Happy New Year! My favorite January tradition is treating myself to a fresh new notebook. A friend asked our group what our best notebooks are, and that question was a gift because I have thoughts.
Here’s what I said.
What do you like, and why do you like it? Personally, I have to practice answering this question. I get influenced by what others like. I have an internal judge telling me what I should and shouldn’t like. When I do know I like a thing, it’s not easy to quantify why I enjoyed feeling whatever it made me feel.
This past year, to practice figuring out what I like and why I like it, I rated and wrote a couple sentences about every single thing I watched, read, or listened to all year. As of today (late December), I’ve written 115 reviews of the movies, television shows, theater productions, books, albums, and podcasts I consumed in 2025. Whew! Here are the ones I enjoyed the most.
Digital tech has flattened our experience of the world to text under a glass touchscreen, writes Amelia Wattenberger in a beautifully-illustrated essay. We should build more computer interfaces that serve the way humans experience the world—through their five senses.
I think about this idea in terms of how my kid sees me get stuff done. When I was growing up and observing my parents manage our family life, I watched them jot plans on a paper calendar hanging in our kitchen, write checks and stuff stamped envelopes to pay the bills every week, scribble weekly grocery shopping lists, plan a month of family dinners on index cards, keep an address book of names and phone numbers, call their friends on the phone, and spend Saturdays going to the bank, the butcher, and the post office. Today, my kid observes me doing all those different things but has no indicator of what I’m actually doing unless I show her and tell her, because it all just looks like me tapping on a phone screen or typing on my laptop.
Be bored. Be by yourself. Let your mind wander. Let your imagination breathe and watch what comes. Watch what comes and have the courage and the audacity to just try. Try it out. Whatever comes into your head, try it out.
— Rosie Perez’s advice to young people in this NYT Magazine feature on Gen X, “the last generation that wasn’t online until adulthood.”
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Last weekend’s Black Friday deals lured me to my local computer superstore, where I picked up a bunch of parts, went home, unboxed them all, plugged them into one another, pressed the power button, and crossed my fingers. Beep! My new server booted up, in all its redundant storage glory. Now I have enough room to store and search all my photos and videos and files, without relying on Google or Apple or Amazon to do it for me.
It’s the easiest it’s ever been to make software–especially simple apps, single-serving websites, and scripts. This year I’ve been having a blast programming again and I’ve really embraced the idea:
Software is useful even if it has just one user.
This year I put together a few small apps for a single user: myself. They’re not scalable or secure or written to run on public servers or pushed to GitHub or tested beyond my own use case or ready in any way for other users or other programmers. They are all comically simple but help me get something done. They are home-cooked apps, and you’ll just have to believe me when I say they’re delicious.
In the spirit of showing my work—and to remember how and why I made them—here are a few of the things I built just for me in 2025.
I’ve added these to my Projects page, in the hope that others can take the ideas and methods and adapt and expand on them for their own purposes.
Did you make anything small and simple just for you this year? Tell me about it.
High achievers are perhaps the most insecure people among us. Competitive people behave the way they do because without those daily victories they struggle to accept themselves. They need constant reminders, promotions, or media attention to feel good about who they are.
Despite how much public praise they receive, for many, achievement is a way to mask self-loathing, depression, anxiety or shame. Perfectionism and ambition can be coping mechanisms, with the unusual bonus that other people reward them for coping in this way.
— Scott Berkun is writing a new book about rules to live by, and this one is about aiming for stories versus perfection.
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Like everyone else on the internet, I’m completely obsessed with Lily Allen’s newest album, West End Girl. Allen wrote and recorded all 14 devastating and detailed songs about her marriage’s breakdown in just 10 days. (Listen to them start to finish, with closed captioning on.)
“It was hard to make this record,” Allen said. “It was incredibly manic, and it was emotionally traumatic. But nothing felt forced. It just sort of fell out of me. That’s what happens when you’re writing from a place of truth, and without an agenda. This record was purely for me, and it was a way of processing things that I was going through in my private life.”
I haven’t made anything new in awhile and it doesn’t feel good. I’ve been looking after a family member who had surgery, so most of my time has been spent on doctor appointments, pharmacy runs, food prep, laundry, going to the gym, and making sure my middle-schooler is fed, getting her homework done, taking showers, wearing clean clothes, and getting to school on time.
Objectively I know that caring for the people I love in tangible ways is one of the best uses of my time and energy. Yet, I found myself telling a friend that I “lost the day” to the logistics of sustaining my family life. When I don’t make progress on creative projects, my internal judge decides it’s a less productive—and therefore less valuable—day, even if I’ve made a nutritious meal, shared a laugh with my kid, and lifted heavier weights at the gym.
This doesn’t make sense. Challenging beliefs like this is a major part of my personal productivity detox. The idea that building new things is more valuable than maintenance or care is some capitalist bullshit, and it’s worth deprogramming.
The extreme hype surrounding generative AI and technologies like LLMs has been exhausting over the last few years. Coupled with fear-based marketing against a backdrop of rolling layoffs—“if you’re not embracing AI you’ll be left behind”—it’s downright toxic. You can’t toss a rock on LinkedIn without hitting some thinkfluencer sharing the AI prompts and products that will solve all your problems, or celebrating the latest unicorn someone vibe-coded last week.
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There’s a profound difference between 3 seemingly similar ways to spend time:
- sitting around and making things, either alone or with people you want to be around, which is a fundamentally human experience
- sitting/standing around and making things with people you’ve been ordered to work with, on things you’ve been ordered to make, on a full-time work schedule set by someone else
- performing all the capitalist ceremonies of the previous bullet point, but you’re not even making anything yourself
All 3 get muddled together in discussions and in subjective experience, and in any case most people only experience the 2nd or 3rd one for large swaths of their lives.
It takes a while, post-retirement, to let go of all the nonsense from those ways of being, and instead to return to the simpler and more human acts of chopping wood, carrying water, and making things for their own sake.
— Redditer ScoobyDoobyGazebo on how deeply “people don’t understand the grasp work and productivity has on their lives.”
A couple of weeks ago I turned 50 years old, which is a sentence my fingers feel strange typing because in my mind I’m still somewhere in my late 20s. Age perception is weird like that. There’s a polite assumption your loved ones (and your financial planner) like to make, which is that you will live to be 100 years old. Actuarial tables tell a more likely story, but I don’t care: I’m going to try to reach centenarian status.
Working back from there, I think of this 50th birthday as halftime—that pause mid-game when players get to run off the field, take a breather, review what’s happened so far, and strategize what’s next (ideally while Shakira and J. Lo do this show).
