From Gatekeeping to Gateway: Why I'm Launching recursive.eco

After months building Jongu as a mental health platform, I'm making a significant shift. Today I'm launching recursive.eco and redirecting Jongu to it. This isn't abandonment—it's evolution toward what wants to emerge.

What recursive.eco Actually Is

Infrastructure for recursive meaning-making—tools, channels, and community spaces that evolve through collective participation. Following Joseph Campbell's call to reinvent our mythology, I'm building new sense-making tools through software, content, and community.

There's no alternative to not following your bliss—just unhappiness. So I'm following mine: making belief recursively to find meaning, while meaning good for the whole.

Currently, recursive.eco features one channel (Wellness Tools) and one tool (Best Possible Self), but we're building toward community-driven digital spaces where anyone can contribute. The infrastructure evolves through participation—a recursive public in Christopher Kelty's sense.

From Problems to Patterns

When I started Jongu, I was thinking too narrowly. I focused on containers—relationships, therapy, wellness—rather than the deeper pattern underneath. I was trying to solve mental health challenges when what called to me was more fundamental: how do we create conditions where humans naturally flourish?

Instead of asking "How do we fix what's broken?" I'm now asking "What conditions make recursion regenerative rather than extractive?" Instead of copyrighted gatekeeping frameworks, I'm reaching back to ancient wisdom like Stoicism and forward to whatever technology offers for human flourishing.

The mental health approach carried regulatory constraints that didn't align with my vision of radical openness. Instead of navigating complex therapy regulations, I wanted to build in human development and meaning-making—areas where innovation can reach more people freely.

Most importantly, mental health kept individual transformation separate from collective evolution. Recursive.eco integrates these: we transform the collective by transforming ourselves.

The Gateway Principle

Recursive.eco integrates the false separations that fragment modern life—user versus builder, consumer versus creator, individual versus community. Most of humanity's problems stem from these schizophrenic divisions where we're forced to choose. I reject these false dilemmas entirely.

When I build tools for my own growth and share the source code, I'm simultaneously solopreneur and user, individual and community member, learner and teacher. Every cycle dissolves artificial boundaries: personal practice becomes public infrastructure, individual transformation enables collective flourishing.

The Recursive Virtue Hypothesis

Unlike material resources that diminish when shared, virtue multiplies through infinite synthesis—what you share, you gain—creating expanding cycles of mutual transformation.

For recursiveness to spiral toward order rather than chaos, it needs virtue. If we create a make-belief world where we're recursively creating meaning endlessly, it must be virtuous. Virtue becomes a feature, not theory. If bugged, recursiveness stops. If embedded, it spreads beyond its original reality.

This moves beyond therapeutic "problem-fixing" toward creating conditions where human virtues naturally emerge and compound through participation.

Growing Slowly, On Purpose

I'm building according to my internal compass rather than external expectations. Growing slowly means patience to feel when something's right before deciding. It means changing direction without karmic debt to people who bought into a vision that's no longer appropriate.

Recursive.eco starts free and donation-based. Behind every transaction that isn't freely given, we become bound. For all of us to be free from each other, together, the foundation must be voluntary participation rather than extraction.

I'm funding this through my corporate job while building in public. This prevents the rush to monetize that corrupts vision before it matures.

Join the Experiment

Recursive.eco debunks false dichotomies—a place where serving yourself and serving others integrate with complete authenticity. The recursiveness emerges from refusing to separate these aspects of being human.

Visit recursive.eco to explore the experiment. The Discourse community is new space for collaborative meaning-making. Source code remains open for others to adapt and build upon.