. In fact, it feels too good to be true at first. But the longer we stay, the more we realize this isn't a mirage. It's the real thing, and we yearn to spend more time here, because it makes us feel more alive than any other corner of the internet ever has. It makes us feel like maybe, just maybe, the internet isn't so bad after all.

I hope it's clear by now. I believe oases can make our digital lives richer and more nourishing. I believe oases can help us break free of the patterns and incentives making our internet toxic and maladaptive. Lastly, I believe a more delightful internet—where we spend our days in oases that nourish our better angels—can help us become who we need to be, both individually and collectively, to confront the complex problems of modernity.

For those of us who create, we owe it to ourselves, and to the world, to build our own oasis. To rediscover our aliveness, and allow it to flow into the digital world with generosity of spirit. We get to create the corner of the internet we've always wanted, both for ourselves and our homies. We have the power to build digital containers that shape us into the people we yearn to be.

And for those of us who consume, we can reclaim our attention, and our humanity, by directing it towards the oases that make us feel seen, connected, alive. We can starve the algorithmic attention economy beast of its nourishment, and slowly begin to change the culture, and the incentives, on which the modern internet operates. By redirecting our attention, and by supporting those who bravely subvert the status quo, we can effect bottom up change that, given enough time, totally transforms the digital landscape.

This website exists for the celebration and propagation of oases. It's a place where we can share our gratitude for the corners of the internet that nourish us, and a place where we can discover new sources of nourishment. It's a place where we take the evolution of the digital world back into our own hands.

A more beautiful internet is possible, and it all starts with the conscious choice to build oases and inhabit them.

Welcome to Oasis Builders.

Brothers. Sisters. Fellow Creators, Artists, & Media Professionals.

We are gathered here today, on this webpage, to discuss The Pattern. Once you see it, there is no unseeing it. But it is urgent that we open our eyes. Like a wildfire after years of drought, The Pattern is ripping through our digital commons, and seeping into the hearts and minds of humanity. The Pattern is stifling our creative potential. It is poisoning our culture. And it is standing in the way of our ability to live well and flourish.

In the chapters to come, I will share my understanding of what The Pattern is, along with the story of how I, Rob Hardy, became so intimately acquainted with it. I will also share how I believe we can turn the tides in this battle, and restore the creative soul of the internet. Let us begin.

Part 1: The Pattern Emerges

I first noticed The Pattern in the summer of 2014. At the time, I was writing for one of the internet’s largest filmmaking blogs, and making a good living with it.

Like all blogs of that era, the site made most of its money from advertising. As contracted writers, generating pageviews was our mandate. Not only did the site depend on our ability to drive traffic, but so did our paycheck. We only got paid if we got results. And we did that through two primary tools—aggregation and clickbait.

Turns out, the workday of a professional blogger has little to do with researching and writing original content, but instead scouring the internet for other people’s work. When we found something with traffic-generating potential—perhaps a slick video editing tutorial, or the announcement of a new camera—we’d write a little summary, maybe sprinkle in some opinion, give it a clickbait headline, then fire it off to our hundreds of thousands of facebook followers. Lather, rinse, repeat, multiple times a day, for years on end. That formula was a money-printing machine.

It was easy work, and good money. And my first year in the trenches was genuinely exhilarating. It all felt so new, and for the first time ever, I was getting paid to write about a topic I loved. But the longer I stayed in it, the more I began to notice The Pattern, and the more hopeless and cynical I became about my own creative prospects, and the media ecosystem around me.

In the summer of 2014, I found myself grappling with an unshakeable sense of boredom. After writing “7 unexpected lighting hacks to make your videos more cinematic” or "This new 6K camera will revolutionize cinematography" for the six hundredth time, I felt an intuitive desire to write things that were a bit more thoughtful and interesting. I wanted to go deeper into the craft of cinematography, and into the psychology of creativity. So I tried a few times. But the lesson I learned, again and again, was that thoughtful, long-form content rarely drives traffic as well as lazily-aggregated clickbait.

There was one instance where I spent a month working on a long-form written interview with a Hollywood film editor. I poured 25-30 hours into this thing, and I was so freaking proud of it. But then it flopped, of course. No one read it, and it made less money than something I could have churned out in an hour. So, despite my dissatisfaction with the status quo, eventually I stopped trying so hard. I stopped caring. Part of me was yearning to do better work, but I knew better than to heed the call. I had student loans to pay off, after all, and I knew how the sausage was made. So I stayed in that gig, churning out mediocrity, for another 18 months.

That’s the first important thing you should know about The Pattern. If we're not vigilant in our defense against it, it gradually turns us into cynics and nihilists—ignoring the voice within that knows we're capable of more. When you're living out of alignment with your values, you can feel it. But in a world controlled by The Pattern, it's easy to rationalize away that sense of discontent. When the economic incentives are stacked up against you, it’s easy to convince yourself nothing matters. But even if you ignore that inner voice, it never goes away. It's always there, poking and prodding, reminding you that you're off track, and that you have so much more to give.

There's something else I learned that summer. The Pattern isn’t just a personal phenomenon. It also plays out on a much, much wider scale.

Part 2: The Cancer Spreads

Just as The Pattern wore me down as a creator, so too did I come to despise it as a consumer.

In those early years, filmmaking was my singular passion. Film is a rich tapestry woven from other great art forms—theater, music, photography, writing—and I had an insatiable curiosity to untangle and understand it. I wanted to learn everything I could about visual storytelling. I wanted deeper insight into the people behind my favorite works. And I wanted to explore all the technical, nerdy details of this complex craft.

In theory, my job as a curator and aggregator should have given me a front row seat to all of that. After all, my paycheck hinged on my ability to hover over this corner of the internet like a ravenous hawk desperate to find its next meal. Nothing interesting or newsworthy could happen in the world of filmmaking without us pouncing on it. And for the first year I was in that gig, I gorged myself, drinking deeply from the firehose of information.

