2025 Round up
Well, another year in the bag. Congratulations for making it through. I have no doubts that for some of us it was an amazing year, maybe the best one we’ve had. And for others, it felt like one huge turd you watch spinning around the toilet, praying to a god you don’t believe in that it will finally just disappear.
Whichever one it’s been for you, a theme that seems to come up again and again, both in the writing here and in my own life, is the need or desire to try and stay with uncertainty rather than rush to resolve it. The world around us seems to be moving in so many directions at once, and it’s hard to know what any of it really is in the moment, until we’ve lived through it.
Which is frustrating. But, to quote a thinker far smarter than me, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
Here are the posts that really stood out this year, both from the response from you, dear reader, and from the ones I’ve been most proud of.
1) Not Yet: Thoughts on Hope
“Hope is active. It is not just a feeling but an orientation to both the present and the future. It is the recognition that the world could become better and that your desire for that better world matters… Hope is ontological. The world itself is unfinished. Things are what they are and also what they might become… Maybe that quiet sense that something in your life or in the world is missing is not a sign that something has gone wrong. Maybe it is the faint signal of the not yet.”
2) John-Hughes-ation of Our Times
“Nostalgia often resembles this second structure. It is not the pain of losing what was, but the pain of something that never materialised in the first place. A longing for a memory we never actually had. If we read nostalgia in this Freudian frame, the thing that is refused is not only the loss but also the possibility of life after the loss, the survival that allows us to build new futures. Nostalgia keeps the past insistently alive, but only in the version that will never threaten to change.”
3) Why Masculinity Feels Fake
“When people say modern men feel fake, or that they’re ‘performative,’ it usually sounds like a complaint about authenticity… But the idea of a ‘real’ man is precisely the problem. To call masculinity fake isn’t to insult it, but to recognise that what we call masculinity is already a fantasy, a kind of scaffolding that covers something unbearable underneath… Masculinity is not a timeless truth but a story we keep telling. And like all stories, it can evolve.”
4) The Next Dish
“We think we want the food, the lover, the phone, the promotion, but what we really want is the wanting itself. The anticipation, the pursuit, the electric hum of maybe-this-time… This is the difference between desire and drive. Desire still believes in fulfilment. Drive has given up on it and found its pleasure in the repetition itself. The goal, we tell ourselves, is to find the right dish. The aim, secretly, is to never be full.”
5) Love is a losing game
“The fantasy that love should make us invulnerable is seductive because it promises a tidy ending. Someone to confirm our worth, someone to stop our doubts, someone whose presence feels like proof itself. But that beautifully packaged story misses the point: love is not about immunity from loss, it is about staying open despite it… Love is a losing game, but not in the sense that it fails to work. It loses because to love is to give in, to give up the claim that you know what the ending will be. Love asks for vulnerability rather than victory, exposure rather than assurance, and in that asking it loses before it ever arrives.”