Reflecting on 2025

This is the fifth year I’ve done an end of year reflection on my goals and themes. If you want to see past years, they’re all here.

This year didn’t play out like I thought it would, but then again I’m not sure that I had a good fix on what I was expecting from it in the first place. Longtime readers will know that I think about themes for the year and let goals flow from the themes; I tend to be more flexible with my goals and more rigid with my themes. But if you look even at my themes from January, you’ll see they’re kind of wishy washy:

Theme 1: Radical ideas & radical solutions

• For human coexistence with each other
• For human coexistence with the natural world
• For human thriving and creation

Theme 2: Inhabit playfulness

• Make things that use play as an entry point to things deemed more serious, especially in learning, sustainability, and urbanism

Theme 3: Celebration as an act of resistance to despair

• Find more occasions to drink champagne
• And more non-occasions to drink other sparkling wines
• Notice the details of ingenuity, creativity, and complexity
• Take time to connect with people, especially if you haven’t seen them in a while

You know how I know that I knew they were a little flimsy? Because I didn’t share them with anyone. That’s a lowkey way of me saying to myself, “hey, don’t hold yourself to this.”

So I came into the year without a very clear sense of what I thought the year would be about or how I wanted to direct it, even loosely. To some extent, that’s OK. I’ve learned from years past that the themes don’t actually have a one year shelf life; they have momentum and can spill over with no regard for the constraints of the calendar. That was certainly true of this year - I had bitten off more than I could chew in 2024 and was still carrying a lot of inertia into 2025. Nonetheless, I look at what I externalized and I can read between the lines to see that I was implicitly saying, “let’s just see what this year has in store.”

With that epic caveat out of the way, it’s time to ask the question: how’d we do?

Theme 1: Radical Ideas & Radical Solutions

This one is firmly in the red…but I don’t feel bad about it. Whatever the opposite of momentum is, this one has it - that is to say, I don’t really have anything concrete to show for it but it has taken up an inordinate amount of my mental energy over the last several months. My goals coming into this year in this theme are so imprecise that I can see this was a curiosity more than anything, but I can already feel it taking more shape going into next year. Lowkey, I have a clearer perspective that play is a radical idea for human coexistence.

Theme 2: Inhabit Playfulness

Speaking of play…this one is probably greenish yellow. There have been a bunch of minor little throw away play experiences. I’ve found this new focus for Play’s The Thing that moves me more toward play broadly and not just in one specific game. I developed Read Me Like A Book, got in a handful of playtests with it, and I’ve recorded a first episode of a podcast/game show for it…There’s energy here. There’s momentum. It’s still something I feel fascinated with and compelled by. Do I wish I had done more with RMLAB? Definitely. But I feel gratified to see that in the course of a year it went from an idea to a paper prototype to a shareable digital version with a gameshow attached. It’s not taking the world by storm, but I am quite proud of what has come of the work so far.

Theme 3: Celebration As An Act of Resistance

I suppose I was anticipating a bit of a tough year when I wrote this one…not incorrectly. I’ll grade myself on a curve on this one and put it in the green. I drank a lot of champagne this year with a lot of people who I love and enjoy, and in the process I went from an absolute novice to being moderately knowledgeable about sparkling wine. Champagne was the right thing to use as an entry point for being attentive to details, because the classical method of making it is such a detail-oriented approach. But I’ve also learned about the internal contradiction of noticing the details - that is, the more attentive one is to details the more one is aware of one’s inattentiveness. I became more attentive this year, and as a result I am even more aware of how little I notice.

I never really said what it was I was resisting. At the beginning of the year, I probably could have just waved my hands and said, “you know, like all of this.” But through the work of celebrating with people and noticing the things that people make with great care and attention, I have a far more specific view that will continue to play out as I move forward: I am resisting simplistic, reductive thinking; I am resisting the folly of pure rationalism; I am resisting the game of power and domination; I am resisting the desire for effortlessness and efficiency above all else. I needed to celebrate the things that I care about to better understand the things that I resist.

So where does this all leave us?

If I came into this year without a clear sense of what I thought the year would be about, I’m heading out of the year with a lot more clarity: 2025 was a very internal year for me. One of 2024’s themes was “take a 10 year view on change,” and one of the most significant consequences of that was that I sought out an Internal Family Systems counselor here in the Netherlands. I could recognize that I needed some help to make sense of myself…and while I’ve been to counseling before, this time around has been far deeper than I’ve previously experienced. Going to counseling has taken as much energy, rigour, and dedication as any project that I’ve worked on this year. Writing about it publicly, I feel some pressure to have something to show for it or some great revelation to share. But I don’t. I got to put a name to my specific brand of neurodivergence, I got to identify a bunch of the different subconscious forces that influence my decision-making. It has been demanding, and it has been good, and I expect more of the same headed into next year. It’s indicative of the fact that this year was a more cerebral year for me than the last few years, a less hands on year. I didn’t make quite as much for public engagement, but a lot has been marinating in the dark recesses of my brain.

The years do run into each other…I didn’t get conversant in Dutch in 2024 like I wanted to, but at the end of 2025 I’ve passed all 4 language exams for Dutch integration (by some divine providence did I pass the speaking exam…) and can read a newspaper, follow along with Dutch television programs, and usually get 4 or 5 turns into conversation with a Dutch person before they switch over to English. I didn’t launch an in-house product in 2024, but I had the idea in mind for Read Me Like A Book - and that actually came to life in 2025 and will continue on into 2026.

The lack of clarity about the year also meant that a lot of unexpected opportunities presented themselves. I developed a Playlab app that has been rolled out across the country of Ghana. I explored playgrounds & libraries in Singapore. I launched this play-focused research project. None of that was on the cards a year ago, but I’m so pleased that I had room to say yes to those things. It’s a benefit of the way I have my life set up right now that I have room to say yes to these kind of things (and, of course, an epic note of gratitude to Sarah who makes all of that possible).

You might get the sense from all of this that I feel some kind of disappointment in this year, but I don’t. I do feel some kind of exhaustion - not the bone deep kind, but the kind where brain fog is a not infrequent occurrence. Part of this year has been learning to recognize when I need to rest and what rest looks like for me…but for 2026, I think the fruit of that work will start to show itself - I think I’m figuring out some things about what I need in order to sustainably get deep into my bag of tricks.

The time isn’t right yet to share how I’m thinking about 2026 - we still have to close this year out properly, which mostly means that I have a stack of books I want to get through (even though I have already exceeded my Goodreads challenge goal). But I will share it. It isn’t perfectly clear yet, but I can already tell that the year to come has better definition than the year past.

Thanks for being on the journey with me. A phenomenon that has occurred repeatedly this year is that this newsletter has acted as an accelerant to relationship - sometimes with new friendships, but sometimes as a way of catching back up with old friends in order to go deeper. It’s not something I ever knew to expect when I sat down to write, but what a delightful unintended consequence.

Next week I’ll drop in a few of my highlights of the year.