Our Obvious Truths are a set of principles derived from the lived behaviors of our community. They grow and evolve slowly over time through our collective actions.
We have been in the process of evolving and updating the language of our obvious truths over the past few months to match the current state of our roadmap. You can see older version of our Obvious Truths and how they’ve evolved over time here:
- Building Cabin's Network City — Cabin
- Guiding Principles & Obvious Truths — Cabin
- Cabin | Cabin's Network City
- Obvious Truths
As you’ll see from these links and from the language below, the main thrust of these Obvious Truths has been pretty consistent over time, but we’ve continued to refine and update the phrases and explanations of the principles.
At the recent Summer 24 contributor retreat, based on feedback from members of the community, we took another pass at refining the language for the Obvious Truths. The goal was to represent the full range of principles we’ve had in the Obvious Truths over time in the simplest, clearest way possible. For each one, we’ve distilled it into a short phrase, a sentence, and a paragraph.
As always, these principles represent a current snapshot of the community, not anything written in stone. Please share any thoughts and feedback you have on the language! We will also be sharing this updated draft at the State of the Network this week.
Obvious Truths:
Live Near Friends
It Takes a Village
Do The Thing
Touch Grass
Play Infinite Games
Live Near Friends
Turn your friends into neighbors and your neighbors into friends
We are our best selves when we live near people we admire. Spend any time in a co-located living community and it’s immediately evident how different of a lifestyle it can be for human connection, novelty, and happiness. Living near friends and family is a deeply natural thing for humans to do; it’s how most people who have ever existed have lived. If you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, then you should choose to live around the kind of people that you aspire to be. We choose to surround ourselves with kind, thoughtful, creative, open-minded, playful, generous people. We are highly motivated, easy-going people who want to do good in the world and have fun doing it. We connect, root for, and learn from one another. We build squad wealth when the whole squad is winning. We help each other set and achieve ambitious goals.
It Takes a Village
It takes a village to raise kids and it takes kids to raise a village
The only way to build a community with resilience and longevity is by designing for intergenerational living. We don’t think everyone needs to have kids, but we do believe the whole village should be a part of raising them. Younger generations can learn from the experiences and wisdom of older adults, while older residents can stay engaged in the changing world. Shared resources and services, such as communal spaces and caregiving, can reduce individual costs and improve the overall stability of a neighborhood. If you want a community to grow and last over time, it needs kids to carry to torch of the culture forward, and to make it their own. Intergenerational neighborhoods can become inclusive, dynamic, supportive communities that can thrive across generations.
Do The Thing
Stop talking and start doing
We value actions over abstract ideas. We make, test, build, and create things. We practice docracy: the art of being the change you want to see. We enjoy philosophy, but we value people and processes that make positive tangible changes in their environment. We ask for forgiveness rather than permission. Creation is the feedback loop between ideas and actions. If you really want to understand ideas, you have to try them. Mental models are misleading, and the real world is always more complicated than the version in your head. Great creation happens when you can figure out how to translate big ideas into small practices. This means developing habits of consistent experimentation, starting at small scales — Gall’s law states that complex systems can only work when they evolve from working simple systems.
Touch Grass
Get offline and build resiliency with nature
Spending time in nature is crucial for mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. You probably don’t need science to tell you this, but the evidence is there if you want it. The internet is great, but so is unplugging and being present in good old fashioned reality. At Cabin, we believe that the best compounding store of value is a regenerative local community. Small communities can practice regeneration by providing for human needs in close collaboration with the local environment. We can build a globally resilient network of these local communities.
Play Infinite Games
Life is a long-term live action role playing game
At Cabin, we practice co-creation, cooperation, and reciprocity to promote a culture of positive-sum coordination. Co-creating culture naturally happens at small, local scales where people can interact directly and develop trust. It’s also now possible to coordinate and co-create globally using a new type of leviathan that puts capture-resistant governance directly in the hands of a community. We self-govern autonomously and transparently to make organizational decisions without the need for a trusted central authority. We practice “Yes, and” by taking others’ contributions and helping make them better. We do all of this with eye towards the long-term. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Cabin won’t be finished in our lifetimes.