Despite my best intentions for 2025, most of my goals for the year weren’t really executed upon. This year, my work-life balance has been a bit out of whack. Large work projects distract from things that matter at home and make it difficult to concentrate on personal projects with little energy left over for hobbies. Adding in the continual flood of near-existential crisis in about every aspect of life right now – and progress on any sort of “goal” metric slows down. I found a local club to engage with and have largely switched back to Linux for day-to-day computing. Those are huge wins, but many of the other 2025 goals were partially met at best.

In the past year, the cost of my multiple “life reboots” has hit really hard. Even a single change in work, change in city, or change in faith community costs friends and acquaintances. In many ways, my social network never recovered after my first “hard reset,” and the handful of soft reboots since haven’t helped the situation. Nor has the increasingly polarized political climate. I’ve found politics in general a cancerous subject that erodes friendships and minds.