Year end…

I am in the process that many people are: closing out the year. Doing some cleaning. Reviewing the year. Looking ahead to the next to see what I would like to do moving forward. I keep seeing people complain that “‘new year, new me’ is not real. You shouldn’t wait for the new year to do it.” For some people, it does take a new year to put fire under them. Another year down. No telling how many more you have. Of course that is going to make you take inventory and recognize the things you want to build on and the things that you want to change.

Life is just life. Our time measurements are invented. Most people just get up and go about their routines. People think typically in terms of deadlines, due dates, holidays, and whatever fills the in between. Some people only know what day it is because they have things that they have to do that day. Only particular days really put time and our lives into perspective. Birthdays, anniversaries, and widely recognized holidays keep certain things in perspective. That is how we mark our time. Milestones. Goals. These are the things that pick your head up. Otherwise, you’re just going by your schedule. If it takes a new year to shake people and make them realize that they need to do better, so be it. Let’s just be glad that there are people trying to do better. It is far preferred to those who are actively getting worse.

We are in changing times. There is plenty of reason to feel the need to be better. To feel as if it is worthwhile to try for more. To look at your life, decide if you are happy with it, and if not, do something about it. People getting on high horses about what motivates other people is weird. It’s just another ridiculous “moral high ground” people take to feel like they’re better than others. People have different paces. People have different motivations. People hone in so much on what those around them are doing and how, yet have far less concern about actions that actually effect them. That person over there finally going to the gym has nothing to do with you. Them not going to the gym has nothing to do with you. It does not effect you one way or another. You know what does? Polluting centers being put in your neighborhood, taking up electricity and water. It’s funny how the concept of scarcity works. We don’t realize that there is so much money for us and so many other things that we make in excess because we can make it. We don’t make water. We don’t make coal. We don’t make oceans. We don’t make trees. We can’t just make some more. We have to deal with the limited supply that we have been given, which is not actually limited naturally, but manufactured limitations that represent capitalism. We are made to feel like we have all of the time, but not enough money. You can’t earn more time. You could increase your fitness and take better care of yourself, but ultimately you don’t know when. I’d think you would rather be able to enjoy your life now than to keep planning for a better future which seems further and further away. Let people “New year, new me” if they need to. Whatever they do is their consequence to face. If they’re decisions don’t have anything to do with your life, why wouldn’t you re-focus on the people and things that do? Like how much is your healthcare about to be? How about your taxes? Can your kids read? Is your neighborhood less safe because of crime or because masked assailants are running through indiscriminately “fighting crime” like Tazmanian devils? 

I truly hope that 2026 is the year that people move with better discernment. If 2025 was the year of great reveal, then I hope that 2026 will begin the period of people recognizing that the freight train moving 80 miles per hour right at them will not be derailed by some unknown hero. You are going to find a way to either get out of the way, redirect, or stop it. Being a mature adult is realizing that there is nobody coming to save you. I know that I have been waiting for someone, some adultier adult to come along and pick me up. Some politician, some activist, some great revolutionary to come along and build the movement to help us all. 2025 taught me once and for all that I am the adult I am waiting for. Nobody is even supposed to pick me up. I have to get around on my own. It will be my decisions, my actions, my own hands that are going to be the ones to put me where I want to be. It is not that people we are in relationships with owe us nothing. It is that they do not owe us more than we owe ourselves. Nobody does. 

We’re here. For some reason. We can look around for others to tell us that reason or give us a reason, but it is for us to walk in that reason. Nobody else can believe for you. Nobody can love you enough that you’re finally going to grow up and be good in your life. Even if you found an amazing partner who loves you with all of their heart, they cannot love you out of your own way. We have good reason to believe that the world is what we think it is. Our lives up until this point have taught us what the world is. What we believe, what we think we know is based on everything that we have learned and experienced in our lives. You don’t just think things because you do. You learned to think that way. Through lived experiences. Through lessons taught by parents and guardians and teachers and authority figures. Nothing that you believe from childhood was an original thought. Imagination is original thought, however, even it is influenced by something. By what we see. I don’t just think that Stevie Wonder is one of the greatest artists of all time because I was born thinking that. His music was played around me when I was a kid and then I sought his music out for myself. I was able to listen to him and form that opinion, but if I did not know he existed I would not have. I’m not just randomly going to think to look for some guy named Stevie Wonder who has one of the greatest album runs of all time. I had to know he existed first. I don’t just look for random people that I don’t know exist. Nobody does.

