Alright team. I started this post in December. I was totally going to be on time to finish. But now it's February. Blergh. Well better late than never, it's time for #yearinreview!

I had been thinking about what I wanted to say this year, and then I came across alanza on lines suggesting a framework for thinking about goals at the end of 2025.

how was 2025 for you?

what concepts / principles are you thinking about for the new year? how do they relate to the world around you? (locally? globally?)

what old things do you want to shed? what new things would you like to cultivate?

what would you like to accomplish?

do you have a plan for making it happen?

does your year ahead have a ‘theme’ that you’d like to give it?

how about the next three months? the next month? the next week?

I like it, and so I think I'll take a stab at it later in this post. The first bullet shall be my first section though. How was 2025? in a word: meh¹.

When I started this post, I was depressed. 2025 didn't seem like a good year. In fact, I felt it was straight up terrible. Two facts had soured me on the year:

1. The political realities in the US, which is causing deteriorating living situations for friends and others.
2. The fact that my wife and I were living apart for most of the year.

Having worked on two political campaigns that lost to Trump², I feel pretty weird about watching the rights of fellow citizens be destroyed and erased. A strong feeling of depression and lack of wanting to engage, and just a general feeling of hopelessness. There were weeks where I was able to completely ignore the news, and weeks where I was deep in it. While many of my friends have been enraged by everything going on, I have found it hard to feel anything besides depression when thinking about the future of my home country.

On top of our societal issues, I did not handle Mel being so far away for so long well. I've always had theories that I wouldn't handle long distance relationships well, and boi did I validate that theory in 2025.

It wasn't all bad though. I got more involved in my local community, played lots of board games with friends, and had a very successful year at work. As time has drifted from 2025, I've found it easier to remember the good times, and the negative feelings have decreased.

Which is why I really like doing these years in review. The act of going through each month's photos highlighted a lot of great times though the year. So lets hop skip and jump across twelve months of memories and then get into the goal stuff.

2025 in photos

January

January, like always, was pretty quiet and chill. It snowed. I hung out with Mel before she went back to school.

February

February was great. Two trips back to back. First I went to San Antonio, TX for work where we did our winter offsite. Historically our winter off-sites are not great. We discuss how we didn't do as well as we needed to last year, etc etc. This year though, we had knocked it out of the park in 2024, and it was just a big celebration.

Afterwards I went to London for my birthday and hung out with Mel. It was great. Lots of art, food and good times.

March

March, not a lot happened. Continued playing lots of Dungeons and Dragons and music. General hanging out and recovering from a busy February.

April

April, the flowers were out and Spring arrived. Niket visited briefly, and my mom came by for a long visit where we went into the city, and visited some friends in Providence, RI.

May

May had two people visit: Chris came for a long weekend where we wandered the Hudson Valley and had a grand ol' time. And then Mel visited! She had a brief spring break and hung out for a week. It was wonderful.

I also performed music in front of people for the first time ever! I performed five minutes of music at Recurse Center during Never Graduate Week, the annual alumni event.

June

June I got to finally meet one of my favorite authors, Craig Mod. Some friends and I went to a baseball game. I also continued going into the city for work every Tuesday (sometimes going out to dinner with coworkers).

July

July I saw Alanza perform at Quinn's in Beacon. I also performed for the second time in front of people with New York Modular Society in Woodstock, NY. I played for half an hour. I put a recording of my set from Modstock 2025 on my website.

I also had a work trip to Vail, CO. I actually really disliked this trip. Vail is gorgeous, but I had to work so much I couldn't enjoy the scenery. I only left the hotel for dinners.

August

August I went back to London to begin helping Mel move home! We did some touristy stuff, including visiting Cambridge and Brighton. I took like half of her stuff home with me, which was an interesting navigational challenge (so many bags), but I made it.

September

September was a great month. Mel returned to New York. Laurel had an ad in Time Square. Niket came to visit again. Two of our good friends, Katie and Megan, got married in State College, PA. Just a great month of celebration and good times.

October

I made a trip out to SF for work, where I got to hang with my brother for a bit. John and Lauren got married in Brooklyn! Mel and I celebrated Autumn.

November

Jesus visited! Spent an afternoon wandering Brooklyn Heights chatting and drinking and having a great time.

We spent Thanksgiving in the Bahamas with Frankie, Mckenna and a bunch of other friends. It was a delight. I particularly enjoyed going to Clifton Heritage National Park and learning a bunch of history about the Bahamas and also enjoying an early Junkanoo (the normal celebration is closer to the New Year).

December

December was a weird one. We got some very sad news that Beasley's health had taken a turn for the worse. We had originally planned on spending a few weeks in SF but instead turned it into a whirlwind three day visit.

But December was also the month of some incredible food. Mel and I celebrated my five year anniversary at Laurel by having dinner at Oiji Mi. Then to celebrate Christmas, the whole family went to Single Thread. Both were some of the best meals I have ever had and would highly recommend if you get a chance.

2025 Goal Review

In my 2024 year in review, I had some goals.

