Packy McCormick (b. 1987) spent a whole day writing trivia questions and building slides for the first night of a club he wanted to start. Seven people came. He stood in the room with a Duke degree behind him and an expensive high school behind that and four years on a Merrill Lynch trading desk, and he counted the chairs. The arithmetic shamed him. He has told the story since. He calls the feeling embarrassing. The number stayed with him. Seven.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) knows what the number means. In The Denial of Death he argues that a man builds his life as a defense against two facts he cannot carry: that he dies, and that he might come to nothing. The first terror belongs to the body. The second runs deeper, because a man can outlive his fear of the grave and still wake at three in the morning certain he has left no mark. The hero system answers the second terror. Culture hands it to him. It tells him what a life that counts looks like, and it promises that a man who plays it well leaves something behind that the grave cannot reach. Seven chairs at a trivia night is the terror. It says: you might be no one.
The Not Boring man builds his answer out of the future. Most hero systems reach backward for their immortality, to the fathers, the land, the covenant, the dead who watch. Packy reaches forward. He locates the sacred in what has not happened yet. The reactor that floats off a shipyard. The fusion ignition at Livermore. The healthcare system a founder fixes because, as Packy likes to say, no law of physics requires it to stay broken. His heaven sits in front of him, and a man earns his place in it by leaving the world with more in it than he found. More energy. More companies. More open doors for the children who come after. He named the podcast Age of Miracles, and he meant the word.
He tells the story of his optimism as a subtraction story. Strip away the fear the press sells, the doomer who profits from dread, the degrowth myth that has held men back for fifty years, and what remains, he says, is the obvious thing: the world gets better when men build, and it gets worse when they shrink. He calls this realistic optimism, and the modifier does the work. The optimism, he wants you to believe, is what stands once illusion clears. Becker reads it the other way. The optimism comes first. It does a job, and the job is old. It holds the terror at the door. A man who looks forward with hope has somewhere to put his death. The pessimist has nowhere, and so the pessimist, in this scheme, has failed at the one task culture set him. Packy’s good cheer arrives dressed as arithmetic. Under the dress it is a faith, and faiths answer fears.
Watch the sacred words move. A word does its work inside one hero system and means something else, sometimes the reverse, inside another. The same syllables carry opposite freight depending on which terror a man has armed himself against.
Take abundance, the sacred word in the whole Not Boring catalog. For Packy, abundance raises the floor and the ceiling at once. A hundred times more energy brings the rest of the world up to the comfort the West takes for granted, and powers the science fiction that founders will make real. Abundance is the proof that the future stays open. Now carry the word into a Cistercian monastery. To the monk who has taken a vow of stability and rises in the dark to chant the psalms, abundance is the danger. The full barn is the trap. He keeps the parable of the rich fool close, the man who built bigger barns and died the same night. The monk earns his immortality by emptying, not filling, and the soul he is saving needs the room that having less provides. Carry the word again, south, to a herder watching the desert eat his grazing land at the edge of the Sahel. Abundance for him means the rains return on time and the well holds through the dry months and the herd survives to the green. Not a hundred times. Enough. The hero in that place is the man who brings the family through the lean year with the animals still breathing. And carry the word one more time to the degrowth ecologist, the rival Packy names by name. To her, abundance is the disease. Abundance ate the forests and warmed the sea. Her hero treads light, consumes less, leaves the old growth standing for a grandchild she will not meet, and her immortality lives in the continuity of a living world that does not need her in it. Four men and women, one word, four heavens. Packy’s abundance opens the future. The monk’s abundance damns the soul. The herder’s abundance is survival. The ecologist’s abundance is the wound.
Take miracle. Packy built a whole show on it. In his hands a miracle is a thing men make. Fusion. The micro-reactor. The cure for the rare disease nobody funded. The word exalts the builder and the engineer who treats the reactor as just another hard machine. To a pilgrim kneeling at a Marian shrine, or a Breslover at the grave in Uman, the miracle runs the opposite direction. It breaks into nature from outside it, by a Hand that needs no founder and no balance sheet. That miracle humbles a man. Packy’s miracle promotes him. To the oncologist on the ward, miracle is the word a family reaches for when the medicine works and they will not credit the medicine, and she flinches at it, because it gives the win to heaven and takes it from the protocol she spent her life refining. To a Lakota elder, the sacred already lives in the given world, in the grass and the animals and the agreement between them, and the project of remaking that world by splitting its atoms reads as desecration. One word. The builder’s glory, the pilgrim’s humility, the doctor’s irritation, the elder’s grief.
Take risk. Packy turned it into a banner. Embrace risk. The man who refuses it dies slow. Risk is the toll on the road to the future and the founder’s required nerve, and the worst case rarely costs what the fearful man thinks. Here is his own ledger from the lean year, when he left the salary for the startup: the floor, he reasoned, is not that low. Move back to his parents’ house. Still a bed. Still meals. Still a roof. A man who has run that calculation and found the floor soft can afford to leap. Now hand the word to a short-seller on a trading desk who has built his career on fading other men’s hope. Risk to him is mispriced enthusiasm, the bubble he shorts, the founder’s nerve seen from the other side as the mark’s last error. He earns his standing by being right when the optimists are wrong, and his hero is the man who saw the crash coming. Hand the word to an actuary, and risk becomes a number to remove from a widow’s life, a thing to price and hedge and lay off, and the hero is the one who protects. Hand it to a mother in a shelled city walking her children to the one market still open. She does not embrace risk. She endures it. The hero on that street is the woman who gets the children home, and she would trade every leap Packy ever praised for one boring afternoon. The founder’s virtue, the short-seller’s prey, the actuary’s enemy, the mother’s daily weather.
The rival Packy fights, he fights by name. The degrowther, the doomer, the man who says use less and want less and accept the limit. Packy can argue with that man all day, and he does, because they share a board. Both care about the planet his children inherit. Both want the children fed. They disagree about the road, and a shared road allows a fight.
The rival he does not name is the one his system has no seat for. The contemplative. The man of enough. The monk who thinks the whole frame of more is the error, who would tell Packy that the terror of insignificance is the thing to cure, not feed, and that a man chasing the future to escape his own smallness has mistaken the chase for a life. Packy can rebut the degrowther because the degrowther wants the same future built differently. He cannot rebut the man who refuses the future as the place where worth lives. There is no level for the monk in the Great Online Game. The herder does not log on. The mother in the shelled city is not playing. Packy’s scheme reaches the whole world it can see, and the part it cannot see is the part that measures a life by something other than what gets added to it.
He carries more self-knowledge than most men in his trade. He calls optimism his double-edged sword. To a fault, he says, and the phrase admits the cost. He knows the temperament can mislead him on a fact, and he checks the facts. What he treats as a bias to correct, Becker treats as a faith to examine. Packy thinks his optimism a lens that runs a little warm and needs adjusting. He does not yet hold it as a hero system, a structure raised against a fear, the thing standing between him and the seven empty chairs. The honesty is real and it stops at the right place, the place where looking further might cost him the warmth that gets him out of bed.
Three coordinates, then. His hero is the builder who leaves the world heavier than he found it, the founder who treats the impossible as merely hard, the man who beats the terror of nothingness by pouring himself into what comes next and trusting the future to hold what he made. The rival he fights without naming is the man of limit, the contemplative who finds his immortality in renunciation and accepting the given, the figure who has no slot in a scheme where worth lives in the next thing built. And the cost his ledger cannot price is the sufficiency of the present. His books have a column for what gets made and no column for what is already whole. He cannot price the chance that a man might count at rest, that the seven people at trivia night were enough, that a life which adds nothing to the pile is not for that reason small.