My point is that we have to come into our own for ourselves in a way that suits us, but is also reasonable based on what is available to us. That doesn’t mean dream small. It means that if you can’t dream big where you are then it’s time for you to go somewhere else. If everything you are being shown or the resources available to you do not grant you a clear pathway to the life you want to live, you may need to change your surroundings. It is true that we have to have self-belief, but that alone won’t get you from point A to point B. You’re going to need to move. You’re going to need to do things. You’re going to need to be in certain places. That’s real. Self-belief is crucial. You can’t do much without it. But it alone will not propel you forward. That belief needs to power actions that will be the realization of what you want. This whole year I’ve been trying to make sense of my life. How it feels like I keep getting further away. But 2025 taught me that it was about freeing myself. I was never going to be able to do what I wanted to do in any good way without freeing myself first. The revolution won’t be televised because it is not about what other people see. It is about what you become. A revolution is just a name for the collective actions of revolutionaries. We may hold one up as the one that got us across the finish line, but no one person accomplishes it alone. It is a communal effort. However, nobody will take up those efforts until their freedom means more to them than anything. What you base your life on is what you choose to live for. If I base my life in changing my life in ways that enable me to joy and fulfillment, then I will revolt in situations where I am prohibited from doing so. Until I value my own freedom, myself, my own life, I will never do what is necessary to make it better. That is not about the materials, it is about the life itself. 

All of the things that I take up in order to make the life that I want for myself are a part of that life. Life is our experiences. Our being. That is the actions we take and the thoughts we think. In order for us to achieve joy, we must find ourselves in joyful lives. You should enjoy where you live. You should enjoy the food you eat. You should enjoy the clothes you wear. You should be happy with each thing that you have and do in your life in order to have a happy life. Each thing we sacrifice as not the thing that brings us joy diminishes our ability to know a joyful life. You have to be creative when you do not just have the thing you need. You have to be creative when you don’t have money. Sometimes that creativity keeps you alive. Rent was due. I’ve been creative in ways that I care not to discuss. Probably not what you’d think, but still not something I want to talk about. They were mostly just degrading in terms of putting myself in a position to have to overperform for very little just to get what I needed. May those days soon be behind me. 

I do not hate work, but I do hate being overworked. Hard work is just a romanticization of being overworked. Every time I have worked hard I have pushed myself to my physical limits. That is not something that anybody should have to do. Certainly not at the behest of people who would never. At this time, we need to realize that we have to revolt against our own beliefs and habits that keep us in lives that we hate or at least suffer a good portion of the time. We should not have to do so much sacrificing for the bare minimum. We should be able to spend some of our day in work and the rest of our day in enjoyment. That’s not ridiculous. That’s not radical. That is the life of a billionaire. I don’t want to be a billionaire though. I shouldn’t have to be a billionaire. I should be able to fill some good function in my community that enables me to the basic conveniences that have been sold to us as civilization. No, you wouldn’t need money if you could just build your own home, make your own clothes, grow or hunt your own food, cook it yourself, and make all of the things that we need for ourselves. That may seem like a lot of time, but you literally have all of the time in the world. I’m sure it will not take years of 40 hour weeks to get the materials together to build your own home. Can you build it like contractors, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, drywallers, painters, landscapers, or general construction workers? No. But you could build your own house. The whole sale of a nation is that it enables us to live lives of conveniences. We can buy instead of building a house. We can buy instead of making a car. We can buy instead of growing, hunting, butchering, and cooking our own food. We don’t have to do each and everything for ourselves. That is what is supposed to make it worthwhile to clock in. That we can buy things instead of making them. In some lands, however, that is complicated by the concepts of landownership. You can’t just build a home somewhere. You have to buy land. In many places pay taxes on it. You need money because you can’t just go and claim land. If you could you wouldn’t need money to buy it. This is the type of thinking that is actually free.

Rehashed concepts that have been around for centuries do not come from thinking. They come from collecting the thoughts of others. People long dead who lived in worlds that did not last even as long as they did. The world changes from generation to generation. That is why it becomes more and more foreign as you get older. It is not so much the younger generations of people. It has a lot more to do with the fact that the world is ever-changing. There is no point when it does not stop changing. I contend that the worst times of unrest and war are the result of people fighting tooth and nail to stop the world from changing. Because some people are doing amazingly well with how things have been. Others have DNA that has suffered through generations. That conflict of people who want things to change and people who want things to say the same is what our shared world has suffered through for as long as preserved history goes back. There were plenty of wars around the industrial revolution. Revolution seems like a good thing for those who long for change. It is a nightmare for those who do not want change. 

This is where my head is finishing out 2025. I can admit I am ready for this year to go. I know that does not change things directly, but it gives me some hope for a better future. This year whooped my ass. It tore me a part. I will be leaving some parts of myself in 2025. But I believe those things represent the last of what I needed to get rid of to become the person that I want to be. I needed to lose what I lost, as much as I may grieve that loss. It is not about the things we lose not being good, it is just about them not being for us. You have to put some things down to pick others up. You have to leave some things behind to move forward. It is not about right, wrong, or any other designator of pre-destiny; it is about the choices we make and what we do thereafter. It isn’t about if you should leave them behind; it is about what you do after. If you move forward better, it is not necessarily proof that it was bad for you. That may just mean it was not to be a part of your future. That is what I will spend the next few days reflecting on as I decide how I am going to do what I want to do in 2026. It is mine do decide. I may not accomplish every single goal, but I can make progress. If in the next year I make steady progression, who knows where I’ll end up? I just know it will be further along than here…