You know, I've been writing these posts every year since 2016. Some of them have titles like, "Gosh, what an awful year" or "Another year I'll be glad to see gone". When I looked forward, it was stuff like, "Things are gonna get worse after 2024".
Thing is, they really all have been terrible in so many ways. We should have noticed in 2016 when all the celebrities started dying, completely out of nowhere, but by the end of that year it was clear we'd crossed into the darkest timeline. Even when we got a respite at the end of 2020 by voting out Trump, 2021 started with a deadly riot at the Capitol and the deadliest phase of the Covid pandemic was about to start.
So, uh, with that in mind, welcome to my recap of 2025! It's been another bad'un, both at the macro level and the micro level. Looking at the wider world, political chaos and violence have been the norm, and while it's been disheartening to see how many institutions simply caved to whatever nutty Trump demands came their way, it's been good to see some pushback from the grassroots level. Though it's not going to mean a thing if the Democrats don't take back the House and Senate in the midterms and impose some accountability on this administration.
Oh, and btw, it still won't mean a thing if they do. Realistically, even if Democrats sweep a supermajority in both chambers and impeach Trump, he'll get pardoned by President JD Vance, and whatever Vance can't pardon him for, the Supreme Court will just say he had immunity or something. I'm not actively worrying about how bad things will get in 2026, 2027 or 2028 because I can't change any of those things, but I still sometimes find myself wondering what absolute chaos will happen because people last year thought Joe Biden was too old.
As a final point on the political stuff, whenever Democrats regain the levers of power, I'm really worried about how hard it'll be to undo everything that's happened just this year. A bunch of agencies, like USAID and Voice of America, are probably not coming back at all, because both parties seem to have lost interest in soft power, but apart from that, the health and economic data collection isn't going to bounce back easily - even if whoever's in the White House and Congress after 2028 has any interest in resuming all the research and data collection that we had before this year, any datasets we have on, say, infant mortality or broadband penetration or basically anything will have these large gaps between 2025-2029 that'll skew our understanding of what was happening.
And that's to say nothing of the sustained cyberattack that was DOGE, in which a bunch of unelected Elon Musk fanboys got a hold of the federal government's data and can now do whatever they want with it. That situation isn't going to change when President Gavin Newsom or whoever gets sworn in, and we're gonna be feeling the aftereffects for generations.
Okay, but how was it for me?
Ugh.
As I may have mentioned, I lost my job in March - incidentally, five years to the day since my boss at State Farm told us we'd be working from home because of the then-nascent coronavirus. But we'd be back in a couple of weeks, they assured us. In my five subsequent years of work, I spent 1.5 days working in an office, and those were for office parties.
The job search sucked, with three legitimate callbacks and one that was a waste of time because it paid way too little (like, it would have meant a $36k pay cut). On the plus side, the last one then led to my first proper interview of the year, so we'll see how that went.
The first thing I did, though, was schedule out my time for every week, so that I'd ensure I was spending my time doing the things that mattered to me. This meant that I had time for writing, job-hunting, going to the gym, learning, and so forth. Of all of these, the writing is my one bright spot for 2025, both because I made sure I spent a couple of hours on it each day and because I was in that TV writing class I've talked about so much.
Compared to previous years, where I found it tough to get new projects off the ground, this year I ended up writing four TV scripts (one spec and three pilots), plus plotting out four novels (two rewrites and two new ideas). I also came up with ideas for movies, a non-fiction book, and a rewrite of a novella I wrote a few years ago. It's hard to say whether I'll be able to maintain this momentum, especially when I find a job again and don't have quite as much time anymore, but at least I know what to work on.
On the dating side, once I lost my job, this was never going to be a great year, but at the very least it seems to have been better than 2024. I went on a couple of dates, had a phone call vibe-check that was supposed to turn into a date but then she bailed, and after Thanksgiving I reconnected with someone I'd gone out with back in 2023 - we've only been texting, but it's nice to chat with her again, wherever this leads.
Fitness-wise, I got a lot more serious about going to the gym, even though I had to cancel my monthly personal training sessions. I maintained my schedule of going 4 times each week, and I way overshot my original goal to lift a total of 300,000 lbs, by hitting over 1.2 million lbs. This included that period of two months when I was in Europe and wasn't going to the gym. Not to be shallow, but the friend I've been texting noted that I looked fit when I sent her a picture of myself next to the Christmas tree, so it looks like at least all that gym work has had some effect.
On the financial front, once again, it was never going to be a great year, but I was quick to cut down on certain spending, and was lucky enough to be able to lower my rent quite substantially. All of which means that, even though I haven't had any money come in since September (when my unemployment ran out), I still have a fair bit of runway, even without raiding my retirement accounts.
As far as the life/other goals, mixed bag again - I didn't get out to as many cultural things as I'd have liked, but I got to some. I didn't leave the Bay Area as many times as I'd have liked, but traveling is expensive, and anyway, I managed to fuck off to Europe for two months, which was cool. Still didn't do enough decluttering, though.
There's no dressing this up: personally, 2025 was a shit year, and it was a shit year in part because the macro directly affected my micro (I'm pretty sure I'd still have a job if Kamala Harris had won last November). But amid the shit, I made the best of it where I could, and that's the important thing. Now... it'd be nice to have a year where I thrive, both personally and professionally. I'm not due anything, because the universe doesn't work like that, but the hope is that I unlock something, whether internally or externally, that makes that year (decade? Lifetime?) of thriving possible.
For as many years in a row have been terrible, in however many ways (2026 looks to be the 11th bad'un in a row), the hope is what keeps me going. Things may not clear up in 2026, or 2029, or, honestly, in my lifetime. But something will come along. It'll do so for me, and it'll do so for you.
Happy New Year, and don't let the bastards grind you down.
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