I chose that title on the fly because I'm listening to the "decade playlist" that Spotify has auto-generated for me, but it also reflects what I wanted to chat about for this post, the first of this new year and decade (which should have been the last of the previous, but that's what happens when you're busy having fun).
I've seen a lot of people, both friends and media outlets, talking about the decade that began on 1 January 2010 and ended last week, but the more I thought about these past ten years, the more I had to expand my definition to include 2009, because in so many ways that's when a lot of the things I'm doing started.
The main one is dating - I'd asked women out before then, but until 2009 I hadn't been on a proper date, where both parties knew and accepted that it was intended to be such. I'd been on various dating websites before then, but what clicked was getting onto the Guardian's Soulmates service, and then taking great care to write a decent profile - the first woman I went out with started strong, leading to four dates and kisses (including a makeout session at Angel Tube Station a week before I turned 30), but I can't say I maintained that momentum for the next few years. There were a few more women I went on multiple dates with, but none so fun until I met my girlfriend in mid-2019 - and as she reads this blog sometimes, she'll be happy to hear that she was worth the wait.
[Awwwww]
2009 also marked the start of my travels, at least in their current form. I'd had some good trips in the years before then, when I had lived in Southend, but none of those had been very far afield, and as I grew more concerned about saving what little money I earned I found it harder to justify spending on train trips and hotel stays to increasingly marginal spots in Southeast England. So it took romantic rejection in 2009 to finally say, "Fuck it," and book a week away in Paris.
Reader, it was amazing. I know there are those who claim that Paris is overrated, but my experiences with the City of Light have been uniformly wonderful. I decamped there with my shoulder bag, a week's change of clothes, and four books - I spent that week traipsing around eating good food, reading obsessively and hitting as many sights as I could stand. I even managed a couple nights up in Normandy to see the D-Day Beaches and the Bayeux Tapestry.
That trip set the template for others that I took in the following years, notably Singapore, Portland, Buenos Aires and Tokyo: I would decamp alone (more or less), and spend my days exploring, eating and most of all, reading. By then I'd gotten a smartphone and encountered the delights of reading Kindle books on it, so I didn't have to repeat my feat from Paris of finishing my fourth book with a couple days to spare and needing to find a new one.
Now that I'm with someone, I'm looking forward to having a travel buddy, and eventually to taking any notional children on interesting adventures.
The other big thing that started in 2009 was my running, and generally my approach to fitness, though I think it only kicked into high gear a couple years later when I started working with my first trainer. But since then I've consistently been a member of a gym, and for a lot of the time I've also had a trainer to work with, usually preparing for a big run. I've eased off a little on the longer-distance runs, because I don't enjoy how they eat my life, but fitness remains something I crave (even if my diet doesn't quite show it).
There were a couple of big work transitions during the decade, starting in 2011 when I was made redundant from my job at the Regulatory Affairs Journals, where I'd been working (mostly unhappily) for five years, and landed instead at Informa Telecoms & Media. That marked a transition from healthcare, which had been the focus of my career from the start, and from journalism, which had been the focus almost as long. Instead I found myself working on tech, and as an analyst rather than a reporter, a transition that suited me down to the ground.
To put it another way, I hadn't understood how stimulating and rewarding a job could be, until I found one I was actually good at. Though it would have been nice if it had been more financially rewarding.
The other big work transition was in 2017, when I was abruptly made redundant from that telecoms and tech analysis job. I'd been unhappy in my team, and at the company, for about a year, so the change, while shocking at the time, was ultimately for the best. The aftermath let me go back to London for an extended period in early 2018, earning more than I had in my previous London jobs; it also let me experience the freelance life for a short period, and led to the current job that I have.
Speaking of money, despite being paid terribly at Informa, by 2011 I had managed to draw down my student loans and increase my savings enough to get back to a positive net worth, while still enjoying the odd international trip. By the time I was laid off from Ovum in 2017, I had more in the bank than I was earning per year, which felt quite clever.
And last, but not least, I think in the past decade I turned a corner with my writing. I started paying more attention to story structure, and craft in general, which I believe led to my first paying credit in 2013. I branched out from novels and short stories to screenwriting and novellas, and while I'm not quite there with getting stories accepted regularly (and frankly I could do with submitting them more), I'm proud of the stories I have written, especially in the last couple of years, so as long as I keep up that momentum, I think I'll find some success.
Coming into this new year, and decade, there are things to be optimistic about, even if the global geopolitical situation is getting more chaotic. That said, one doesn't need to wait for the start of a new decade, or new year, or even new week, to target their future - Chris Hardwick may have been tarnished for me by his own #MeToo moment, but he loomed quite large in the past decade because of his book, the Nerdist Way, and its key message was "Go out and do the thing you love."
So I'm going to plug away at all the things I love, whether or not I reach them, because life would be boring without them.
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