Hi Reader -

Last week I made fun of typewriters. This week, a confession: I once got misty-eyed over a steam engine.

I was maybe 6 when the last steam engine came through my ancestral village of Nanjangud in 1990 or so. My uncle took me to see it. I remember the smoke first. It should have felt dirty and loud. Instead it felt oddly restful.

The technical term, I would learn later in life, was 'wistful.'

Then I heard the chugging, which I was sure would live rent-free in my head for the rest of my life.

Then the whistle. I remember thinking it was heartbreakingly cruel that nobody would ever hear that sound again.

Years later, in my travel writing days, I kept chasing that feeling of nostalgia-slipping-away. I wrote about a meter gauge train line on its way out and a century old toy train that still runs on steam.​

Sigh, even nostalgia isnt what it used to be, or so I used to say.

Anywayyy, those trips taught me something: nostalgia is a liar. A charming one, but a liar.

Steam engines were filthy, slow, and brutal work for the people who kept them running. Nobody shoveling coal on that footplate into the fire for 10 hours a day was romanticizing anything.

We don't miss the steam engine. We miss who we were, standing next to it.

Now I'm watching other things I love go the same way....

I miss writing every line of an ad by hand. Knowing a spreadsheet so well you could feel a broken formula. I miss obsessing with a designer for three days on one static to make every pixel of it sing.

I'll miss some of that. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

There are two cheap ways out of feeling it.

The first is the cheerleader. Every change is "exciting," every old skill was "inefficient anyway," and anyone who feels a pang "just doesn't get it." You've seen this person on LinkedIn. They have a ring light and a 14-part thread about it.

The second is the mourner. Keep the typewriter on the table, romanticize 2019, claim that nothing beats 'doing things by hand' and call everything new "AI slop"(forgetting how agonizingly annoying the 'doing it by hand' always was).

One skips the grief by cheering. The other skips it by staying in the past.

The harder thing is to feel the grief fully, and then get on the train anyway.

The steam engine died. The railway didn't. It got faster, and it carries more people to more places than steam ever could.

Typewriters died. Carrier pigeons are no longer in vogue. 'Doing things by hand on the internet' will soon be no more in an age of AI.

The past always dies. That's not a tragedy. It's reality. Welcome to real life. :)

The only choice you get to make is how you deal with it: you can stay nostalgic and miss what will never come back, or you can grieve and honor all that you loved and appreciated about the past: and still appreciate the future.

​

Anywayyy, if you're spending $50k+/month and want a team that respects the legacy of direct response history - and still embraces what is new with AI, hit reply and say "STEAM" and we'll talk.

Or don't. I'm sure the steam engine is coming back any moment now.

Later,
Shamanth

P.S. I just had Karina Tukanova on Intelligent Artifice. She found a stretching app's best untapped audience by scrolling TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit comments, not by running another customer call. We talked about research, AI as a second brain, and why handing 100% of ad production to AI gets you slop. Check out the episode here.