But in the summer of 2014, just as I was getting bored of my own creative work, I also found myself fed up with the space as a whole. Turns out, it wasn’t just our site playing cynical aggregation games—it was all of us. Once I saw The Pattern on our blog, I saw it everywhere. The entire ecosystem of filmmaking blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels was recycling news and churning out half-baked content at a remarkable pace. From my perch atop the ecosystem, I could watch a story break, then spread from one aggregator to the next, eventually blanketing our entire corner of the internet in a thick smog of mediocrity. It was truly something to behold.

Increasingly I found myself craving well-crafted, nourishing informational meals. But instead, all I could find was an abundance of mass-produced, nutritionally-void food-substance, fresh off a soulless assembly line. This is how I came to be totally disillusioned. Within the span of six months, The Pattern destroyed my own creative outlook, along with a corner of the internet I wanted so badly to love.

It's not just the filmmaking space, either. Perhaps you've noticed The Pattern play out in your favorite corners of the internet? I’m willing to bet you have. Like I said, once you see it, you can never unsee it.

I noticed it next in the world of indie film. Not with content about filmmaking, mind you. But in the films themselves. Turns out, after you've seen a couple dozen indie films, they all start blending together. They hew to the same genre conventions, use the same story structures, rely on the same aesthetic choices, and often feature the exact same actors in eerily similar roles. Even the trailers and posters—tools designed to differentiate a project and get people excited—blend together after awhile.

Seeing The Pattern play out in this arena broke my heart. The draw of indie filmmaking, in theory, is to be able to take risks and tell stories that Hollywood never could. This is where creativity and originality and resourcefulness are supposed to shine. And while that does occasionally happen, mostly it does not. Just like every other limb of the media corpus, the creative decisions in the indie film world are driven by a set of economic incentives, along with a culture of mimicry, status seeking, and insecurity. Mix these toxic ingredients up, and you're left with a predictable stew of conformist mediocrity.

And don't even get me started on YouTube. Over the last decade, I've lived through a number of phases, in which I’d hone in on a topic, then consume as much information as I could about it. There was a personal development phase. A marketing and online business phase. There were also phases for minimalism, jazz guitar, hockey, psychology, productivity, and politics (this is where The Pattern is at its most ugly and destructive, by the way). I've spent ungodly amounts of time watching videos on all the topics above, with YouTube’s Almighty Algorithm supposedly serving up the best of the best.

But with each new YouTube rabbit hole, after the initial novelty wore off, I’d start to notice all of the videos blending together. Patterns would emerge. Every YouTube Bro™ would start off enthusiastically telling me to “smash that like button and hit subscribe” before launching into something eerily indistinguishable from everything surrounding it. It began to feel like YouTubers were but puppets, reading from the same boring script handed down to them from on high. And in each instance, once I noticed The Pattern playing out again, I gave up on trying to find new information.

One of the places I tried to seek refuge was in books. But it turns out, much like the blogging industry, indie films, and YouTube, once you’ve read a handful of books on any given subject, you’ve read them all. Most every new non-fiction book is filled with the same cheap anecdotes and platitudes. They’re 20 pages of recycled generic advice, padded out by 200 pages of filler. And I've heard from friends in the fiction and literary worlds that The Pattern is just as prevalent in those books too.

I don’t know which corners of the internet I’ll be drawn to next. But I know The Pattern will be there waiting for me. And it fills me with dread. Can you also feel it? That nagging sense that there’s a cancer spreading through the internet? That sense that humanity’s greatest invention has been captured by mediocrity and bad incentives and cowardice? Can you feel the vastness of the potential being squandered?

Part 3: The Tyranny of Freedom

I've never been much of a new year's resolutions guy. But as the clock struck midnight and 2014 came to an end, I knew I needed an exit plan from the filmmaking blog. The money was great, but thanks to The Pattern, I was dead inside. So I resolved to escape.

Over the first few months of 2015, I started laying groundwork. I took a few courses on copywriting. I learned the nuts of bolts of freelancing. And most importantly, I started my own online business aimed at indie filmmakers. My plan was to use freelancing income to give me the time and space required to build something real, meaningful, and good. I was intent on breaking The Pattern, and finally doing work I could be proud of.

And just like that, I was on the path towards freedom. Or so I thought.

Back in those days, my understanding of The Pattern was still fairly limited. I pinned the blame on certain business models. More specifically, I thought advertising poisoned everything it touched, and inevitably led to bad incentives, along with a flood of mediocre media. So in my first business, I opted to monetize through products and services. In my case, I started creating online courses for filmmakers. And later on, I started coaching. In theory, that should have created the proper incentives to do thoughtful, long-form writing.

And indeed, in my first year running that business, I published a few pieces that I am still proud of to this day. But beneath the surface, an even sneakier, more pernicious variation of The Pattern was taking root and sinking its claws into me. Because it turns out, The Pattern has little to do with business models, and everything to do with our collective inability to grapple with insecurity, ambiguity, uncertainty, and fear.

In my case, I quickly learned that freelancing isn’t an easy or glamorous way to make a living. Feast or famine is the norm, especially for new freelancers. There are periods where it’s going great, you’ve got enough clients, and your bank account is full. There are also periods of near-destitution, where new clients are nowhere to be found and old ones won’t return your emails. I vacillated between these two extremes throughout 2016 and 2017, and I was constantly in a state of financial scarcity.

During those periods of financial insecurity, I started putting increasing amounts of pressure on my online business. It was no longer acceptable to take my time and play the long game with it. I needed it to pay off big, and as quickly as possible. This desire for short-term results led me directly into the arms of the Online Marketing Industrial Complex, and into a reincarnated zombie version of The Pattern.

If you’ve spent any time exploring the worlds of online business and marketing, you know the space is overflowing with gurus and hucksters promising to teach you the secrets of building a successful business. “Just follow my simple five-step formula,” they’ll tell you, “and you’ll be making six figures and sipping daiquiris on a tropical beach 90 days from now.” Or, in more subtle forms, they’ll say things like “Your business is not successful yet because you're not using...” and then they’ll fill in the blank with some flavor-of-the-month marketing tactic. Guest blogging. Facebook ads. Chatbots. High ticket sales. Evergreen launches. Email automation. And on and on and on.

