Nobody is here yet, so I'm writing to myself, but hopefully a lot of people are here in the future.

Community is one of those words which we use a lot but have forgotten what it really means. Everything is a community these days - every collection of people who share a common interest calls themselves one. And I can understand why. Humans are made to exist in community, in deep and permeant relation to each other, and hardly any of us do, so we try to will it into existence. No matters how many times we say it though, it doesn't make it true.

So, with that reservation in mind, I think the best way to think about this place is like my Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu gym. We're not family or neighbors, or a Church, we're not bound to each other by necessity, but we share more than a common interest. We are here to work hard, and support each other in the work; but when the time comes, it's not a team sport, and we will all have to face off against Fortune one-on-one.

On our own, we can read and write about Stoicism, and do our best to work practices into our daily lives, but we need training partners if we are ever going to be any good at this. We need real-life examples of virtue to inspire us, and we need to be around other practitioners who are both more and less experienced than us; the former for us to learn from, and the later for us to teach, further deepening our own understanding. And we need to have friends, so that when everything else seems too difficult, we keep showing up for their sakes.

This idea isn't 100% clear in my mind, but I think that's enough set us off in the right direction. Show up, work hard, help each other get better. The unofficial slogan of my gym is "Nobody Cares, Work Harder." But that's not really what it means. A less cool, but more honest translation would be "this is very hard, but if you work very hard, and don't give up, you're one of us."

That's what I'd like to build.