2024

I begin each year with a theme, a kind of personal Leitmotif, a deliberate axis upon which the year might turn. In 2023, it was “More Meaning, Less Bullshit,” a slogan, an imperative, a protest against the encroaching trivialities that had consumed my self since 2020. What 2023 delivered, however, was an unmediated torrent of Bullshit. Bullshit arrived not with the politeness of metaphor or the veil of plausible deniability. Barefaced, crude, and startling in its audacity. This was Bullshit stripped of pretense, unsoftened by the usual social varnish. It appeared with a kind of malevolent clarity. The kind where everyone complicit in its manufacture knows the truth but shrugs, covers it with a dusting of denial, and mutters, “I don’t smell anything, maybe it’s just you.” The desperation for meaning, then, was not an abstraction but an acute hunger, a need to assert something real amid aimlessly ricocheting in a directionless game I really hadn’t agreed to play.

By the time 2024 rolled around, I thus chose a new mantra: “Pursuing Purpose.” It sounded noble, didn’t it? Purpose. Solid, upright, dependable. But purpose has a way of not being what you expect. It doesn’t hand itself over neatly. No, 2024 turned me inside out. Purpose, I learned, does not stabilize; it destabilizes. It unmakes you to remake you, stripping the protective layers you hadn’t realized you’d built. It hollowed me and filled me in ways I didn’t anticipate. It wasn’t a year for finding purpose; it was a year for surviving what purpose demanded.

Here we are, on the eve of something, just weeks before 2025 begins its gambit. The year I will turn forty. Last night ended slowly, deliberately, with the ceiling and I locked in a long, unbroken stare. For over two hours, we exchanged no gestures, only sentences. Sentences rising, circling, caught in the thick steam of the bathtub, as if waiting for permission to dissipate. And then one came back. A solid sentence, singular and unforgiving. It struck with precision, lodging itself square in the chest. My body felt it first, then my mind, and finally I sensed it with my age.

It was not a sentence designed for comfort or hope. It wasn’t gesturing vaguely at a brighter future. This was a sentence of necessity, one that left no room for comforting fictions of abstraction. It was a solid sentence. It filled me with a sense of dread. That much the previous years had taught me. A challenge to walk the walk.

So be it. 2025, here we go.