by CD Damitio

I've been writing this week about a philosophy called Baoism — something I built over years of living outside the usual structures, and crystallized on a road trip with my daughter in 2024.

Three principles: Stop Tox, Do Rox, Help Others.

The first two get most of the attention. Stop the inputs that make you worse. Build something real. Those are recognizable. People find them immediately useful.

Help Others is where it gets interesting.

Here's the trap in the first two principles without the third:

Stop Tox and Do Rox can be entirely self-directed. Clear your noise, build your output, optimize your existence. There's a version of this that's just self-improvement with better framing — still pointing inward, still concerned primarily with your own inputs and outputs.

It's useful. It's genuinely better than most of what gets sold as "personal development."

But it's still a closed loop.

Help Others opens the loop. It's the principle that makes Baoism something other than a productivity philosophy with a philosophical name.

The instruction is specific: use what you've built to reduce friction for someone else. Not generosity in a general sense. Not "give back." The specific thing you built — the knowledge you earned, the skill you developed, the infrastructure you created — in service of someone who comes after you.

The earned part is load-bearing. Help that comes from someone who hasn't actually done the thing is usually just advice. People can feel the difference, even when they can't articulate why.

I learned to move through the world with nothing.

No money, no safety net, no fixed address. How to find work when you have no permanent location. How to navigate bureaucracies in languages I barely spoke. How to build a life across multiple countries with a backpack and a decade of hard lessons.

I wrote the first version of Rough Living in 2003 because there was no book that would have helped me when I needed it. Not an inspiration story. Not a lifestyle brand. A field guide — what actually works, from someone who actually needed it to work.

That's the Help Others pattern: I went first. Here's what I found.

Not because I had a platform. Not because I thought people were waiting for it. Because the book I needed didn't exist, so I made it. And then it existed for the next person who needed it.

Twenty-three years later I updated it. Some things changed. The part about what you find on the other side of conventional life? That held.

There's a larger version of this principle I'm living right now.

I'm building a social network called Xcrol.com. Privacy-first, community-owned, designed around the idea that the people using it should be able to leave with everything they brought.

That's not a feature list. It's the founding principle.

I've watched too many writers, community builders, and people who spent years developing an audience on a platform lose everything when that platform changed without warning. The algorithm shifted. The account was suspended. The company pivoted. Years of connection and writing, gone.

Xcrol is Help Others at infrastructure scale. Build the thing they can actually keep.

The sequence matters — that's the part I keep coming back to.

You can't skip to Help Others without the first two steps. Help that comes from someone who hasn't cleared their own noise is usually just projection. Help that comes from someone who hasn't built anything real is usually just advice.

But without the third step, the first two are just self-improvement. A cleaner, more productive, better-optimized version of the same inward focus.

Stop the noise. Build something. Point it outward.

Every culture I've spent real time in has some version of this. The names differ. The specific forms are wildly different across traditions. But the core — you are not here only for yourself — is consistent.

Baoism didn't invent that. It made it the third step in a sequence that earns it.

If this landed, the longer version lives at indignified.substack.com

CD Damitio didn’t observe Silicon Valley from the outside.

He worked inside it—until he walked away in 2000.

/That insider perspective fueled Petshitter, his sharp, darkly comic novel about a couple launching a pet-tech startup with a comically terrible name amid the ego, hype, and “change the world” pressure of venture capital.

Fast-forward to April 2026: AI pet-tech is exploding with massive funding rounds for smart collars, emotion-reading devices, and precision-nutrition platforms. The absurdity Damitio satirized is now playing out in real time.Yet his critique goes far deeper than one book.

Across 30+ titles and four startups he actually built, Damitio has consistently exposed the extractive nature of Big Tech while offering alternatives.

His latest creation—xcrol.com—is a deliberate counter-model: a social network with zero surveillance, no algorithms feeding addiction, and a design that puts human connection first.

Add in Baoism, his straightforward spiritual philosophy (Stop Tox • Do Rox • Help Others), and you see the full picture: a thinker who doesn’t just complain about toxic systems—he builds cleaner ones and writes the stories that help others do the same.

While today’s tech founders chase valuations, Damitio has been quietly prototyping a post-hype future for decades. That combination of lived critique, hands-on building, and unflinching storytelling makes him one of the most grounded voices in an increasingly absurd industry.

In 2001 I bought a VW bus for $100 and moved in. Not for the aesthetic. Because I'd just walked out of a corporate job during the dot-com crash and the rent wasn't happening.

Here's what I found: freedom and homelessness are the same experience described from different emotional states. On a good day, you're free. On a bad day, you're homeless. The external circumstances are often identical.

I kept notes. How to find work without an address. How to eat on nothing. How to stay clean and sane when everything you own fits in a bag. Those notes became Rough Living — a field guide I published in 2003 and just updated for 2026.

Some things got harder. The systems are less tolerant. The cheap things got expensive. What didn't change: most people are more capable than they've been led to believe. The system benefits from you thinking otherwise.

The knowledge that you could survive outside the plan — even if you never have to — is its own kind of freedom. That's what the book is really about.

Rough Living: Tips and Tales of Vagobond → indignified.com/books