2025: In Review

Every December, I close out the year over here by trying to anticipate what from this year will really stick with me in the future. The premise is: when I think back on this year 5 years in the future, what will immediately jump to mind. Next year is going to be a fun one, because it will mark 5 years since the first time I did this exercise here so we’ll be able to see how valid my predictions are. The last few years have not been defined by Big Life Events, so it’s fun to get into some of the smaller anecdotes that a life gets built on.

Best Cup of Coffee

This is an annual category, and I am subconsciously aware of that fact to the point that somewhere around September I was slightly distressed by the knowledge that I’d have to write this at some point and there hadn’t been a single cup of coffee that really stuck out in my mind. Not that I hadn’t had a whole lot of excellent coffee throughout the year - I absolutely had. The problem may be that the bar gets raised with every passing year.

And then it happened. I settled into my new favorite coffee shop this year (about that, more below), and took a sip and my brain skipped a beat and then was flooded with a sense of sublime pleasure. Over the past couple years, I’ve developed the habit of not reading the tasting notes before drinking to see what I could pick up on. I’ve learned that there are actual sensory kits that tasting experts use so that there’s consistency within those notes, which is a little bit of a funny thought - a lime tasting note does not necessarily mean what you taste when you lick a lime, it means something similar to the agreed upon sensory experience of a lime as defined in the sensory kit that people who craft tasting notes use for calibration. I’m not at the place where I use one of those sensory kits, but I do find their existence fascinating.

And whoever had written the tasting notes for this cup of coffee had not used such a kit.

There is no universally agreed upon sensory experience of summertime and happiness, except I’ll tell you what - I could taste every single one of those tasting notes in this cup.

A good cup of coffee falls in one of 3 categories for me:

• This could be a daily driver. I enjoy it and believe that I would enjoy drinking it regularly and can produce the flavor profile consistently. A great washed Kenyan coffee almost always falls in this category.
• That was novel. It’s less about whether or not I like it and more that I haven’t had something like it before…but I don’t want to keep having that same experience. This category is increasingly populated by different experiments with fermentation - interesting, but even when they’re great I usually don’t want to drink a whole bag.
• The ephemeral experience. This is the pinnacle of great coffee for me - it’s when I take the first sip and know that I need to be fully present within the boundaries of time between that sip and the last sip because I will not have this experience again. This usually occurs with the very best coffees being prepared by the most skilled baristas where I know that I couldn’t reproduce what they’ve done. It is also usually accompanied by a sense of place - the environment I’m drinking the coffee in or the person I’m drinking the coffee with make the experience unique.

This coffee fell into that last category. I could have bought a bag of it, but I knew I’d be chasing that experience of summertime and happiness - and I didn’t think I could ever achieve it. And that’s the thing about the ephemeral experience cup: I’m always happy to have that signular experience that is frozen in time.

A New Routine

I mentioned in my end of year review that the time I spent in counseling was one of the defining experiences of the year. Part of that experience - the part that, in fact, led me to that cup of coffee mentioned above - was the part that takes place outside of the therapist’s office after my time with her has concluded.

I would walk out of that office absolutely reeling. I’ve seen counselors before, but never one who I feel like cuts me open, pokes around, pulls some things out and holds them up for dissection and discussion. I started clearing my calendar for a few hours afterwards, and I started to take a long walk after each session. But eventually I needed to write up my thoughts and experiences. A few months into the year, I had developed a regular path: walk along the canal outside of the office, detour past Pieterskerk, pop into Water & Bloem Bakery, and end up at Chummy Coffee, where I’d sit down to drink a coffee and dump out everything swirling around inside me. Afterwards, I’d pop into Mayflower Bookshop across the street and browse - often ordering a book I’d been intending to read.

Even though I only did it every couple weeks, it wasn’t too long before I could pop into the cafe and the barista would see me and say my order to me before I could say it to him and the bookshop’s proprietor would ask me about something I had previously purchased.

Less than 500m separated the church from the Bookshop, with the bakery and the cafe right in the middle. It quickly became my favorite 500m in the whole country.

Around August, as I was popping out of the bakery I noticed a coworking space on the ground floor of the building directly across the way and a thought occurred to me: what if I move out of my studio in Utrecht and start to work from here?

This was an irrational thought. Leiden is an hour on the train away from my house. Each way. My studio is a 15 minute bike ride. My studio is a dedicated space, the coworking space would just be a desk and a monitor. If I were to give up my studio, I’d also have to figure out what to do with all of the furniture and decor I had accumulated in it over the course of 2 years.

So of course I did it. I gave up the studio, and now I ride the train out to Leiden once a week (twice when I have counseling) and work from smack in the middle of my favorite 500m. When I need a break, I walk to one of my favorites or I explore a bit farther afield. I keep it for days when I want to get into deeper focus, and I find that’s exactly what I get.

