For eleven consecutive weeks, a small group of people from four continents has met every Thursday evening for one hour, to show each other what we built that week. No hierarchy. No assigned tasks. A designer, an entrepreneur, a computational scientist, a facilitator, a neurotechnology founder, a strategist, a platform builder. We call the gathering Lab Night, and the group is the Ikigai Collective. Today we open the doors.
We are held together by three values, distilled over weeks of discussion and adopted as first principles. Curiosity: it generates questions and the desire for understanding. Agency: the ability and the desire to maintain, build, and strengthen the ability to act. Compassion: iteration guarantees failures, and they are not shameful; it is through compassion that we support each other and stay human.
Why now? Technology has reduced the distance from idea to action to zero, while the half-life of skills keeps shortening. For the first time, billions of people have the freedom, and the burden, of designing what to do and how to live. Nobody taught us how. Doing it together, with AI as an instrument of our own agency, is what this community is for.
We operate like a studio: everyone pursues their own projects, shows work in progress, gets honest feedback, and joins forces only when both sides want to. We are volunteer-run and free. Adopting the three values is the only membership requirement there is.
Come to a Lab Night, Thursdays at 21:00 Rome time (CEST) on our Discord. Bring a project, or just your curiosity. The founding story, told by David Orban, is on his blog; these Lab Notes are the community’s own record, and they continue weekly.