Nathanael Yellis

I've just returned to the normal routine after a 30-day sabbatical from work. It was great to completely disconnect from my job: no Gmails, Slacks, or Zooms. For two weeks of the sabbatical, I kept my normal information habits: Gmail and podcasts and reading online. Not working opened up even more time for this sort of thing and my brain craved it. During our annual ski week, most of my morning checks of the snow conditions turned into email and news reading. At the halfway mark, my sabbatical brain felt and awful lot like my working brain. It was taking on slightly less information, but in the same methods and at the same pace.

For the last month, I've been on a sabbatical from work and have used the time to travel. We spent a week in Maine, skiing, about ten days in Tennessee and the Dominican Republic, and I managed a solo sojourn to Vermont for some skiing. My daily life is local: I can often manage a full week within a few hundred yards of my house; this series of journeys changes that pace!

Last week, I listening to a great book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer. I grabbed it from HubSpot's free books program because I thought it would help me calm down and, amidst my ongoing sabbatical from HubSpot, think about structures for keeping my work in its proper place. The title made it seem like the sort of book that would help me reconsider my constant racing to manage the calendar and inbox and my increasing work evenings.

History may not repeat, but it rhymes. It's not hard to see the echoes of the 1970s today: inflation, foreign wars, recalibrating political coalitions, one-term GOP presidents... there may be lessons to learn from what happened then to what might happen now.

This week has been a pretty busy one for me: I spent the week doing the normal consulting of my HubSpot customers and preparing my team to cover that work during my 30-day sabbatical, which starts today. It's part of the fairly cushy benefits you get when working for a software company: after five years of unlimited vacation, I'm granted a 30-day sabbatical.

Who can forget the invasion of Afghanistan in the months after 9/11 or the ignoble end to it in August 2021?

Whenever you see hockey-stick growth, you have to wonder why. In 2010, why did everything need to be a daily deals website? Why did every category suddenly need new luxury DTC brands? Why is everyone on Tiktok?

Are things getting better or worse? By some measures, now is the best time ever to be alive: people have never been healthier or wealthier or longer-lived; by other measures, it seems grim: teenagers, especially girls, have never been more depressed or suicidal, and people of all ages report fewer real friends and participation in robust communities. We're coming apart, inside and out, at a time when we might expect to be doing our best.