by Nathan Coumbe

Digital dementia

Psychologists also call it digital brain rot.

It describes the forgetfulness, the inability to focus on anything meaningful, the brain fog, and the mental fatigue caused by our chronic overuse of smartphones, digital devices, online games, and social media.

It’s even been shown to reduce the gray matter in our brains associated with emotional regulation, decision-making, and creativity.

The good news is that it only takes a few days to bounce back, but it can be a tough few days.

Try a digital declutter or the phone-foyer method. Find something that works for you, but for your sake and that of future generations, do something.

Everyone worried TV would rot our brains, but smartphones actually are. We know these devices are purpose-built for addiction and harm.

Now is the time to break the cycle.

H/t to Brad Stulberg.

by Nathan Coumbe

Are you good enough?

That question is impossible to answer. It’s missing a vital fragment.

“At what?”

Until you know what you need to measure yourself against, there’s no point in measuring at all.

by Nathan Coumbe

History is tragedy, not melodrama

One of my professors in college, a tiny little man from the Delta named Dr. Bo Morgan, said one of the most accurate and poignant statements about history to all of us historians-in-training on our first day in his class:

“History is tragedy, not melodrama.”

Melodrama: think of all the westerns from the 1950s and 60s. There were good guys and bad guys. And you could easily see who was who.

Tragedy: real people with real flaws acting the way humans do… And their flaws destroy them in the end.

History isn’t a Western, as much as our politicians would like to treat it that way. There are rarely obvious villains and heroic good guys that you can easily spot. It’s full of good people doing bad things and bad people doing good things. Flawed humans acting as such.

Acknowledging the bad things we’ve done doesn’t harm America. It doesn’t make America or Americans “bad.”

Acknowledging the Holocaust doesn’t make all Germans or Germany bad. Why would recognizing our history of systemic racism or chattel slavery or the destruction of Native Americans harm the US?

If anything, acknowledging it helps us because we can learn from it and improve the present.

There is no point in erasing or hiding any of it except to please a small fringe on one side of the aisle.

And it’s also true that labeling our country as pure evil is equally wrong, something an equally tiny fringe of extreme people on the other side has tried to do as well.

History is tragedy, not melodrama.

This post was inspired by Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter from March 28.

by Nathan Coumbe

The first rule in juggling…

Never lunge for the ball.

If you make a bad throw, just let it drop. Then start over.

Learning to juggle taught me how to handle life: sometimes you make a bad throw.

Sometimes you take on one too many projects. Or Murphy’s Law derails your plans.

Don’t lunge to save things. Let them drop.

Reset, and begin anew.

by Nathan Coumbe

What kind of fear is it?

Is this fear keeping you safe?

Or is it the kind of fear that’s preventing you from being your best?

Learn to differentiate between the two.

Inspiration

by Nathan Coumbe

Do you know a virtuous person?

Who do you know who is courageous?

Wise?

Disciplined?

Just?

Do you know anyone who embodies all four of these cardinal virtues?

How much better would things be if you had a boss like this? A coworker or employee?

How would the world improve if we had leaders like this?

It’s hard to succeed with only one or two. You need all four to be truly effective.

The German soldiers who steamrolled Europe were courageous and disciplined. But they were brave and disciplined for the most unwise and unjust of reasons.

You can probably think of several people who were incredibly wise… But who lacked the courage to stand up and do the right thing when the time called for action.

We need more virtuous people in the world.

They aren’t born this way. They make themselves so.

by Nathan Coumbe

AI isn’t taking your job

…at least not yet.

I use AI almost every day to assist with work and learn new topics (as part of my job) that I’m unfamiliar with. I read diligently to stay up-to-date on the latest developments, so I can learn how to use it more effectively.

AI will become (if it hasn’t already), and continue to be, a large portion of all of our lives.

However, we’re receiving a significant amount of misinformation about what’s happening and the effects it’s having on workers. Some of it is outright deception, while some is simply lazy reporting.

First, the deception.

The CEOs of these massive tech companies (e.g., Dario Amodei, Sam Altman) are brilliant business people who’ve created mind-boggling products. But they’re hemorrhaging cash trying to make their programs more powerful…

And after years of unbelievable growth and progress, they’re failing. The scaling law on which they used to project LLM growth is slowing down, and the improvements are now incremental, rather than exponential.

This is a serious financial problem for them. They need to keep their current investors engaged, and they need new investors to infuse them with additional capital. So what do they do?

They go on cable news shows or podcasts and claim that their AI software will replace all entry-level workers (10-20% of the workforce) within a matter of months.1 It just isn’t true.

But you wouldn’t know that from the news you’re consuming. They’ve bought into this story hook, line, and sinker.

Which brings me to my accusation of lazy reporting. Headlines like “Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs” and “AI is Replacing 10 million Workers” (I made that one up) are attention-grabbing… But untrue.

These media companies, like the AI companies they write about, need to make money. They do that by getting as many eyes on their work as possible. And the best way to do that is to scare people into giving them attention… Even if the claims are untrue or misleading.

To paraphrase Ryan Holiday, who warned us about this years ago: “Trust them… They’re lying.”

It is true that computer science graduates are having a much harder time finding jobs at the moment. And it’s true that there have been massive layoffs in the tech sector.

It’s also true that the companies doing these layoffs are investing more of their money and efforts in AI. But AI is not the cause of this, nor is it replacing those who’ve been laid off.

Here’s what’s actually happening:

During the pandemic, these tech companies went on a massive hiring spree—they simply overhired. Now they’re bloated, and the quickest way to reduce the bloat and (temporarily) increase shareholder value is to shed programmers left and right.

At the same time, the tech sector itself is contracting, which means there are fewer jobs for all the newly minted computer science graduates.

