The week the values got their final shape, through a public change of mind.
David withdrew part of his own proposal: meaning and purpose matter enormously, but they are not foundational. “They are an objective; they cannot be a principle from which you build.” You strive toward meaning; you cannot stand on it. The replacement he offered: agency, defined as the ability and the desire to maintain, build, and strengthen the ability to act. Agency is also what rescues curiosity from being decorative: you can read all the books you want, but without the ability to act on them, curiosity is rudderless. And it is the AI connection in one line: the more sophisticated the tools, the higher our degrees of freedom, the stronger our agency.
A member answered with why he attends at all: he has struggled with meaning and purpose his whole life, and shows up every Wednesday precisely “to trap myself into activating the agency in my life.” The theory and the testimony matched.
The other standing theme was honest measurement. It is entirely possible to arrange your metrics so you can declare victory regardless of reality, until reality becomes undeniable; institutions do it at scale. The antidote is a group that looks at what you measured, not what you claimed.
Shown that night: an interactive ikigai visualizer built in a single day by a member who had joined two weeks earlier (“it cost me twenty years to do it in one day,” he said, echoing Picasso); a portable human-portfolio prototype mapping skills to public standards; a personal website with a momentum theory behind it; and a 3D visualization of an agent fleet rendered as a growing city.