I consider myself a fairly savvy guy, with a healthy dose of skepticism towards scammy nonsense that seems too good to be true. My mama didn’t raise no fool. But here’s the thing. When I’m in a state of financial insecurity, it’s like my brain gets hijacked. I go into survival mode, and start looking for anything—even deeply irrational things—that’ll make me feel safe, and like I'm in control. So in those early years of my business, when I was in a constant state of "not enough," I whipped out my overtaxed credit card more times than I care to admit.

Wasting money on courses is one thing. But I took what I learned in those courses, and injected it straight into my fledgling business. I followed the Best Practices. I ran the playbooks. I trusted the Experts. I started creating lead magnets, building funnels, writing long, pressure-filled sales pages. The writing on my blog became more focused on driving traffic, growing my list, and demonstrating that I, too, was an Expert. None of it felt particularly aligned with how I wanted to show up in the world. In fact, a lot of it felt kind of scummy. But the clock was ticking. I had bills to pay. And I wanted to reach my desired state of financial freedom sooner rather than later.

None of these Best Practices worked half as well as promised, nor as quickly. But I'm stubborn as hell, and I kept at it. And after three years, I didn't need freelancing anymore. My little business covered all of my living expenses. I was ostensibly "free." But, much in the same way the luster of the filmmaking blog had worn off after the first year, so too was I disillusioned with the business I’d built. Sure, I was making an okay living, but I was fucking miserable. I’d gone all-in on the things I was supposed to do—adding value, building funnels, launching courses, the whole nine yards. And it all left me feeling empty, deflated, uninspired.

And I’m not the only one.

Over the last two years, I've met so many creators—including outwardly successful ones making a great living—who are unhappy, and who feel trapped. They joined the creator economy to pursue a life of freedom and creativity and connection. So they followed all the rules and Best Practices. They did everything right, yet still ended up constructing a prison for themselves, just as soul-crushing as any day job that preceded it.

Many of us try to escape The Pattern, only to end up right back in its grips.

Part 3.5: An Explanatory Interlude

So far, I’ve been coy about what The Pattern is. And frankly, that's because it's not just one thing. It's a complex emergent phenomenon, driven by the interplay of several ingredients. Here are a few of the big ones.

1. An environment of irresistible short-term incentives that blind us to long term possibility. As humans, we're evolutionarily wired to prioritize short-term gain. Hunter gatherers had no use for five-year plans, and those instincts are still within us. Combine that with our current economic system, ad-driven business models, and algorithmic social media platforms, all of which visibly reward cynical short-term games, and you've got the perfect recipe to get lots of people prioritizing what's easy, quick, and shallow. There's so much opportunity waiting for the people who do deep, meaningful work, and who play long games. But our wiring and our current environment make it very difficult to see those possibilities, and trust them.

2. Mimetic desire and rivalry. This is yet another thing that's baked into human nature. Put simply, we want what we perceive others to want. We look around, find the people who appear to be successful and high status, then start playing the same games as them. Often, this happens intuitively, or even subconsciously. If you’ve ever wondered why so much of the creator economy looks like a pyramid scheme—with course creators who teach other creators how to sell courses to creators who eventually sell their own courses on course creation to other unsuspecting creators—mimesis is at the heart of the matter.

3. Our innate psychological needs around safety, certainty, and control. Creative work and entrepreneurship are, by nature, uncertain. They're also intimately tied to our sense of self-worth, so the danger we perceive isn’t just financial, but existential. Beyond that, safety is a core need for all of us. We crave certainty, and love feeling like we're in control. So when crafty marketers offer those feelings to us on a silver platter, most of us, myself included, jump at the opportunity. It eases the tension building up in our head, and makes us feel like we've found a cheat code. But in reality, all we've really found is a fast track back into the arms of The Pattern.

Put more directly, The Pattern is partly about the systems we live in, partly about our innate drive to fit in, compete, and seek status, and partly about wanting to feel secure in an increasingly complex, chaotic world.

I’m not naive. The Pattern is extraordinarily fucking powerful. It follows us wherever we go because, in fact, it's a reflection of the human condition itself. In Jungian terms, The Pattern is an extension of our shadow—those darker parts of ourselves that we shove away and try to ignore. But we can't escape it because it's part of who we are. Beyond that, we can't change our economic systems overnight. We can't change our biological makeup. And we can't reorganize our psyche at the snap of a finger. Breaking The Pattern is an uphill battle, and perhaps even a quixotic one.

Despite all of that. I believe we can win. In fact, I believe we will win.

Part 4: How We Win

The Covid lockdowns were my wakeup call.

By that point, I was making a decent living with Filmmaker Freedom. In 2019, the business pulled in $55k, and had I kept going in 2020, it likely would have done more. Sure, I could sense I wasn’t happy or fulfilled, but when I was caught up in the day-to-day frenzy of running the business, it was easy to ignore those signals and rationalize them away. "I'll be happy when I'm finally making six-figures a year with my business," I told myself.

In retrospect, those first two months of lockdown turned out to be a precious gift. I was too shaken and anxious to work on my business, and I couldn't go anywhere. Given that space to step back and reflect, I came face to face with just how miserable I was. I saw clearly how I’d been living out of alignment with my values. I could no longer lie to myself. If I stayed on this path, it would keep eating away at my spirit, and I would end up on my deathbed, full of regrets.

That’s a test I’ve started using a lot in the last two years. When I encounter some new decision, or some fork in the road, I ask myself, “Will I regret having done this, or not having done this, as I’m laying on my deathbed?” It’s a bit morbid and uncomfortable, but damn is it clarifying. Because it always points me in the direction my soul yearns to go, and it undermines the stories my intellect has spun up for why I’m not allowed to travel there. For the last two years, every time I’ve run the deathbed test, it’s pointed me in the same direction. There's no denying it anymore. If I don’t do everything in my power to break The Pattern in my own work, and help others do the same, I will end up on my deathbed, overcome with regret. And I find that unacceptable.

