The Living Question

An epilogue to a manifesto, and a new beginning for my personal writing

So, uh, I totally overhauled my Substack last week.

When I set out to write a manifesto for Lightpage back in April, I wasn’t expecting to emerge from the process with an enlivening new vision for my personal writing. But here we are.

Somewhere around week three of my exploration calls with Kasra, we stumbled into the age old question: given the uncertainty of the world, how should we choose to live? That thread, once pulled, gave us the beating heart of the finished manifesto.

Here’s the final version we landed on.

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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?

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I've been writing morning pages on and off for years, and I’ve been doing them near daily since I scuttled off to France in 2023. But for the last five weeks, I’ve started using that question as the focal point of my daily writing.

Every morning, those are the first words I type.
How do I want to live today?
I’ve come to refer to this as “the living question.”

And holy shit. It’s hard to over-emphasize how meaningful this small shift has been for me. As someone who habitually escapes into grandiose daydreaming about my future, or wallowing in the mistakes of the past, this practice of directing my attention back to humble daily aspirations has felt so grounding. As I work to put my life back in order after two-ish years of falling apart, this practice is helping me accept my life as it actually is, with full honesty, and take small, imperfect steps towards where I want to go.

In many ways, this is the most effective thing I’ve tried for softening the pernicious perfectionism that derails me in so many areas of life. I always thought the idea of “progress, not perfection” was lovely on paper. But only when I started reflecting on this question each morning, and trying to live into my answers as best I could, did I feel like I was truly practicing it.

Like a lot of people, I’ve fucking adored this Rilke quote for years.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Whenever I read this, it strikes some deep and resonant chord in me. But until the last few months, I don’t think I’ve ever actually understood what it meant to “live the questions now.” Some part of me—that scared little boy who learned that love is conditional on being seen as perfect—was always too desperate for certainty and control to really live into an ambiguous question. It was always safer to hide and theorize and dream than let imperfection fill my days.

One other thing that’s begun happening as I reflect on the living question each morning is that more questions are showing up. Questions I can’t easily answer. Questions that can only be engaged with by living them imperfectly each day. Questions like:

• How can I balance the work my soul calls me towards with my need for financial security?

• How can I come into right relationship with the internet, and with media more broadly?

• How can I be more in conversation my life, rather than trying to dictate what it should be?

• How can I stop dreaming of saving the world and be more of service to the people right in front of me?

• How can I live a more spiritual life, instead of intellectualizing spirituality?

• How can I let go of my need to control how people perceive me?

• How can I find worth and dignity in something deeper and more enduring than intelligence?

That last question feels like a big one. Not just for me, but a whole lot of us. We're on the precipice of a wildly disorienting era of history, as our collective answers for "how to live" come undone. For the past 150 years, humanity has placed material intelligence, and having concrete Scientific Answers for everything, at the center of our stories about human and economic value. AI is eating those stories alive, and hollowing out the institutions and cultures built from those stories. Shit’s already weird and unstable. But I suspect we’ve barely seen anything yet.

As the narrative fabric of our world unravels, and it becomes clear that the old answers aren’t workable anymore, we’re going have no choice but to dance with the questions again. Individually and at scale. Questions of who we are, what we most value, and how we want to live in this world, today. That strikes me as simultaneously terrifying, and also the most beautiful opportunity.

So yeah, that’s what this publication is about now. The questions that call to us. The questions that, should we accept the invitation into their ambiguity, might just help us come alive.

Onwards.