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

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