she started a religion and the first rule is that nobody tells you what to do

i have interviewed a lot of founders. this is the first one who started a religion.

may of 2020. she wanted a physical space for people to work out what they actually believed, and there was no such thing as a physical space that year. so she went online and asked one question. is anybody else feeling this.

a hundred thousand people answered inside a month.

then she did the thing almost nobody does with a crowd that size. she polled them and asked what the pain actually was. the answer came back near unanimous. i want the information, i just do not want everyone telling me what to do with it.

so she built the whole organisation around that constraint. every belief system welcome. curiosity as the only required posture. and no dogma of its own, on purpose, because dogma is the machinery by which one person tells another what to do.

one point three million people across a hundred and thirteen countries, inside a year.

i asked whether a multi faith thing can hold at that scale, or whether it ends up pleasing nobody. she said she was never convinced it would work. she thought somebody should find out.

the story that landed hardest was about a town where two religious communities had been fighting for years. she did not try to reconcile the theology. she asked about the children who were not getting to school. both sides wanted a stronger community, education is a step toward a stronger community, so start there and leave everything else on the shelf. they got the kids into class. then they kept talking. the community started integrating instead of separating, and none of it required anyone to change what they believed.

then the line i have not stopped thinking about. lasting transformation almost never comes from better answers. it comes from being given the space, and the safety, to ask better questions.

she learned it from her son, who is on the spectrum and who will not accept a prescription for how to live from anybody. he takes the world as an experience rather than an instruction. she says he has taught her more than any other part of her life.

i notice how much of my week is spent handing people answers. i do it because it is faster and because it makes me look useful. it also means nothing i say survives their drive home.

and when people ask what religion i am, my honest answer for years has been confused, which i have come to think of as a feature. it buys me a conversation with anyone.

who in your life keeps asking you what to do, because you keep telling them?