The Trudeau Library

A large part of the reason I felt so comfortable making the move is because I’ve also become much better situated in working from home, and that is in large part because we - by which I mean mostly Sarah - have completely reorganized and redecorated our whole home this year. And while it wasn’t a singular comprehensive vision, it was a series of changes that have made our house vastly more livable.

The move I most appreciate has been getting the two oldest kids into their own rooms, rather than sharing one larger room together. The result of this move was that their former bedroom has become what I originally thought of as the guestroom/office. In decorating the guestroom/office, we moved in 2 desks and several large bookshelves which we filled with books. If you’ve been on a video call with me in the past 6 months or so, you’ve probably seen one such shelf.

When Addie first set foot in the redecorated room she gasped, “We have a library in our house!” And that caused me no end of delight. So I now refer to this room as the library. Like a library, it’s a public space. While I’m often the sole occupant, it’s not uncommon for many Trudeaus to be sharing the space all together.

I work from the library most days. I do a lot of reading in the library. For some reason, it’s so much more satisfying to work from the library than it is to work from the guestroom/office.

A Book I’ll Remember

Another regular entry on this end of year list…but I have to take some liberty this year, because I do usually have a single book that feels defining for the year, but this year I have three that are in conversation with each other, and I can’t choose just one without the others:  Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga, Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant, and Presence in the Modern World by Jacques Ellul.

The latter two are natural fits - Presence in the Modern World is a broad critique of technocentric solutionism, the idea that efficiency has become an end unto itself that justifies any technology that improves efficiency; while Blood in the Machine is a history of the Luddite revolution that also passes as a critique of technological adoption from the industrial period up to the present. Homo Ludens is a bit of an odd fit with those two, as its not specifically focused on technology and more on the play element in human culture. To me, however, it’s the book that provides the lens to see how culture and values are evolving in response to an increased emphasis on and centrality of technology, especially as that shows up in how we play. I’m not as reflexively critical of technology as Jacques Ellul is, but he’s a strong advocate for the idea that we have to live in the tension and engage in the dialectic…and I increasingly feel that tension becoming more acute as we enter into one of the strongest technology hype cycles of my lifetime. Without a strong grounding in what we hold most essential as defining traits of humanity, we risk giving up anything that comes with too much friction or inconvenience.

I’m still working out the way these books influence my own thinking and practice, but they feel apt for the year that 2025 was.

Two More

When I look back on this year, I will certainly remember the first ever playtest of Read Me Like A Book, which happened in February in Toronto when the game was still called Oldies But Goodies. The name change itself was suggested by my friend Mehdi, who was one of the players. The playtest itself only came together because my good friend Tolu organized it. It was an early prototype, and it only needed to answer one question: does this help people bond? And it was quickly apparent that it did. If it hadn’t worked, there’s a good chance that the whole project would have died on the vine right there. Instead, it still has legs going into 2026.

And while I ate plenty of delicious things this year and went to some wonderful restaurants, the meal that is most conspicuous in my mind happened in a Chinese restaurant in a New Jersey strip mall that could have been any Chinese restaurant in any strip mall anywhere in the US, and the most remarkable thing about the food was simply the fact that one particular dish was not sent back to the kitchen. But this maybe needs a little bit of explanation. There were 2 other people at the restaurant with me: my Uncle Paul and my Grandma Joan. I don’t see my grandma nearly as often as I’d like. She lives in New Jersey, I live an ocean away. Fortunately, despite the fact that she maybe never had used a computer before my grandfather passed away two decades ago, she’s proven surprisingly adept with technology. We FaceTime pretty regularly (she would say not nearly enough), but she has a presence in person that can’t translate into the screen of a mobile phone. Because I was going to be in New York for work, I had the pretext to find my way to see her.

Grandma has a bit of a reputation as a tough customer. If the food she orders is not prepared to her liking, she will send it back to the kitchen and explain exactly what is wrong with it. If it is not sufficiently rectified, she will send it back again. And she is opinionated. The odds that the food will be sent back are very high, even at places that she frequents. So I held my breath when the food came out, and she commented that hers was a little bit salty…but she didn’t send it back. She ate it happily and packed up the leftovers to bring back to her apartment. This may seem minor, but when I relayed this story to the other members of my family everyone was shocked. It was part of a larger trend I noticed: she has become much more attuned to all of the people around her - I think in large part because she has spent so much of her life surrounded by familiar faces, but as she has aged she has lost so many of her peers that the things that we can all take for granted in our longest held relationships are gone and she is developing new relationships that are still in their relative infancy. This isn’t the first time I’ve been surprised by my grandmother’s ability to turn over a new leaf. For a person who lived in the same city for the first six decades of her life, her capacity for change is profound. It’s one of the things that I’m learning from her.

Writing all of this up serves as a pointed reminder of just how rich this year was. I hope you can say the same.

See you in 2026.