Hi,
Lately I’ve realized I’m not really asking, what should I do next?
I’m asking, what is worthy of my attention now?
That feels like a different question.
After years spent building inside technology companies, I know how to help things grow. I know how to build brands, media, trust, and attention. But this phase of life feels different. I’m not trying to fill my calendar. I’m trying to understand what kind of work I want to give my energy to for the next five years.
That question has become more than a career question.
It has become a life question, partly because this whole period has been a bigger reset for me. I’ve been trying to design life first, and let work follow from that, instead of the other way around.
I want to build things with love instead of for love. I’m more interested in thriving than striving. I’m trying to get closer to what actually matters in a well-lived life, and then build from there.
And increasingly, I think it is also one of the central questions of the AI era.
Packy McCormick’s essay “Riding the Leopard” has been rattling around in my head.
He starts from a premise that AI will bring abundance. I’m not fully convinced yet. Maybe he’s right. Maybe he’s partly right. Maybe he’s also writing for an audience of builders who need to believe the future is still worth building toward.
But even if abundance does come, the bigger question underneath it is the one that interests me most.
If we can build more, automate more, create more, and produce more, what is all of that for?
That is where the conversation stops being mainly about technology and starts becoming about meaning.
It probably won’t surprise anyone who knows me that I’ve been a Joseph Campbell nerd since my 20s. I came to him through storytelling, mythology, and the idea that our lives are shaped by the stories we choose to live inside.
So this line from Campbell hit me hard:
“The goal is to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces.”
That feels like the assignment right now.
Not to retreat from the AI transition.
Not to deny the energy of it.
But not to be torn apart by it either.
To ride the leopard of life with a little more composure and a little more intention.
One of the ideas I took from Packy is that the purpose of life may have something to do with experiencing your own weird life as fully as possible, and then creating or sharing something from that unique experience.
That idea feels true to me.
Not because every person needs to become a Creator with a capital C. But because each of us has a particular life. A particular set of experiences, relationships, tastes, wounds, places, questions, and obsessions.
That is where meaning comes from.
The danger, at least as I see it, is that AI makes everything smoother, faster, cleaner, and more average.
If we use AI to express ourselves more fully, to build from our lived experience, to share what only we can see, then maybe we are in alignment.
But if we use it to sand off the weirdness, skip the friction, and produce something perfect but soulless, then I think we’ve lost something essential.
You can already see flashes of this in a lot of AI ads and AI-generated social content. It’s polished. Fast. Efficient. Sometimes even impressive for a second. But it often feels strangely bloodless. Like something is missing.
That missing thing may be the human life underneath it.
This is where I’m still thinking in public.
Packy writes about humans creating new “information.” I keep wondering whether that is connected to consciousness itself.
AI can remix, compress, extend, and generate from what already exists. It can be astonishingly useful. But can it create the kind of newness that comes from actually living? From having a body, a childhood, a family, a grief, a place, a love, a failure, a weird obsession, a moment of beauty on a trail or in a conversation?
I’m skeptical.
But I suspect this is where the human part still matters most.
AI can help us express a life.
It cannot live one.
That brings me back to the question I keep circling with The Calm Society:
What is worth building now?
Because if software becomes easier to create, if content becomes infinite, if more people can turn ideas into prototypes almost instantly, then the hard part moves up a layer.
The question is no longer just: can we build it?
The question is: should we?
Does it help people live better?
Does it increase agency or dependency?
Does it deepen attention, relationships, purpose, or place?
Does it create more life outside the product, or does it pull people deeper into the machine?
I’ve written before about the question, can we build our way out?
It would be almost comically ironic to build an app to help people be calm.
But maybe the problem is not that the tool is digital.
Maybe the problem is what the tool optimises for.
That feels like the right principle for this moment:
Meet people where they are, online and overwhelmed.
But do not leave them there.
The best technology in this space should help people return to life.
That is also the question I’m asking in my own life.
What work is worthy of my attention?
What is worth building?
What would I be proud to help bring into the world?
What would help people live better, not just faster?
I don’t think this is only a personal question. I think it is going to become one of the defining questions of the AI era.
Because when building gets easier, choosing what matters becomes the real work.
AI can help us move faster.
It can help us create.
It can help us express.
It can help us build.
But it cannot tell us what is worth giving our lives to.
And it cannot ride the leopard for us.
More soon,
Cameron