First, thank you. The messages, the gifts, the pictures, the meals, the stories, the words of encouragement since the baby arrived. I haven't been able to respond to everyone, but I felt all of it. That meant more than I expected.

My whole life people told me I had potential.

Four weeks into paternity leave, and I'm mainly doing diapers, garbage, reheating Factor meals, refilling water bottles, timing naps, and Googling "is this normal" at 3 am, trying to keep everyone alive and well. I wouldn't trade any of it. Watching him figure out the world is the best thing I've ever seen.

Right now, I don't feel like I'm killing it, though.

Healthy baby, happy home, the business went better than I had any right to expect in year one. And still, I'm tired, I have more questions than answers about what's next, and I thought I'd have more of this sorted by now.

This was the first week I started coming up for air. A bit more sleep, a bit more time online, and suddenly the world rushed back in.

The first thing I noticed was the extremes.

On one end, people crushing it. CEOs. Founders who raised. Companies that sold. IPOs, awards, and accolades. On the other end, layoffs, and people navigating a job market where the signal is harder and harder to find.

And then there's where I actually am. Paternity leave. Self-employed. Supposed to be on pause. Analytical brain still running but no energy to act on any of it. Like being on a sabbatical, but instead of time and energy to think, you're running on the least sleep you've had in years.

As I've been talking to people across the whole spectrum, what strikes me is that nobody has a clean read right now.

A VC friend told me he's struggling to know how to place bets. He mentioned OpenAI’s current raise, and the numbers are so large they've stopped feeling real. Raises keep getting bigger and more concentrated, even as AI makes it cheaper and faster to build. And then a new model drops, likely wiping out a cohort of startups that raised barely six months earlier. The data to justify the bets barely exists.

A founder I know, a YC alum who has built multiple companies, is watching an entire generation build AI-first products before they've found a real problem to solve. Technology seeking a solution instead of the other way around. He's seen this pattern. He knows how it likely ends for most of them.

Another friend is tinkering on a prototype in the margins of a day job he's not sure has a long future, not sure the side project will pan out, not sure he has the DNA to go all-in. Happy-ish. Stuck-ish.

And someone else just trying to get a foot in the door is sending applications into the void and hearing nothing back, because the postings and the applications are increasingly both AI-generated, and getting a real signal back is harder than it's ever been.

The investor hesitates. The builder questions. The operator hedges. The job seeker waits. The confusion isn't yours alone. It's systemic. Nobody is coming to sort it out for you.

Every time I read one of these stories about industry disruption, I think about a man I knew.

Ten years ago, I watched him lose his job. Sixty, immigrant, thirty-plus years as a news cameraman, very little English. Technology made his role redundant. He hadn't done anything wrong. The game just changed around him.

What got me wasn't the economics of it. It was the helplessness. Someone doing everything right, giving everything he had, and still getting swept out by something so far beyond his control late in his life.

It left a mark. But he was sixty, and I was in my twenties. There was enough distance to make it feel like someone else's chapter. Something that happened to people who hadn't kept up.

That was ten years ago.

The people I'm hearing from now aren't cameramen at the end of long careers. They're data analysts, UX researchers, developers, investors, and founders. Most of them are younger with a lot more life to navigate.

The skill ceiling on safe keeps moving. Nothing feels sacred. Not the seat you're in, not the one you're trying to take, not the bets you're trying to place.

The cameraman used to feel like an edge case. He's starting to look like the early warning.

And I'd be lying if I said I don't think about where I fit in that picture.

I have two dependents now. I live in Southern California. I left my job to build something of my own, and it worked, but I'm still figuring out what comes next. My wife is carrying more than her share of our new chapter right now and doing it with a grace I'm not sure I could match, which makes me feel so fortunate. But underneath all the career questions, the what-do-I-build and who-do-I-build-it-with questions, there's likely a simple fear.

What if it dries up? What if AI reshapes the opportunities I was counting on? What if the world changes and opportunities go away? What if I'm standing at my son's career day without a good answer?

If I'm honest, some days I want to build an AI startup. Some days, I want to click on one of those Instagram posts of a farmhouse in Provence and disappear to a simpler life. Sometimes both in the same hour.

That back and forth between ambition and escape, between fear and groundedness, is what this moment actually feels like sometimes.

If you're reading this, you're probably somewhere in that same oscillation. Maybe not the same circumstances. But the same underlying question: how do you think clearly about what's next when nothing feels stable, and the noise keeps getting louder?

The hard part isn't the headlines. It's trying to think clearly inside a system that isn't built for your clarity. The most alarming prediction gets the most reach regardless of whether it's true. And AI is moving faster than social media ever did.

Think about what hits you before 8 am. A geopolitical crisis. A major market move. An AI announcement that makes something you built last year feel obsolete. By the time you sit down to make a real decision about your career, your business, your next move, you're already corrupted.

The fear of losing your footing hits your body the same whether the threat is real or imagined. The sleeplessness, the difficulty thinking straight, the low-grade dread that something is coming and you can't quite see it yet. That's your nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do. The problem is that it was built for a world that moved a lot slower than this one. It can't tell the difference between a real threat and a news cycle.

Urgency isn't always accuracy.

The answer isn't new. The body responds to the same things it always has. Slow it down with movement, sleep, and real conversation, and you can think again. Let it run hot on a diet of crises and predictions, and you're making the most consequential decisions of your decade from inside a fog and calling it strategy.

The volume isn't going down any time soon. So the question is: what are you doing to stay clear inside the noise?

For me, right now it's a twenty-minute walk. No podcast. No news. Just the walk. That's it. That's all I've got.

If you make your next move out of pressure, or just to stay visible, and it works, will it actually mean anything to you?

I'm in the middle of all of this right now. Running on no sleep, two people depending on me, and a business I'm still figuring out how to grow. I don't know what the next move is yet.

I don't want to make it from fear. And I don't want to look back at this decade and realize I was so busy keeping up that I forgot to ask where I was running.

My son is going to ask me one day what I did with this time. I want to have a real answer.

Do you?

Hit reply. I'm genuinely asking what's working for you.

Eric