EOD: What really fucking matters?

Shaken ambition in the wake of great trauma is a common theme among people and, more specifically, entrepreneurs, though what emerges from the sludge looks different for everyone.

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Christine Droney, a licensed clinical social worker in Pennsylvania specializing in grief and palliative care, explains that “the process of grieving is very taxing on our brains and on our bodies.” It follows, then, that motivation is frequently impacted by it, in some way or another: “It can be a lack of motivation, or it can propel you forward, or it can do both.”

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Sage Ke’alohilani Quiamno, founder turned strategic advisor and angel investor for tech and social impact companies, found out her grandfather died during a national roadshow to get her startup into new markets…“Hawaiian culture is about the collective and not about the self. But sometimes that boundary can lose itself as we’re continuing to work because we’re living under capitalist American Western society, where it’s take, take, take or give, give, give.”

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Dan Simons is the creator and co-owner of Farmers Restaurant Group. After a wakeboarding accident left him with a severe concussion in 2019 — resulting in years of symptoms like headaches, confusion, fatigue, irritability, anxiety, depression, and more — the hustle of restaurant culture was setting his recovery back…Today, rather than expanding his business, Simons is more focused on deepening the quality of his work.

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If ambition once meant striving without end, perhaps grief’s hardest gift is the reminder that our lives’ work is not just to achieve, but to honor the fragile, fleeting time we are given, and the ups and downs along the way. Grief may slow us, soften us, or even undo us — but it can also teach us to move forward with a strength measured in meaning, and perhaps a strength that feels a little different than before.

Mental illness is largely episodic and invisible. “We can’t take a picture of depression [or] anxiety,” said Erwin Estigarribia, CEO of Headlamp Health. “Measuring it reliably in the blood is something that we’re not able to do due to the blood-brain barrier, which essentially isolates the organ of interest that we’re interested in studying.” Tools that better isolate and interpret the contributing factors behind psychiatric conditions could drive a sea change for millions of people simply trying to get through each day.

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Williams said much of recent A.I. in mental health has focused on automation, but Lumos is built differently. “It’s structured to help identify responder versus nonresponder populations way earlier in development,” he said. “Then, leveraging that longitudinal, real-world and behavioral data informs trial design and treatment matching.”

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Robin Williams, in his role as Patch Adams in the 1998 film about the real-life physician, once said, “Our job is improving the quality of life, not just delaying death.” Through Headlamp, Estigarribia and his team are trying to live up to that idea. “If I don’t feel safe enough for [Lumos] to be used by my own mother, then it’s not something that we can deploy,” he said.