So let's get to the heart of the matter.

If I've done my job correctly, you see The Pattern now. You’ve probably felt it for years. But now you see it. Like really see it. Chances are, you will never be able to unsee it, either. I certainly haven’t. And with this newfound sense of awareness, you get to make a choice. Will you flow with The Pattern, or will you attempt to break it? Please know there’s no shame in declaring “this is not my work,” then spending your days on something else. We all have but one life, and if you don’t feel called to fight this battle, I hope you find another one that lights you up.

But if you’ve made it this far down the page, I suspect you feel what I feel. Your intellect sees the ways the status quo is broken, and your heart, despite not having all the answers, knows a more beautiful world is possible. And most importantly, I’m willing to bet you have a sense that you are capable of so much more—in your creative work, your business, and everywhere else. If that’s the case for you, I’d like to invite you to fight alongside me. That starts with making the decision—right here, right now—to commit to the messy, uncertain, long-term work of breaking The Pattern.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t have all the answers for how we beat this thing. Like I said, it’s a complex phenomenon that always defies easy answers. But that’s why this place, Ungated, exists. My work here is to thoroughly explore the question of how we break The Pattern, do creative work we’re proud of, and live meaningful, flourishing lives in the brief flash of consciousness we’re gifted as we float along on this space rock. Ever since I founded Ungated in those first precious months after the pandemic, I’ve been in exploration mode. I’ve been running lots of random experiments in creativity and marketing. And though there’s still a great deal I don’t know, there are a few pieces of the puzzle that have fallen into place for me. It finally feels like I’m starting to break The Pattern in my own life, and I’d like to share what I’ve learned.

First things first. We need to accept that The Pattern originates within, then act accordingly. We can delude ourselves into thinking this is just about external factors like capitalistic systems, business models, and incentives. But I believe the real work of breaking The Pattern begins by understanding our inner world, then doing the messy work of healing the wounds we find there. My suspicion is that getting ourselves to a place of Deep Okayness is far and away the most important work in this fight. When we know, deep in our bones, that we are enough exactly as we are, and that we’ll be okay no matter what the world throws at us, we lay the strongest foundation possible for the journey ahead. The Pattern nourishes itself on our fears and insecurities. The Pattern runs on uncertainty and self-doubt. So let's strike at the root, and take away its primary fuel source.

From there, actively choose to subvert The Pattern in the external world, in ways both large and small. That means tossing aside the formulas and Best Practices, and striving to produce creative work no one else but you could. It means choosing to play long, infinite games with your marketing and business. It means making friends and building positive sum relationships. It means trusting your intuition, telling the truth, and trusting others. It means walking your own path, even when it's uncomfortable or unpopular. But most of all, it means doing whatever it takes to nourish that inner voice, and keep your creative spark alive. If there's one thing I know, it's that putting pressure on your creativity to pay the bills immediately is a surefire recipe for summoning The Pattern. Don't fall into that trap like I did. Get a day job if you have to. Just take your time, and keep the spark alive.

Third, we must find the others. This, I believe, is the most important step we can take for effecting change in the external world. Be courageous enough to shout your authentic creative work into the void, knowing that it won't connect with many people, but it will connect, and it will matter, to the right people. If there's anything that breaks The Pattern, it's finding your true fans, and knowing that your work actually matters to someone. The more you feel just how nourishing that is, the harder it gets to return to a life of pumping generic content into the belly of the algorithmic beast in hopes of getting a few likes or shares. Once you've tasted the real thing, there is no going back. It's the same for your fans as well. They're starving for meaningful creativity in a world full of junk, and they'll never be able to look at the cheap stuff the same way again once they've tasted of the real thing. Get enough creators working in diverse niches making sure their audiences are fed up with the cheap shit, and all the sudden the incentives of the entire internet will begin to shift, and producing good, original work will become a dominant cultural norm.

In addition to finding your true fans, we must also find and connect with other creators who are playing the same game. Fighting The Pattern alone is a recipe for burnout and disaffection. It’s too heavy a burden for one person to carry. As the old proverb goes, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. This is how we cultivate shared knowledge, encourage and lift each other up during hard times, and develop scenius—or communal genius. The Pattern is an unwieldy, multifaceted beast. But if you get hundreds, even thousands, of creators working together on becoming a smarter and more capable foe, it's only a matter of time before we defeat this fucking thing. This, by the way, is why the Ungated Collective exists.

Finally, we must keep going. Many of our efforts to combat The Pattern will fall short. We may even have entire seasons of life where The Pattern gets the best of us. In fact, we should probably expect that it will, and extend to ourselves grace, compassion, and patience. For as long as the inner spark stays lit, there is hope, and you will live to fight another day.

One of my deepest held beliefs is that creativity, in its many forms, is humanity’s greatest gift, and our most potent source of strength. We’re at our best both individually and as a species when we’re creatively and courageously confronting the world in front of us. The Pattern is the greatest threat to creativity in all its forms. And it's going to take every ounce of courage we can muster if we're to defeat it, and restore the soul of the internet.

As for how my story ends, I don’t know. Like yours, my story is still being written. All I know is that I’m choosing a life in opposition to The Pattern. I’m choosing to take the harder, more uncertain path. And I sincerely hope you’ll join me.

-Rob Hardy

P.S. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk 😁

• The filmpreneur doesn't try to compete with Hollywood. He knows it's a fool's errand.

• The filmpreneur understands that when you make films for everybody, you reach few, and delight no one. So she niches down and focuses on serving a core group of like-minded people.

• The filmpreneur strives every day to make work that fits his niche like a glove. He knows that unless his work is different in a way that’s meaningful to his people, it’ll just be another commodity in a world drowning in commodities.

