Coming into the final weekend of 2023, it seems like a good time to look back on the whole year and what I got up to. There were highs and lows in my own life, while the wider world just seemed to get more chaotic and unpleasant. The trick, as ever, is separating those two facets from each other and recognizing when things have gone well for me.
Taking each of my personal categories one by one, I can say that writing was a mixed bag but probably a little negative overall. I spent a lot of time revising some short stories and a novel, but didn't write anything new or send (almost anything) out for submission. With regard to the novel revisions, I do think that I made some good progress and I should be set up for making some agent submissions in the new year. Also, I hope that having something out on submission makes it easier for me to move ahead to the next project to write - I just wish I could get the balance of writing, revising and submitting stories right.
On the dating front, 2022 was positive just from the perspective of getting out there again, but 2023 was much better, and indeed has to rank higher than any year of my dating life other than 2019, when I met my ex (2020 and 2021 don't count, because I was in a relationship and because the pandemic kept us at home). The process, at least in the first half - or three quarters - of the year, was as enervating and soul-crushing as usual, especially when one date unmatched me on Hinge the same afternoon that we met. But I wasn't exactly surprised at that, or even particularly sad. On the other hand, I had some very good dates later in the year and moved out of my comfort zone, so that has to rank as a positive.
With regard to health and fitness, another mixed bag. I seem to have gained all the weight that I didn't gain during the pandemic, which was negative. I also seem to have plateaued with what I could achieve in my workouts at home - possibly because I've gotten jaded/lazy, or maybe I just got too habituated to the workouts I was doing. I have, however, started going back to the gym, and may start working with a personal trainer again in the new year.
On the money front, things went on as normal. I think I've generally eaten through the pandemic bonus that came from not paying for the gym, the cleaners or traveling, but the point of money is to use it for things that are important, not to hoard it. Also, no matter what I spent on, I still managed to put away decent amounts into my various retirement accounts, so at least that's going well. As always, I'm hoping to build on that in 2024.
For the category that I variously call "life" or "other", I think I did a good job of getting out of the house. I had a good trip to Italy in February, experiencing skiing in the Alps and enjoying life in Turin outside of the summer/fall months when I usually go. I also spent a nice time with my mom in Rome, and then had a fun couple of days to myself in Munich, making for my first trip without family since Stockholm in 2019. I also managed to get out to a good number of cultural events, both online and in person. Regrettably, I didn't do much decluttering, so once again I have to defer that goal to the coming year.
Work had its ups and downs, as always. I started to learn a new topic, and found ways to marry it to the subjects I know more about, so hopefully that synthesis will help in coming years. I think that's all I want to say about that subject.
Overall, then, my own year was probably decent, if not great. I didn't make as much progress as I'd have liked in some of the more important areas, but I am happy about coming further out of my pandemic-related torpor. I wouldn't say it exactly held me back in 2022, but nevertheless it's been important to start living a little more normally again, although I've continued wearing a mask in many indoor and crowded places, and I've kept up with my Covid boosters.
Looking at the world more widely, it's hard to be as optimistic. Politics has just gotten more chaotic and unpleasant worldwide, but especially in the four countries that are my heart's home: the US, the UK, Italy and Germany. The far right is a problem in each, though to varying degrees, but it's surely not overstating things to say that if the US votes in Trump again in 2024, the world as a whole is going to get less safe.
One positive is that the Dobbs decision from last year, which ended the federal right to abortions and devolved it to the states, seems to have galvanized the progressive side of the electorate. However, that doesn't really let the Democratic establishment off the hook for 50 years of ignoring the right's increasing attacks on the right to abortion, culminating in Dobbs; it's also an open question as to whether Democratic voters will continue to mobilize around that topic, or if too many are being turned off by the situation in Israel and Gaza.
I've long argued that there wasn't a single cause for Trump winning the 2016 election, but the most fundamental was that Democrats just couldn't be bothered to turn up, whether for the primaries or the general. 2020 was a different beast, because we'd seen what a Trump presidency entailed (including bungling the pandemic response), and turnout in the primaries was up again. The danger here is that Democrats once again are too jaded to go out and vote when we get to November - whether because they think President Biden is too old, too establishment or they're unhappy with his handling of Israel and Gaza. But because there's no Democratic primary this time, we won't know that before the fall.
Culturally, the biggest story was Twitter. It struck me the other day that Elon Musk has managed to worm his way into everyone's heads the same way Trump did when he was "president" - it's become impossible not to think about him at least once a day (if you'd managed to avoid it until now, sorry). I've had to institute a rule with myself not to click on every story relating one of his outrages, but I've found it harder to keep from clicking on every story about what's going wrong at Twitter. It's also top of mind for me now, because I was forced to update the app recently and it became clear how insulated I'd been from its suckiness as "X". Leaving aside bugs and whatever, it's just no longer enjoyable to surf Twitter - which doesn't stop me from doomscrolling a few times a week.
I could go on, but it boils down this: you know we're fucked when the only sane-looking social media platform is Facebook.
At the macro level, 2024 is probably going to be at least as grim as... well, every year since 2016, really. But this is going to be the year when the criminal cases against Trump (hopefully) really get going, which is going to galvanize the worst of his supporters (btw, I'm not saying he shouldn't stand trial, but I'm acknowledging that this state of affairs is somewhere short of great). The election itself will also be bad: if he wins, that's bad enough, but if he loses, then his supporters are going to go crazy again and we'll have years, probably decades, of these jerks insisting that the election was stolen.
This will also be against the backdrop of increasing global temperatures and wilder weather, plus the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. There's also going to be some other damn-fool thing happening somewhere, which will destabilize the world even more. It could be the UK's general election, but I expect it'll be the collapse of the ruling coalition in Germany and potentially greater inroads for the far right there. It's clear that far right parties are going to keep coming closer in election after election in Europe, and eventually one is going to attract enough of a majority to actually form a government, unlike in Poland and the Netherlands so far. It'll also be interesting to see what happens in Russia, China, India and Brazil.
I don't mean to get too pessimistic, but it's clear that people aren't going to get sensible overnight. The wave of rightwing populism sweeping the world is caused in large part by anger against the self-satisfaction and complacency of the elites on both right and left, and those elites haven't measurably changed how they do things since 2016. Until they do, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni, Javier Milei, Narendra Modi, and above all Trump, aren't going anywhere.
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