Good Grief

Last Friday, July 10th. Around 1pm.

I was sitting at my computer after an intense week in Kansas for the Fourth of July holiday here in the States. And for 10 minutes, I just had to stop and stare out the window.

I wasn’t feeling great. But not horrible either.

It was one of those weeks where the weight of it all just felt heavy. I wish that didn’t happen as often as it does. But some weeks it just does.

ONE IDEA I’M SITTING WITH

For those of us in venture leadership, the last few years have been a lot.

COVID.
VC winter.
The AI reset.
Back to back to back.

And that’s before factoring in day-to-day stress.

The employee who left and took something with them when they walked out the door. The founder you couldn’t quite make it work with. The funding for your organization that didn’t come. The family member who got sick. The one you lost. The daily pull between work and the people you love most, and the quiet guilt of never feeling fully present in either place.

There are real wins too. Moments of light that feel genuinely incredible. They’re what keep us going.

But underneath all of it, there’s a drum beat that never stops.

For a long time, we labeled that never-ending beat as stress. The research is starting to call it something else.

Grief.

Not the grief of a single moment or loss. Something quieter than that. Grief sits. It accumulates. It changes the way you carry yourself coming through a door. It’s why some weeks, on a Friday afternoon, you find yourself at your desk and just have to stop for a while.

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest whose writing I keep returning to. Even if you aren’t a practicing Christian, I find what he points toward genuinely useful for anyone trying to lead well in a hard season.

Rohr talks about the cost of building a life on external validation. On who approved of what you did today. On whether you’re climbing or falling. He quotes Thomas Merton: “You spend your whole life climbing the ladder of success, and when you get to the top, you realize there’s nothing up there. But until you’re up there, you think there is.”

That’s not just a spiritual observation. For those of us in this work, it’s a description of the last five years.

We climbed. The ladder moved. We climbed again. In large part because that felt like the easiest way to survive.

And somewhere in all of that climbing, grief was accumulating under the surface.

Most of us haven’t realized it because we’ve kept moving. Kept performing. Kept showing up to the next meeting, the next cohort, the next board conversation, the next everything. Because that’s what we do. Because stopping feels more dangerous than exhaustion.

But grief doesn’t disappear because we outrun it. It just changes shape. It starts manifesting in everyday life. In the weeks when the weight just feels heavy and we can’t entirely explain why.

But here’s what Rohr also believes. And this is the part that really speaks to me.

Grief, named and moved through, produces something.

Not immediately. Not cleanly. But over time, the people who’ve sat with their grief rather than outrun it tend to develop something you can’t manufacture any other way. A depth. A kind of compassion that only comes from having been in the hard place yourself. A different way of leading. Less about proving, more about seeing. Less about climbing, more about accompanying.

This framing means that the accumulation of these last few years isn’t just dead weight or a burden you’re meant to carry forever.

It might actually be the key to personal formation.

The idea that the losses, the hard seasons, the back to back to back of it, aren’t interruptions to your story. They are the story. They are what’s making you into the kind of leader your founders actually need. Not the polished version. The real one. The one who has sat at their desk on a Friday afternoon and knows what that particular kind of heavy feels like.

The founder sitting across from you who can’t explain why they’re struggling. You know something about that now. Not from a book. But from your lived experience these last few years. That’s everything.

But you can’t share that gift without first growing yourself.

Recognizing your grief.

Then being formed by it.

All said by someone who is very much in it with you.

With love and trust,

Pat

TWO QUESTIONS I’M ASKING

How much news is too much news?

Roughly two-thirds of Americans check the news several times a day.Some of us check several times an hour. And when we get there, the average engaged time with a news article is 57 seconds.

I’ve been guilty of it lately. Constantly pulled into what’s happening with Iran. Trump. Epstein. AI. Elon. It never stops. And I keep going back for more, the way you keep touching a bruise to see if it still hurts.

So I finally asked the question: How much news is too much?

Turns out there’s an actual answer. UCLA’s mental health program recommends at most two 30-minute windows per day.One hour, total. Not first thing in the morning, because it sets your stress posture for the entire day. And not right before bed, because it sends your mind racing when it should be letting go.

The American Psychological Association has a name for what happens past that line.Media saturation overload. The signs are simpler than I expected. Intrusive thoughts about current events throughout the day. Anxiety that lingers after you put the phone down. Perseverating on a story you read hours ago.

Yet the recommendation isn’t to quit the news. It’s to stop grazing on it. Pick your window. Read deliberately. Which brings me to what I found more useful:

What kind of news is helpful news?

While I was digging into all of this, I came across what some of the smartest people in journalism are seeing.Long-form is coming back. Despite everything we’ve been told about attention spans, the average top-performing YouTube video now runs 20 minutes. Sixty-one percent of podcast listeners prefer episodes over an hour. Nonfiction book sales are projected to grow 25 percent in 2026. Substack readers spend an average of 12 minutes with a single newsletter.

And that same Pew research that found we spend 57 seconds with a news article also found we spend more than twice that with long-form pieces on our phones. The device that was supposed to have destroyed our attention.

The same people checking headlines all day are also choosing to sit with one idea for an hour. The appetite for depth never went anywhere. The headlines just crowded it out.

It seems like we don’t actually want more information. We want more understanding.

The smartest people I know have already figured this out. They didn’t quit the news. They traded the firehose for the well. Fewer things, read slower, chosen deliberately. One long piece that helps you actually understand something beats 40 headlines that just keep you agitated.

The publishing industry is quietly rebuilding itself around this. And honestly, so am I. It’s part of why this newsletter looks the way it does.

THREE THINGS I’M READING

My friend Zach Weisfeld runs Ignite, and twice a year he does something I love. He invites the spouses of his founders to a session of their own.They talk about the sacrifices, the uncertainty, and the pride around what it actually means to be married to someone building a company. His line that stuck with me: Some of the most important founders in every startup are the ones who never appear on the cap table. If you run a program, steal this idea. The founders’ partners carry the company too.

An explorer made the case in The Telegraph that the answer for young people isn’t just getting off their phones. It’s getting moving. After everything above about news diets, this lands as the other half of the equation. It’s not enough to remove the source of your stress. You have to replace it with something that asks more of you.

GVN member AlphaLab put together something genuinely useful and generous: a founder’s guide to whether you even need an accelerator.It goes over accelerator programs, mentorship, capital, and how to think about what you actually need at your stage. It takes some confidence for an accelerator to publish that question honestly. Worth sharing with any founder standing at that decision.