In "A Rickconvenient Mort," an episode of Rick and Morty, Rick takes his granddaughter Summer on an apocalypse bar crawl. They hop between planets that are about to die—one swallowed by a supernova, one by a black hole, one by an asteroid. On each planet the inhabitants know the end is coming, so they throw themselves into it. Massive parties. No rules. No tomorrow. An alien on the last planet sleeps with his own father, because why not, the asteroid hits in a few hours.
Then Summer destroys the asteroid. And suddenly there is a tomorrow. In the post-credits scene, that alien shows up to work at the bakery. His father is there too. His mother still won't speak to either of them.
It feels like that right now. Like we're all on Ferkus 9 watching the asteroid grow larger, trying to decide how seriously to take the end. Superintelligence is supposedly on the way. Sam Altman posts about agentic AI. One guy gets wealthier than another guy. And who fucking cares? Do any of these games matter if the game itself is about to change?
Capitalism is societal energy being shuffled around between people until there is production—more people, more science, more objects in the world. Money is not a finite constant. It is infinite. When someone produces something that brings utility to the population, capital flows toward it. That's literally how it functions. The world is not zero sum. More production leads to more net wealth. And if that energy starts getting shuffled much better between non-humans, there will be even more production. The human bottleneck dissolves. This seems inevitable at this point.
So we're in an idea supernova. Our sun—human-led capitalism—is about to burst. No rocket can take us far away, fast enough, to outrun this system. We just have to live in it, day by day, knowing what's coming.
Do companies matter? What really does? How should anyone spend their time? None of this is clear. Anyone saying they know is not telling the truth.
But you still have to wake up.
Everyone asks about purpose. What's your purpose?
This morning I woke up and played with my baby, whose sole purpose right now is to get more milk. Then I went to my dog, Spicy. She recently got punished for pissing on my bed covers. She's looking sheepish. She knows she shouldn't have done it, she forgot in the moment. It's our fault, really—we didn't train her properly. But I also have a feeling she's not the sharpest poodle in the shed.
I reach out to her. Her tail raises, expectant that all is forgiven. I pet her and it's wagging full speed. She jumps on the bed. Licks are given. All is forgiven. I doubt she remembers what happened before. Somewhere in her poodle brain a circuit that reinforces not pissing on the cover is strengthened, and that's about as deep as it goes.
Spicy doesn't have the cognitive ability to think about her purpose. So what is her purpose? She plays.
We've made it more complicated than that. We accumulate energy, pass it down to offspring, and anchor on abstractions—legacy, self-expression, meaning. But go back to Rick and Morty for a second. The show's thesis, underneath all the nihilism, is that you choose your purpose. You choose what you give a shit about. Your cognitive capacity and your background shape those choices, but they're still yours.
The individual goal should be to transcend yourself continuously. The societal goal should be to help others do the same.
Everything in the universe dies. Suns supernova. Black holes decay through Hawking radiation. The notion of forever is meaningless. Companies die. People die. Ideas die. Everything is, until it isn't.
Survival is the baseline. Transcendence is a strategy for purpose. And likely we'll discover higher-order aims beyond even that—purpose is a word we use for the feeling of what do I do next?
There will be ideas we cannot describe right now.
So wake up. Say what you think is right. Distribute that product. Raise that VC round. Protest the thing, fight for a cause. But stop assigning so much self-importance to the whole thing. You're a poodle pissing on a bed. The earth isn't the center of the universe, and soon you won't be the center of the cognitive creation universe either.
How you choose to deal with this is your choice. It doesn't mean nothing matters. You get to choose what matters. Spicy chooses to chase the ball. You can choose to build that company, change the pace at which new things are produced, reduce suffering.
But remember everything ends. So it's really about the journey you want. The journey you want society to take. Do stuff. Be useful. Try things. Be good.
Don't be a self-righteous cunt about the whole thing. If you want the future to look a certain way, make it so. Enjoy the journey. And don't forget to smell the roses.