End of Year 2024

The year draws to a close and I feel compelled to write a tedious end of year blog post.

I had intended my previous post to serve as my end-of-year post, but after being contacted by several people pondering my sense of despair I’ve been encouraged to write something more upbeat and personal.

This was a good year for me. My career took a turn I didn’t expect and led to me getting more real work done than I think I ever have, and work I can genuinely feel proud of. That might sound silly, but I’ve always viewed what I decide to spend time working on as being important, and I’ve always tried to steer clear of things that don’t matter and don’t make an impact. This year, I feel like more of what I’ve done has mattered and impacted real people and real lives more than most of my previous years, and I’m both happy about that and eager to see it through into the coming year.

More personally, I’ve felt the closeness of my friend group around me, even as other friendships have wilted away. All the tumult and messiness of the past is long gone, left behind with a sense of myself that felt unease at others’ views of how things ought to be. I think that’s a mark I use for my own wellbeing: how much I feel compelled to argue, correct, and persuade others about things. Peace for me comes from not feeling like that, from feeling content with myself and accepting the perspectives of others even when I disagree. I’ve been good at that this year — not quite stoic, but content.

I endured one depressive episode this year, my first since winter last year. It snuck in under the radar, taking a shape I’d never seen before and hadn’t been prepared for. The compassionate warmth from others helped guide me through it as I learned that little bit more about myself on my journey out of it, steeled against this sort of onslaught for the future.

My creativity took a slip. I’ve barely written all year, as this blog gives testament to, and my photography has taken a back seat to more pressing urges. In truth, the excitement I felt for picking up my camera waned with my enthusiasm for protest photography — much diminished this year as every protest became a Gaza protest, a movement I don’t wish to be associated with.

I recall a climate protest early in the year that devolved entirely into being a Gaza protest, the voices of those so urgently pressed toward the greatest issue of our time diverted instead away to a cause and a movement I can barely stomach. My golden rule is to pursue photographs that are visually interesting, and I have no doubt this surge in protest activity would provide ample opportunity if the idea of giving air to it didn’t taste so sour.

My self-hosting journey continues unabated, with ever more services and ever more hardware dedicated to the task. I now have two ZFS arrays, two remote servers, two remote storage servers, and a wonderful Headscale overlay network connecting them all to my arrangement of personal devices. I share many of them with my friends, exposed as they varyingly are via three different domains, and I’m thanked frequently for the enrichment to their lives that these services provide — and in turn I donate to and feed back to the many projects I use accordingly.

I played some good games, saw some good movies (though it was a dire year for them), and watched some outstanding TV series. I saw tons of great bands — The National at Cardiff Castle was a standout — met some great people, had some wonderful dates, and found myself quieting down in a way I never have before. Through various romantic entanglements and some rekindled dalliances from the past, I learned a little more about myself, became a little more content.

My Favourite Things

I like the simple things.

I developed a love of chess. I am terrible at it, and find great amusement in how wildly my rating swings, aligned as it is to my mood, my sleep habits, and my general wellbeing. There are many grand quotes and ideas about the game I wouldn’t dare to yet utter, but I am absolutely fascinated by how something seemingly so simple and so evenly drawn for both players can become such a massively complex battle. I’m not sure I’ll remember many of the games I played this year, not even those great many played in pubs and on trains with the travel set I drag around with me, but I will remember being defeated on a street in Ireland, playing on a near–lifesize board with a gathered audience around me.

And I read more. I upgraded to a wonderful Kobo Libra eBook reader and rediscovered my love for the written word. I realise now I missed the clarity of thought that came with well-practiced reading, and how much better I felt during and after focusing my attention on a single thing. Reading makes me feel better on its own by virtue of the practice, never mind the enrichment that both fiction and non-fiction provide to the soul, and makes me feel better and be better when I move on to other things.

This was a good year for me.

The Year Ahead

And so I come tediously to the turning of the year, wondering what is to come.

My previous post gave air to my despair, but I have optimism too. I genuinely do think our political position in the UK looks extraordinarily bright in comparison to the dark horrors looming for much of the world in the coming year (and in contrast to the fourteen years of hell we’ve just endured). In particular, I get to cheerlead incessantly on my Mastodon about our outstanding efforts to decarbonise the grid, renationalise our railways, and crucify every NIMBY that’s ever stood in the way of a wind farm or a cancer hospital — and I’m sure my tediousness about these things won’t be tempered at all through the coming year.

I’m not one to make resolutions, but I do want to write more and will certainly attempt to blog more. Writing, like reading, has a virtue to it all on its own, making me feel better and my mind feel more keen as a result of merely indulging in the practice, never mind if what I write ever gets read. I also want to relocate my love for photography and to keep courting this sense of contentment. I intend to read more and more, a practice I’ve neglected since COVID, and something I feel now is vitally important to me.

I intend also to focus more on the longer forms than the short. Good journalism and good cultural writing is hard to come by, but I’m certain it hardly ever comes in the form of social media posts and clickbaited articles. It comes from long-form writing by dedicated and creative professionals, and I aim to devour ever more of what they create — while being a champion for their work in an era of tweets and podcasts.

I have my predictions for the year, but few are good. I think Reform will overtake the Tories as the second party in our politics. I think Elon Musk will, among his many other insanities, seek to offload Twitter, its acquisition having fulfilled its purpose of propagating mass right-wing propaganda through a critical election. I think also that we’ll see an unbearably horrid outcome for Ukraine in their heartbreaking endeavour to defend themselves against military conquest by an authoritarian neighbour — something we’re likely to see in abundance in coming years and decades (though I very much hope that I’m wrong about that).

This is the point where most will say where they want to travel to in the coming year, but that side of my inclinations departed long ago. I have little aspiration to travel anymore, the yearning in my soul that once featured foreign shores and sights having been replaced by a deep desire for quiet and calm. Still, I think I’ll find somewhere to go away to for my birthday, this being the year I turn forty.

In My Element

How I chose to dress during a camping trip in the summer of 2024.

I don’t have any big plans for the new year beyond leaning into senior leadership and avoiding turning into a tedious LinkedInfluencer — a task I might find easier than others given my utter avoidance of the platform (along with much of the corporate web). It’s a new phase in my career, and while I’ve managed teams before, this is very different, altogether far more demanding and far more rewarding. I want to do well at this as I careen wildly past middle-management into middle-age.

Beyond that, I have an urge to do something more meaningful. I don’t know what yet — perhaps write something worthwhile, contribute meaningfully to something open-source, or even look to start a business — but I feel like the times demand something to help make the world a little bit better in the face of the abject horror we’re soon to face.

I’m not sure I’m in a good position to encourage others toward anything, but if I were, I’d encourage an increased aversion to the corporate web and a renewed admiration for the longer forms. It’s an age of (mis)information overload, rife with propaganda and ill-will, constantly threatening to drag our senses away from what is real and true toward things more sinister and less human. I don’t know what the solutions for these things are, but I know they won’t come from Twitter, podcasts, and the ever more reductive forms of expressing ideas.

I hope therefore you read some good words, find your thoughts lifted by the wondrous efforts of great writers, and as all the harshness of this new, cruel world comes to bear upon us that you find comfort in the ideas and the people that you surround yourselves with.

I’ll be vying for the same, while trying my damnedest to improve at chess.

Happy new year.