Riding the Leopard - Not Boring by Packy McCormick
Not Boring by Packy McCormick
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Riding the Leopard<br>You are here to experience, or: why differentiation is a moral obligation.<br>May 13, 2026<br>∙ Paid
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Hi friends 👋 ,<br>Happy Wednesday! Last week, I went out to LA to give a talk at my friend Grant Gittlin’s event, The Mountain. He asked me to do something different and weird, and I took the opportunity to pull a bunch of the ideas I’ve written in essays like Means and Meaning, The Company as a Machine for Doing Stuff, The Return of Magic, Most Human Wins, and others into one cohesive ~philosophy. It was a good excuse to think about the meaning of life.<br>This is the talk. It was written to be spoken, so it may seem an oddly-written essay, but I hope it’s useful nonetheless, if for no other reason than that it makes you pause and wonder at the insane gift and responsibility we’ve all been given to experience and create in the world from our own unique points-of-view.<br>I was very nervous giving this talk to a room full of 80 people, but once I got through that, and a bunch of people told me that I should share it more broadly, I decided why not send it to 265,556 of my closest friends. I do think a lot of people are wondering what it is we’re here to do when machines can do more and more.<br>This is my best attempt yet, in what will be a lifetime full of attempts, to answer that question and then try to live the answer.<br>Let’s get to it.
Note: I’m sharing the first half with everyone and the whole thing with not boring world subscribers. Join us.
Riding the Leopard
Transcript of a Talk Given at The Mountain on May 6, 2026
Thanks for inviting me, Grant, and to all of you for letting me fill your experience and attention for a little while.<br>What a week to get to talk to a room of technology people. Sierra just raised at $15 billion. Anthropic crossed a $44 billion run rate, and launched a new company with some huge funds that has $1.5 billion to deploy AI in big companies. OpenAI did the same thing but with $4 billion. Long Lake bought AmEx global travel for $6.3 billion.<br>All of which raises an important question: who gives a shit?<br>I mean that: why do we care?<br>Things are moving so fast that it’s worth thinking about what it is that we’re doing here.<br>Last night, a woman who reads my newsletter reached out over Substack DM. She said she had been diagnosed with Stage IV cancer (she’s in remission now!), so she had been confronted with a question we’d all be facing: what happens to human purpose when AI removes scarcity (or in her case, the need to care about being productive at all)? To answer it, she analyzed more than 200 sci-fi books. Across all of those books, by far the most common thing left to solve for post-scarcity is meaning . 59% of books were about the search for meaning. Identity was next, at just 17%.<br>Assume that companies will keep getting bigger and bigger, and growing faster and faster, and who cares… the thing we’ll be left solving for is meaning.<br>Luckily, that’s what I’d been planning to talk to you about.<br>When Grant asked me to talk and I asked Grant what he wanted me to talk about, he said, basically, “Whatever you want, the weirder the better. The line I really love from your recent essays is ‘You have the right to the work only but never to its fruits. Let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.’”<br>The funny thing about that line, which comes from the Bhagavad Gita, is that when I wrote about it, Venkatesh Rao, who is smarter, better read, and more Indian than me, replied, “This interpretation of the Gita verse is a bit of a stretch.”<br>After going back and forth in the comments, I think Venkatesh and I actually agree, but I am warning you that I am going to do a little bit more Indian-text-stretching and leaping in this talk to build a framework that I think is potentially useful and give it some ancient gravitas.<br>There is this category of questions I’ve been wrestling with, which I think a lot of people have been wrestling with recently, which is something along the lines of:<br>If new technology is so great, why are so many people unhappy?<br>If we have means our ancestors couldn’t have dreamed of, why is there a meaning crisis?<br>What is technology for, anyway? What are we doing here?<br>In his 1978 essay collection, The Unheard Cry for Meaning, Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote, “The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live but no meaning to live for.”<br>Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning about his experience finding meaning in the concentration camp, in the worst situation imaginable, writes three decades later about the lack of meaning in what could historically...