The Case for Minimum Viable Faith
Why We Convince Ourselves We’ve Missed the Window
🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.
While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.
You can buy my book Permissionless here.
I have developed a personal cheat code for life that might sound ridiculous to you, and it might in fact be ridiculous; but in the face of my own doubt, my fears, the unpredictability of every single day of my life since 2020, and the shrouded future of AI, disruption, idiotic politicians, Netflix cancellations and badly thought-out software updates, it’s the only thing I’ve found that works:
Faith as a survival strategy.
Hope as discipline.
Future orientation as leverage.
IE: for good things to happen, I have to blindly assume that good things are still ahead of me, no matter what my past experiences might suggest.
It’s incredibly easy to feel behind, disqualified, late.
To feel like you’re permanently marked by your past decisions, like there are more paths that are closed to you than open.
But in my experience, you can make an equally powerful case for continuing to believe in irrational optimism as you can for the doldrums of precluded fate; you can make a fairly compelling case for treating the future as unfinished, regardless of the evidence one way or the other, as long as you actively choose to make that case.