• The filmpreneur practices self-awareness. He understands that self-knowledge is often the key to understanding others, and that understanding others is the key to being a successful artist and businessperson.

• The filmpreneur knows how to put himself in the mind of his audience. He's genuinely empathetic towards them, because in truth, he's one of them.

• The filmpreneur doesn’t wait around for funding, or resources, or anything. She's relentlessly resourceful, and when there seems to be no way forward, she makes a way through sheer force of will.

• The filmpreneur knows that lacking resources can be an advantage. Nothing breeds true creativity like constraints.

• The filmpreneur realizes that if he's looking for funding, but doesn't get it, he hasn't succeeded in making himself "fundable." So he gets back to work.

• The filmpreneur isn't interested in awards, glamour, or status games. She knows that the relentless pursuit of these things distracts from the work that matters.

• The filmpreneur builds his life and career for maximum stability and leverage. He does this through creating true fans and owning his relationship with them.

• The filmpreneur delights at the irony that the more successful she is independently, the more doors will open in the industry.

• The filmpreneur understands that great work is invisible without great marketing. So she doubles down on being an exceptional marketer.

• The filmpreneur knows that marketing is no longer about repeatedly interrupting potential fans, but instead about earning their attention, delighting them, and building trust. It’s not about who arrives, but who stays.

• Though the filmpreneur optimizes his marketing around relationships, he still uses the principles of direct response to build a measurable, scalable business.

• The filmpreneur pays attention to trends, but builds their business around timeless fundamentals that never change.

• The filmpreneur never spams, scams, tricks, deceives, or bamboozles his audience. He follows the golden rule, and treats them how he wants to be treated.

• The filmpreneur knows exactly what she wants out of life, and is unfazed when that vision doesn’t align with cultural expectations.

• The filmpreneur has a strong set of core values, and leans on those values to make important creative and business decisions.

• The filmpreneur plays the long game. He doesn’t think in terms of one-off projects. Instead, he opts to consciously build a business that will still be thriving in 30 years.

• The filmpreneur is patient. In a world dominated by instant gratification and “get rich quick” thinking, the filmpreneur knows what they’re trying to build, and makes progress day by day.

• The filmpreneur has learned to love the art of business. She understands that at its core, running a business is about finding creative and generous ways to serve people.

• That said, the filmpreneur is still an artist at heart. Forever and always.

• The filmpreneur strives to build wealth. She understands that long term financial abundance is the key that unlocks a lifetime of bold creative exploration. Wealth isn’t an end in itself, but a tool. It gives her the freedom to align her time with her values.

• The filmpreneur understands that money is a natural byproduct of serving your niche well.

• The filmpreneur creates diverse revenue streams, both inside his business and outside.

• The filmpreneur makes art that stands the test of time. She wants her work to matter just as much in 20 years as it does now.

• As a storyteller, the filmpreneur creates worlds so irresistible that people in his niche can’t help but visit often and tell their friends.

• The filmpreneur does everything in her power to create and own valuable intellectual property. She is a relentless builder of assets.

• The filmpreneur understands that IP can grow even more valuable with age, so he builds systems to continually profit from those assets, even if they're decades old.

• The filmpreneur doesn't just make films. She finds tangential business opportunities that help her serve her audience better.

• The filmpreneur embraces risk and uncertainty.

• Because of this embrace of risk, the filmpreneur feels unease—or even fear— constantly. But he knows the greatest rewards come to those who push through to the other side.

• The filmpreneur is skeptical about “best practices” and following the "traditional way" of doing things. In fact, the filmpreneur understands that best practices are the fastest, most direct route to mediocrity.

• The filmpreneur is allergic to mediocrity.

• The filmpreneur has high standards. In a world drowning in mediocre content, she only creates and shares things that she’d want to consume herself.

• The filmpreneur doesn't play it safe to avoid failure. Because to avoid failure is to avoid risk. And to avoid risk is to succumb to mediocrity.

• When the filmpreneur fails, he sees it as a useful piece of data. He's now learned another way not to accomplish his goals, thus narrowing his focus onto the things that will work.

• The filmpreneur is a master at running small, cheap experiments. He knows that his resources are limited, so he finds creative ways to test the market before committing to large projects.

• The filmpreneur keeps an eye on the data, but trusts their gut.

• The filmpreneur knows that there are no “step by step” formulas for creative and business success. There’s never any guarantee that what worked for one person yesterday, will work for you today.

• The filmpreneur is a student for life. She knows the second she stops learning is the second she starts becoming irrelevant in the modern economy. The world is changing fast, and she keeps pace.

• The filmpreneur doesn’t just learn from other filmmakers. She studies across disciplines, and finds creative ways to apply what’s working elsewhere to her business. This is her major competitive advantage in an insular industry.

• The filmpreneur loves learning through books, courses, and podcasts, but knows that the real learning takes place in the realm of action. One small project can yield more real learning than five years of consuming the best information.

• The filmpreneur documents the process of making films. He knows it's great content for his audience, but it also helps him practice self-awareness, be more intentional, and hone his craft.

• The filmpreneur is a craftsman. Not only in his films, but in his business. He takes the time to learn the fundamentals and practice them for as long as it takes to be great.

• The filmpreneur expects obstacles at every step of their journey. Luckily, she’s a master of solving problems through creativity, resourcefulness, and first principles thinking.

• The filmpreneur builds communities, both online and offline.

• The filmpreneur builds relationships, both online and offline.

• In both of the above, the filmpreneur defaults to generosity, empathy, and kindness.

• The filmpreneur has strong boundaries, and respectfully turns down projects and opportunities that don’t align with the bigger picture.

• The filmpreneur defaults to action in the face of adversity. And he knows there will be adversity at every step along the way.

• The filmpreneur loves the work itself. Financial reward is a byproduct of that love.

• The filmpreneur succeeds in a world where other filmmakers are waiting around to be chosen.

