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TouchGrass

Manifesto

The pursuit of excellence — not for excellence, but for a higher sake.

I built this because I already knew everything I was supposed to be doing and was doing none of it. That’s the thing nobody tells you about self-improvement — the information is not the problem. You go to the therapist and they tell you things and you’re like yes, I know. I have always known. The issue is in actually doing. What do you do when action is the problem and you’re a bit too smart and a little sneaky.

I did the whole Atomic Habits thing. I tried the trackers; they all just felt like suggestions I could politely decline. I needed something practical and with actual stakes, that didn’t let me off the hook just because I ticked a box. Something that understood that I would try to cheat it, because I would.

I also think social media addiction is a real addiction, and in some ways worse than the ones we conventionally think of as bad — precisely because it’s so socially accepted. Nobody stages an intervention when you spend five hours on your phone. Nobody thinks it’s a crisis. But it rewires the same circuits, erodes the same agency, steals the same hours. The difference is everyone around you is doing it too, so it feels normal. It isn’t. It’s just popular.

So Touch Grass borrows from what actually works.

The money you stake goes to an accountability partner of your choosing. If you don’t pick one, Touch Grass charges you and applies it toward extending your membership. Either way it costs you something real. Either way you feel it.

But here’s the thing I kept coming back to — what’s the actual point of less screen time? Of better habits? Like, really. Because if the answer is just “so you feel better” or “so you’re more productive,” that wasn’t enough for me. I think the real answer is that bad habits and too much screen time reflect a failure of potential. A lack of mastery over your own consciousness. You know you’re capable of more — you can feel it — and the gap between that and what you’re actually doing with your day is the whole problem. It’s a management failure of the self. And admitting that, in a nice way, is kind of the first step.

So this isn’t really a screen time app. Reducing your phone usage is a side effect of a larger project, which is just — being a better person. A better member of society. Your body, your mind, your discipline, your taste, your habits. None of it is separate. The person who reads and walks and creates and takes care of themselves isn’t doing five things. They’re doing one thing expressed five ways.

I started calling this project “the supramental being” before it had a name — supramental meaning above the mind, a consciousness beyond the ordinary mental level. Which I realize sounds like a lot but bear with me. There’s a Japanese writer called Yukio Mishima who basically turned his entire life into a work of art — bodybuilding, literature, discipline, aesthetics — the obsessive pursuit of perfection even in private, like Patrick Bateman but with actual depth. And when I say aesthetics I don’t just mean how things look. Mishima’s idea was that how you live is itself an aesthetic act — the choices you make when nobody’s watching, the discipline you keep for no audience, the refusal to let any part of your life be careless or accidental. A beautiful life isn’t one that looks good from the outside. It’s one that’s composed with intention all the way through, even in the boring parts. Especially in the boring parts. There’s an Indian philosopher called Sri Aurobindo who believed humans are transitional beings — not the finished product but something evolving toward a higher consciousness. What’s interesting about Aurobindo is that unlike a lot of spiritual thinkers, he didn’t separate the physical from the mental from the spiritual. He thought they all had to evolve together — you couldn’t just meditate your way there, and you couldn’t just read your way there either. The whole person had to change. He envisioned a future being that would be more luminous, more flexible, more adaptable — entirely conscious and harmonious, as different from us as we are from animals. We’re not that yet, obviously. But the idea is that every time you choose discipline over comfort, presence over distraction, you’re inching in that direction. And he believed that when you’re on the right path you can feel it, because it starts to feel easy. And there’s Nietzsche’s übermensch — the idea that you can overcome your own nature through will. That you are not stuck being who you currently are.

This isn’t even a new idea. Plato made both physical training and music part of education in The Republic — not as extras but as essentials, because he understood that the body and the mind decay together and flourish together. You can’t have a sharp mind in a neglected body, but you also can’t have a strong body carrying around an undeveloped mind. The Greeks didn’t separate the two. We do, and it shows.

The thread through all of them is the same: that a beautiful life and a disciplined life and a moral life are not separate things. They’re the same life.

The more things you learn to do — actually do, with your hands and your body and your attention — the more ways you have to know yourself. Playing piano teaches you something reading can’t. Cooking teaches you something the gym can’t. Each skill is another language for understanding who you are, and the fluency starts to feel less like effort and more like just — how you move through the world. That’s the point. Not mastery as a performance, but as a kind of ease. A way of self.

I’ve always been someone who thinks about great minds — philosophers, strategists, writers, people who actually lived with intention across history. Not as trivia but as company. So when I needed a tough love platform that was actually useful, the idea of character personas felt obvious. Every voice in this app is a real mind recruited to hold you accountable to the version of yourself you already know exists. The one that makes better decisions. The one that got there through the daily, undramatic, frankly boring work of becoming.

A behavioral change engine
By Rhubie