Nathanael Yellis

Earlier this week, I caught this podcast from Arthur Brooks on how to quit being addicted to your phone. It brought me back to 2017, when I had to noodle up a fake business to run on HubSpot's software as part of my new hire training. I took a good idea, turning your phone off for a day a week, and made it into one of those vague personal coaching outfits: theoretically, you could've paid me to tell you to turn your phone off. Spoiler alert! A digital sabbath, like my old "one day disconnect" idea, is one Brooks's five tips to curing your phone addiction. His others include phone-free mornings, evenings, bedrooms, mealtimes, and a few weekends throughout the year. While he lards it up with neuroscience and social science "studies," the core insight is commonsensical: if you stop using your phone all the time, then you won't feel the need to use your phone all the time.

Between October and January, I'm working in a new way. Instead of architecting solutions for any HubSpot-related technical challenge, I'm working as a forward-deployed architect for our AI features. In practice, this means I am configuring a specific set of our software's tools for our customers to use them better. The work is more narrow, much more hands-on, and thus deeper than my usual work. I'm about six weeks in, and am just arriving at my first few practical lessons. Among which: it's way easier to make recommendations on how to configure the software than it is to actually configure the software in a way that's really useful. That may not be surprising, but for someone who has spent eight years (and counting!) in an advisory position, it's been a notable lesson to learn.

Maybe it was due to Halloween. A few Saturdays ago, on my way back from Lowe's, I drove through one of those "No Kings" protests. The people had a fair amount of the usual political protest stuff: overly-detailed signs, pins identifying all manner of political opinions, and megaphones. This particular assemblage had something less frequently seen at these sorts of things: inflatable costumes. And not the big rats you see at a typical labor union protest. These were the exact things some kids in the neighborhood used for trick-or-treating: dinosaurs, aliens, and the like. Judging from the media coverage, a hallmark of the protests across the nation was their silliness. I didn't think much of it until I read an overly earnest explanation, written with the specific flavor of confidence only possible with LLMs, of how silliness is exactly the thing this moment requires of protest politics.

I used to be a Halloween agnostic. I didn't like the macabre decorations; for kids trick-or-treating was fine, but I didn't enjoy following them around. It's since grown on me. Now, I'm a fan. Here's why.

In the Spring, I received a mailer from my summer camp. In it, they tell you about what's new and who will be the summer camp staff this summer. As a kid and a counselor, that list of names was catnip: a look-ahead to who I'd be hanging out with all summer. In the mailer, they print the guys' names, their colleges or high schools, and the number of years they've been at the camp. Reading this year's, I noticed a few absences on the list. Not of people, it's been a long while since I recognized the staff, but of colleges. It wasn't just that the camp hire people from different places, it turned out that a few of the mid-Atlantic's Christian and liberal arts schools have shuttered completely.

In these emails, I've done my fair share of handwringing about politics. A lot of what I've written and linked to reflected headlines, not underlying reality. (The emails from 2015-6 reflected my very slow realization that it was time to find a real job, outside of politics.) A few of the blog archives hold up: Romney went from mainstream villain to hero, the gender divide in politics makes the right more male than ever, and my little first-hand glimpse of whatever it was, now over a decade old, still comes to mind when I read the news. Something has happened, or is happening, on the American right.

A few nights ago, around the proverbial campfire, a guy remarked that he found halloween decorations dark and foreboding—evil. Playing the humorous contrarian, I had to quickly make up a reason to like the skulls, skeletons, and severed pumpkin heads popping up all around this end of suburbia. What I said was that, in a culture where we continually pretend death doesn't exist, it's refreshing that for a few weeks leading up to All Hallow's Eve, we manage to face our deepest fear and stare death in the face. And, sure, while these silly decorations may be playing with death as a motif, I think we'd rather acknowledge death unseriously than to go the full year without acknowledging it at all. While not intended to be all that serious, upon reflection, I think this bit of repartee may hold up.

If you’ve been around these parts for a while, you’ve read about rest, pausing, and disconnecting. In a culture of workism and busyness, I enjoy playing the contrarian. But this dichotomy of mental orientation is a healthy corrective: state vs. action. Being state-orientated is a mode of internal inquiry about how you are doing and feeling, a continual inquiry into your emotions. Doubtless a state-orientation can be helpful, but you can easily visualize the lurking downward spiral: if the answer to a state inquiry is negative, then off you go ruminating on the bad feelings, causing you to feel even worse. Seldom does the adventure of asking if you’re happy spark a moment of happiness.

What are you up to this weekend? I'm heading to camp. No, that's not the name of a lake house, nor am I going to sleep in a tent. I'm taking my oldest son to the ol' summer camp. The place I was every summer from age 8 until 21 (with a fun reprise the summer I turned 23). From ages 8 to 13, I spent two weeks there, from then it was four weeks, then eight, then eleven—which was the upper limit of time the staff could be there.