• By living through these ideas, the filmpreneur enjoys a good, prosperous life, doing what she loves, and being of service to others. Because in the end, that's what matters.

The Filmmaker’s Process is new kind of filmmaking website, and it is unlike anything else on the internet. Its singular purpose: to help you make films that you actually care about.

So, what sets this site apart from the other filmmaking blogs out there?

For starters, we'll never tell you that you need to go out and buy a new camera to make better films. In fact, we won't talk about gear at all. Ever.

Instead, The Filmmaker's Process is about digging in, finding something important to say, then saying it through film.

We'll publish content to help you find your voice as a filmmaker, then give you actionable, tactical filmmaking advice to show you how to make great films, regardless of your budget or experience level.

If that sounds good to you, join us on this journey by subscribing to The Filmmaker's Process Newsletter, then by reading on to learn more about this place what you can expect in years to come.

Who's in charge here?

The Filmmaker's Process was founded by Robert Hardy.

You may know him from his writing for No Film School, one of the largest filmmaking blogs in the world. During his three year tenure there, he wrote over 700 articles, most of which focused on cinematography and visual storytelling.

That's Robert, shooting a short film back in 2012. In dire need of a haircut.

He's now moved on to focus his whole heart on The Filmmaker’s Process.

You see, Robert is insanely passionate about filmmaking as an art form, and about teaching people to make films that they’re proud to put their names on.

He firmly believes that when more people are inspired to create meaningful films, and they’re enabled to do so with actionable information about the process, the world benefits from the flourish of artistic perspective.

That’s what drives him. And that’s why this website exists.

The problem with most filmmaking websites

There are more educational filmmaking sites out there than I could count on 20 hands. But for us at least, there was always something missing from the conversation on existing sites.

In short, they often seem to focus too heavily on one particular aspect of filmmaking — the gear.

With laser-like focus, film sites consistently report on exciting new cameras, gimbal stabilizers, lenses, and lights. All under the guise of, “this gear will make your films better.”

And honestly, that’s great to a certain extent. As filmmakers, we need to understand our tools if we want to use them to their full potential.

However, when all we hear about is gear, we start believing that gear is the most important aspect of the filmmaking process.

It’s not.

“The truth of the matter is that the people who watch our films don’t care about the gear. Not one bit.”

Instead, they care about what’s unfolding onscreen. They care about the stories, characters, physical and emotional conflicts, and resolutions that we bring into their lives.

And if we’re lucky, they care about what we, as filmmakers, have to say.

It’s about high time for a website that takes that into account.

Here’s why we’re different

We don’t talk about gear. Ever.

Here at The Filmmaker’s Process, we’re drawing a line in the sand.

If you want the tech specs of a new camera, you won’t find them here. Best head over to No Film School, Cinema5D, EOSHD, or 4K Shooters.

However, if you’re looking to learn about how to make your next film better than your last one, this is the place for you.

More than that, if you’re looking for a resource that will help you make better films regardless of your budget, experience level, or how much gear you do or don’t own, you’ve come to the right place.

Of course, you can’t make a film without gear. It’d be naive to say otherwise. However, great gear doesn’t make great films.

Instead, great films are made by people with something valuable to say. They're made by collaborative teams of like-minded individuals, working together towards a common goal. They're made by people who follow through with the tried and true filmmaking processes that never change, even though the gear might.

Those processes will be explored in full on this site.

We Focus on the Art of Filmmaking

We all have something unique to say, or a subject that we’re keen to explore. This place is devoted to helping filmmakers find their unique voice and share it with the world.

Film is perhaps the greatest art form known to man. It combines so many different mediums, including literature, theater, photography, music, and a handful of others, into one medium that is infinitely expressive.

Film is universal. It’s emotional. It’s powerful and impactful. The Filmmaker’s Process is devoted to teaching filmmaking in a way that allows us to take advantage of that.

For people with something important to say, and the desire to say it through the medium of film, this website will become your most trusted advisor in the years to come.

We’re not an industry site

There are plenty of websites that will tell you how to get a job in the film industry. This is not one of them.

There are plenty of websites trying to teach you how to turn indie filmmaking into a viable business. This is not one of them.

Instead, this is a place for those of us who love making films we care about with people we like.

Regardless of whether you work in the film industry or not, if you love filmmaking and want to learn about it from a fresh perspective, this is the site for you.

The Filmmaker's Process is founded on the belief that when you divorce filmmaking from business, creativity and expression become inevitable.

And when you're a creative, expressive filmmaker, monetizing your skills and your work becomes more easily achieved.

We have a kickass filmmaking newsletter

Not only is our newsletter a great way to stay updated on our new articles every week, but we also share the best filmmaking articles from other sites as well.

“There’s so much great content out there, and it deserves to be shared with the people who need it most, regardless of where it comes from.”

You’ll also be the first to hear about awesome new filmmaking resources and tutorials from our trusted educational partners.

In addition to all of that, we’re going to be spotlighting short films that we love, interviewing the people who made those films, and really digging into their individual processes.

These interviews will be available exclusively in the newsletter.

Last but not least, each newsletter will contain a healthy dose of filmmaking inspiration. Sometimes this will come in the form of a quote. Other times it will be a video or an image. You never know.

What you can expect from us in the future

Every week, we will publish two new articles.

On Mondays, we’ll push out a short article, usually with a helpful or instructive video of some sort.

On Thursdays, we’ll publish a long-form piece, something meaty that you’ll be able to sink your teeth into. Something that will explore a single aspect of the filmmaking process in-depth.

Every Sunday morning, we’ll send out The Filmmaker’s Process Newsletter, which will contain enough juicy filmmaking content to fill the entire upcoming week.

In between all of that, we’ll be sharing great content from other filmmaking websites on our social media channels.

If that sounds good to you, we’d love for you to join us on this journey by signing up for the newsletter, following our social media channels, and telling your filmmaking friends about the site.