This has historical precedence. The same thing happened in 2008 during the financial crisis. And it happened before that during the dot-com bust at the turn of the century.

The number of people entering the computer science field fluctuates in response to the economy. There’s a tech boom, prompting more people to enter the field. Then the sector contracts, and all those people get laid off, which in turn reduces the number of people entering the field.

Until the next boom.

Contrary to what many journalists have written, these people aren’t being replaced by AI. They’re simply being let go because companies overhired during the pandemic or because the companies are refocusing on AI.

However, that refocus, coupled with layoffs and fewer job openings, has led them to conflate the two, concluding that these computer science graduates are being replaced by AI.

This simply isn’t true. That may happen in the 2030s, but it’s not happening right now.

I’ve been guilty of buying into this hysteria too, as you can see in my piece on job hunting in 2025. And I’m here to tell you I was wrong in what I wrote about AI replacing workers in that piece.

All that to say this: Read AI journalism with a healthy dose of skepticism right now. And take any apocalyptic predictions with a grain of salt.

  1. Dario Amodei actually said this in an interview with Anderson Cooper and, ironically, claimed to be worried about it… Which begs the question: if you’re worried about it, why do you continue to do it?

    Why doesn’t he just stop if it actually worries him? It’s his company. ↩︎
by Nathan Coumbe

Four questions

What are we measuring?

How are we measuring it?

Should we be measuring this?

And, most importantly, are we sure we measuring the right things?

Ignore Goodhart’s Law at your own peril.

by Nathan Coumbe

Perfectionism hinders progress

We all have a tendency to strive for perfection. But it’s often a trap that keeps us from reaping any rewards at all.

Case in point:

I used to write morning pages each day to clear my mental clutter and get ideas flowing for the day. And, like their creator, Julia Cameron prescribed, I did them longhand on 8.5″ x 11″ sheets of paper first thing upon waking.

But doing it this way took me nearly an hour each morning. Not a problem when I was laid off and unemployed, but quite difficult on a regular, full day when I also needed to cook breakfast, help my wife get ready for work at 5 am, and squeeze in a workout.

That was hard enough, but life made it harder.

After I left my two-week ICU stay in 2020 and went home to recover from COVID-19, I found myself dealing with horrible inflammatory issues all throughout my body, including my hands and wrists. This made it difficult, if not impossible, to do much writing by hand.

So I stopped writing morning pages. And as a result, I lost all the benefits of that wonderful mental decluttering each morning and the ease with which new ideas flowed.

I tried here and there to dive back into morning pages—the right way, by hand—for years, but never managed more than a few days before I quit. Frustration, or pain, stopped me from continuing.

But in the back of my mind, I always knew there was a simple solution to this: just type your morning pages out on your computer! Rather than mangle my hands or suffer through a slow hour of writing I didn’t have, I could just type them.

But I resisted, because it wasn’t the right way to do morning pages. Julia was very explicit.

I let perfection prevent me from doing anything at all, when something, however imperfect, would have been better than nothing. By refusing to do them any way other than “perfectly,” I was missing out on 100% of the benefits of the process itself.

Doing no morning pages guaranteed that I got 0% of the benefits of morning pages—no mental declutter and no new ideas to work with during the day.

Doing anything, however imperfectly, had to be better than nothing, right? 25% better? 50%?

In fact, it would have been infinitely better! Because a 1% benefit is infinitely better than a 0% benefit.

Interestingly, I found that writing out my pages by typing them up on my computer not only let me do them on days when time was limited and with no physical pain, but I still got all the benefits that I received when writing them by hand.

I delayed doing a less-than-perfect version of something and missed out on all the benefits of that something rather than doing a “good enough” version of it and getting at least some of the benefits.

We’re all guilty of this.

We do it with our health: if we can’t do the extreme workout perfectly, we just don’t do anything at all. But going for a 15-minute walk is literally infinitely better than vegging out on the couch.

If we can’t stick to our meal plan perfectly (and no one ever can), we say “f–k it,” and eat an entire 18″ pizza. But eating 3 slices of pizza with a little salad is infinitely better than binge eating out of frustration.

We do it with our hobbies: if we can’t set aside two hours to practice our guitar, we let it languish on the stand in the corner. But spending 15 minutes learning a small section of a song is infinitely better than doing nothing.

This all-or-nothing mindset is all too common and the enemy of progress in everything we do. We’re trained in school to live by an A+ mindset: how far away am I from 100%?

But we’d be so much better off if we reversed it and asked, “how far away from 0% am I, and what decision would let me move a notch or two higher?”

I use this tactic all the time with my coaching clients when trying to make behavior changes stick, and it works wonders.

The next time you find yourself battling perfectionism, stop and take a breath. Then ask yourself, “What is 0% on this thing I’m trying to do?” Then figure out what a tiny notch higher on that scale is for you and do that.

Those little points, day after day, add up.

by Nathan Coumbe

Courage is a skill

Seth Godin has arguably one of the best ideas for getting a project started that you’ll ever read. It’s called “First, ten.”

The idea is to share what you’ve created—a book, podcast, newsletter, business idea, whatever—with 10 people who already know and trust you. And if it’s good, they’ll share it with three, five, or ten others. Soon, your idea will spread, and you’ll have the opportunity to do it again.

But sometimes, even that is too terrifying to contemplate. So what can you do instead?

Find a single person. Just one person who loves you unconditionally and whom you trust implicitly. Maybe it’s your sister, your mom, or your best friend.

Share it with them. Not because they’ll praise you for it or because they’ll share it widely. Do it simply to show your fear who’s boss.

Stretch that courage muscle by starting as small as possible. Because bravery is a skill. It can be learned through practice and repetition.