• Improve Mental Health
• Make Art Publicly
• Decrease Debt
• Get out of the house

I did very well on two of these: mental health and debt. I drastically decreased our debt (by about 70%). I started seeing a psychiatrist along with my therapist to adjust my meds, which led to a discovery of some very severe vitamin deficiencies which were affecting my mood.

To get out of the house, D&D was my real success here. I started this in 2024, but I kept it up. By basically having a social event once a week, it helped my mood and also made me feel part of a community which was great.

In terms of making art, I had a spat of writing for locative.garden. I am still not making enough progress, and debating merging it into a single novel. But I did make a lot of music, and performed publicly twice, which felt like a huge win for me. I originally felt like I didn't do a good job here, but in hindsight I'm actually pretty happy with my accomplishments. My therapist regularly tells me I judge myself much more harshly than my friends, and looks like this was another case of that.

Looking forward to 2026

Ok, so 2026 has already started. It's a new year, so time to think about the future.

what concepts / principles are you thinking about for the new year? how do they relate to the world around you? (locally? globally?)

Community has been deeply on my mind lately. As a society, I think we've forgotten how to be empathetic towards our neighbors and others. I regularly see people making decisions that are good for them, but ignore the effect they will have on others. I am all for being selfish when needed, but we've reached a point where people just don't think about their community and how it's affected by their decisions anymore. I am not immune to this, I catch myself doing this all the time. There are few incentives to prioritize thinking about how others are effected by your decisions, and it's often hard to even know what the effects are.

what old things do you want to shed? what new things would you like to cultivate?

I want to hoard less stuff. Get rid of things that are unneeded. I have started this already: donating and getting rid of old clothes that don't fit, throwing away unused boxes, donating things that I haven't used in years. Part of this is because we plan to move in 2026, but also I just find myself with too much stuff.

I also want to cultivate spending more time in nature. I spend too much time inside. I need to be in nature and outside every day if I can.

does your year ahead have a ‘theme’ that you’d like to give it?

Moving forward.

how about the next three months? the next month? the next week?

Create more. Work less.

Goals

What would you like to accomplish? Do you have a plan for making it happen?

I have three goals / objectives for 2026. I want these to be connected to my general manifesto³.

1. Be in Nature
2. Create Art
3. Improve Health

1: Be in Nature

To accomplish this I've got two things I will be measuring and doing:

• Walk for more than 30 minutes every day
• Try a new trail or go fishing once a month

2025 was a bad year for me getting outside, so I feel like I need to rekindle my connection to nature. I need to walk more for my health, but also my days are drastically better when I spend time among the trees and birds, so I want to set this as a goal.

When it comes to nature, I find myself revisiting the same trails and places. I want to explore more of the Hudson Valley, and fishing basically always sends me to new places. New trails would do the same, so that's where that comes from.

2: Create Art

Creating art brings me joy. I do not think I am good at creating. This is something I have been fighting with for... most of my life. It's an issue with confidence, and just not being able to accept that sucking is ok. That being said, I am a lot more confident in my creativity than I was in 2024. I made a lot of progress around sharing my art in 2025, and got a lot of good feedback. In 2026, I want to create more and share more.

• Write something every week
• Make music every week
• Finish locative.garden
• Put out an album on Bandcamp

This year I am particularly excited about this goal, as I will be attending a three week artist retreat in Pennsylvania. I've been practicing being thoughtful about my artistic output to hopefully be as successful as possible at the retreat.

3: Improve Health

There's some diet and vitamin deficiencies I need to deal with in 2026. I haven't figured out what that's going to be yet. But along with getting out in nature⁴, I am going to try and do something new.

This something new is inspired by my friend and coworker @kh3dron. He's trying to do 100,000 pushups in 2026. A photo of his progress is above. He's a swole dude⁵, so I'm not really trying to set my goal at a level that I know I'll fail. Instead I am trying for a much smaller goal of push-ups and sit-ups.

• 10,000 push-ups in 2026
• 10,000 sit-ups in 2026

I've created a spreadsheet like his, so we'll see how it goes. His one piece of advice which kind of blew my mind is that you don't have to do all of the push-ups at once. You can do them throughout the day. And I'm like, I can do five pushups ten times in a day. That is totally doable. Reframe the issues! Focus on total output!

Conclusion

We had some very sad news at the beginning of the year, our cat Beasley died at the end of January after a beautiful and happy seventeen years. It definitely pushed us into a pretty deep depression that we're still coming out of.

Despite that, I am optimistic about 2026. Mel got a new job in the fall, my work is being very successful, and Mel is applying to PhD programs. I tend to like even years, so here's to a successful 2026. 2025 was better than I expected, and I hope 2026 will be too.

Lots of love from our home to yours,

/Nat

Footnotes

1. Initial draft of this section had "shit". I have since upgraded it to meh. You're welcome? ↩

2. I volunteered for a few weeks for Kamala, and worked for Clinton for a year. So it's like 1.1, but whatever. ↩

3. I think I want to update this in 2026. Not sure yet, but thinking about it. ↩

4. Lots of doctors say and studies show that being in Nature is good for your health. USDA, Harvard School of Public Health and NYDEC as examples. ↩

5. Bro has six blackbelts and is made of pure muscle and brain matter as far as I can tell. ↩