Hi, my name is Rob, and I am obsessed with manifestos. Reading em, writing em, thinking all day about them. Can’t get enough tbh.

Here’s my thesis on why this genre feels so alluring and alive for me, and why I’m keen to keep exploring it.

Writing a manifesto for yourself, your community, or your startup can set in motion a chain of events that transforms your inner and outer worlds in powerful, often unexpected ways. In other words, manifesto writing is a bit like casting a magic spell. Approached with intention and heart—and yes, a bit of faith—a manifesto can open the door to new possibilities that wouldn't otherwise exist. It sounds a tad hyperbolic, perhaps. But I've experienced it myself enough times to know the magic firsthand. There's untapped alpha in manifestos for those who take the form seriously.

The process of writing a manifesto, at its core, is the process of clarifying your desire. In a world that's constantly distracting us with digital noise and shiny objects, keeping us running on a mimetic treadmill of manufactured desires, getting clear about what you want, deep down, is a radical act. Exploring and articulating what matters most, then committing it to writing, is a bit like waking up to your own humanity after a deep slumber. It kicks off a journey of coming home to yourself.

Writing a manifesto isn't just about desire and vision, though. The process invites you to explore who you must become, what principles you must embody, and how you must act in order for your desires to come to fruition. It brings you face to face with your shadow, and forces you to reckon with the reality of where you are today. To sit with the status quo. To diagnose why things feel so distressing. One of the most impactful things you can do in a manifesto is to articulate a problem so vividly that its solutions become self-evident, both for yourself and readers. That, in its own way, is a form of magic.

The final step, and the most alchemically consequential, is the publishing of your manifesto. Birthing it into the world. Injecting it into the slipstream of the internet. When you share your manifesto, it acts as a magnet. It pulls people towards you, helping you find the others, attract new allies and opportunities, and open yourself to untold future serendipities. But more importantly, publishing your manifesto magnetizes you towards your own ambitions. It raises the stakes of your life, thus increasing the likelihood that these words will not be empty. No. When you hit publish, you are far more likely to strive valiantly towards your deepest desires, and live in accord with the values you committed to the page.

The process of earnest striving, and living in integrity with your words, only feeds the fire, and attracts ever more people and opportunities into your world. Writing and publishing a manifesto begins a virtuous cycle where you accelerate the process of becoming who you want to be. And I believe this is true for individuals, communities, startups, movements, or anyone with deep ambition to create a more beautiful, transcendent experience of life.

In the coming months, I'll be sharing my own experiences with manifestos, as I've been writing them in one form or another since 2015. This practice has shaped my life in so many unexpected ways, and continues to lead me in magical new directions. I'll also be dissecting and studying the manifestos I most admire—from individuals, artistic and political movements, and companies—to weave a deeper understanding of this craft.

Lastly, I'll be using this space to document case studies of new manifestos I write for myself, for startup clients, and people I work with as a writing coach. It's funny, this thread of focusing on manifestos feels fresh and fun, while also being the synthesis of so much of the marketing/creator work I've done over the years. It's like all of the threads of my professional life are coming together all at once, and I can't wait to explore with y'all.

When I hear the word manifesto, I imagine an epic piece of writing that codifies a new worldview, culture, or system of thought. Something grand and totalizing. Something seismic that shakes your entire being down to the core.

Don't get me wrong, I freaking love those types of manifestos. But part of what I want to explore with this newsletter is how the manifesto genre can be functional. I'm curious about how manifestos can move individuals and institutions forward in meaningfully concrete ways.

And for that, thinking of manifestos as inherently big, dramatic, and all-encompassing will likely get in the way. There's a risk of trying to write one giant piece that encapsulates everything you are and want to be, then subsequently getting stuck in the mud for months or years. For the last two years I've been trying to write my magnum opus manifesto about what the word "Ungated" has come to mean for me, and let's just say it has not been going well (understatement). We're all multifaceted, ever-evolving beings, and if you're anything like me, attempting to define yourself in one fell swoop is going to feel like trying to nail jello to the wall.

So I'd like to propose the concept of mini manifestos. These are evocative pieces of writing that address one narrow slice of your life, or one element of your organization, where you'd like to stage a revolution. Doesn't even have to be a major revolution, either. Could be a tiny one.

You could write a mini manifesto about your work life. Your health. Your creative work. Your spirituality. Your relationships. Or you could get even more granular. A manifesto for how to be the product marketing manager you want to be. A manifesto about going for more walks and being present to all of the cute dogs and pretty flowers you encounter. A manifesto about eating more salads and enjoying the heck out of them.

Same line of thinking applies to organizations. Sure, you could write a manifesto that defines an entire startup and acts as its north star. But you could also have a manifesto just for the customer service reps, or UX designers, or engineering team. You could have a manifesto about a practice everyone else in your industry does to chase short-term growth, but you refuse to do at your company because you're focused on long-term games and relationships. Lots of possibilities here.

As for me personally, I'm in the brainstorming and outlining phase for these mini manifestos, each of which address some area of my life that I'm actively working on:

• The perfectionist's manifesto, in which I codify how I want to relate to my deep seated perfectionist tendencies, and reframe them as a gift instead of a curse.

• The loverboi manifesto, in which I declare how I want to show up in romance and partnership.

• The conversational creativity manifesto, in which I shift my framing of creative work away from Expert With Answers™ towards "regular guy who's in conversation with the worlds around and within him."

• The vitality manifesto, in which I move away from a punishment/discipline model of nutrition and fitness, towards one in which feeling fucking amazing in my body is the chief aim.

• Rob's money manifesto, in which I unfuck my relationship with making and spending money by addressing underlying issues of shame.

Your mileage may vary, but I'm finding that writing manifestos for individual aspects of my life feels super empowering. It takes some of the pressure off to Figure My Shit Out at a high level, and instead focus on how I want to show up in these localized areas. And by focusing more specifically, it helps me be more concrete, more direct, and more clear when I'm in integrity with my stated aims or not. Specificity is its own form of power, I'm learning.

So yeah, that's the question I'd leave you with today.

What's one area of your life or business where the conditions are ripe for revolution? An area that would yield disproportionate reward if you clarified the future you desire, and how you'd have to show up to create that future?

P.S. I'm kinda proud of myself for not using the word "minifesto" in this post. Please clap.

All the best manifestos I've written have been birthed during a moment of personal frustration and turmoil.

The Ungated Manifesto came after hitting yet another wall with the promises of the "creator economy." The non-coercive marketing manifesto was a desperate reckoning with my relationship with marketing. And The Source was about making peace with my endless capacity for self-sabotage during a particularly challenging season of life. These manifestos helped me make sense of some underlying distress I could no longer ignore, then chart a path away from it. They were all written, first and foremost, for myself, to satisfy my personal hunger for self-renewal.

As it so happens, all three of those pieces resonated with a ton of other people, too. They’re easily my most “popular” and widely-read pieces of writing. They’re the ones people routinely tell me meant something to them, even years after publishing. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

There are two reasons I bring this up. First, I think there's a conception that writing a manifesto is something you do after you’ve figured it all out, when you want to convince other people of the answers you've arrived at. Frankly, I think if that's your starting place for writing a manifesto, you've already lost the game. A manifesto is an energetic transmission more than some kind of rhetorical trick. Your pain and frustration and desperation are core ingredients that charge the manifesto with vital energy. If you feel that you've solved your problems, and have all the answers, your manifesto won't carry the energy required to reach people who are stuck in those problems themselves. Being in the game yourself helps you speak in a way that resonates. It helps position you not as a guru with answers, but as a leader. Someone who’s in the mess with you, instead of above it.

The second reason I'm on about this is because the "conversational creativity" manifesto that I'm setting out to write in public is Very Much one that I need for myself at this moment in life. For the past decade, perfectionism and self doubt and imposter syndrome have whooped my ass to such a degree that I often wonder if I should give up on writing and creativity as a vocational path. Maybe just get a job at a coffee shop or bookstore or something. But alas, I know I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't keep doing this work. Something in me has to write. Has to keep exploring the frontiers of these ideas and stories that spark me to life.

I've had a few glimpses of the conversational creativity paradigm over the last year or two. Moments where I was able to tune into some larger spark of inspiration, and just flow with it as if it were a conversation, rather than a performance where I had to “do it right” in order to prove my worth. Moments where the self-doubt receded into the background, where the rigidity and fear melted away, and I was just able to deepen into relationship with something.

There was spell of about eight weeks where I wrote a new poem every single day. Most of them weren’t good, but they were sincere expressions of something that was (and still is) alive for me. The other example is writing The Source a few months ago. When I surrendered what I thought that manifesto should be, I encountered a voice deep within me that led somewhere unexpected and beautiful. Conversing with that voice for six weeks, back and forth, led to a piece of writing I’m more proud of than anything I’ve ever written.

All of this is to say, I want and need more conversational creativity in my life. I know it's possible for me. I know the wisdom for how to do this, how to embody it, lives inside me right alongside all of my self-doubt and fear. The purpose of writing the manifesto, therefore, is to help me remember what I already know, and act on it more often.

So yeah, I'll be unpacking more of what conversational creativity is in coming posts. Gonna flesh this thing out, piece by piece, conversation-style. But for now, just wanna emphasize this point again. There's a heck of a lot of power in getting intimate with your deepest frustrations, then writing the manifesto you need to read yourself.

The best manifestos share a common energetic signature that distinguishes them from normal essays or “brand vision documents” or whatever.

While the latter try to persuade you of something in logical fashion, a manifesto crackles with an emotional vibrancy that transcends the actual words on the page. Upon reading such a document, you don’t just feel logically convinced. You feel animated and infected by the underlying energy, and excited by the possibility of carrying said energy forward into your own life.

After plenty of pondering—probably too much tbh—I’ve got a working model of what this energy is, and the three elements that make it such a distinctive emotional experience.

First, there’s the energy of the old story. It’s animated by a clear-eyed awareness of the injustice and suffering woven through the status quo. Old story energy is fire, anger, urgency, compassion. It’s what emerges when the veil is lifted on the inner workings of our disquiet, and you see what you’re fighting against. You’ve met the enemy, and are no longer willing to turn a blind eye to it.

The second energy is that of the new story. It’s animated by the human capacity to imagine, to create, to believe what lays beyond the horizon is more beautiful than what lays behind us. It is the energy of possibility, hope, airiness, and faith. It's what emerges when we drop the protective shield of cynicism, allow our hearts to act as compass, and let our imaginations run free, like children. Where might we end up if we're courageous enough to follow those heartfelt directions? What kind of world might we build?

The old and new stories are diametrically opposing energies. Like yin and yang. You can get lost in either, swept up into their totality. Many manifestos—and humans, for that matter—end up consumed by one or the other as they grasp at certainty and control. Pulled completely into the old story, you become consumed by despair and bitterness and rage. You focus endlessly on what’s broken, and so end up manifesting more brokenness. If you’re fully captured by the new story, you live in the clouds, in a naive sort of escapism that distracts from the very real problems before you. Some might call it spiritual bypassing.

Bridge energy, therefore, is the capacity to hold the old and new stories simultaneously, then choosing to dance between them in the present moment. Bridge energy is pragmatic, grounded, earthy, gracious. It's a sense of responsibility. When we embody bridge energy, we acknowledge that every breath we take, every action, every word, is a chance to solidify an old story of life or affirm a new one. Perhaps the greatest power we hold as humans is the ability to choose the stories we live, and to break the ones no longer serving us. Step by imperfect step.

These are the three alchemical elements of manifesto energy. Old story, new story, bridge. Fiery, hopeful, grounded. The process of writing a manifesto helps you cultivate and balance these energies within yourself. Reveling in the dynamic tensions between them provides fuel not just for creative work, but for bringing a more beautiful story of life to fruition.