Another Twelve Months I’ll Never Get Back
2024 in review and “resolutions” for 2025
It’s an ironclad law that all newsletter writers must publish a self-indulgent piece on or around January 1st, reflecting on the past year. If you’re anything like me, your inbox is full of them. Newsletters I barely remember subscribing to, summarizing a year of posts I didn’t read. Newsletters that, as far as I can tell, only publish on New Year’s, each piece looking back on the previous New Year’s piece, an endless Matryoshka doll of self-reflection. And yet here I am, ever the hypocrite, putting out one of my own. Forgive me Father, for I have Substacked.
It’s hard to believe, but I’ve now been writing this newsletter for a little over four years. That’s longer than I’ve done most things in life: longer than I spent in college, longer than I’ve lasted in most jobs, and longer than my longest relationship. It’s also longer than the average tenure of British Prime Ministers since 1900, according to some ChatGPT math that I didn’t bother to double-check.
Last year I published ten pieces, more or less meeting my more or less pledge that this newsletter comes out more or less monthly. These pieces touched on a wide range of topics, from machine politics to the point of humanities majors, but the most popular were all about my personal life. Unintentionally, they ended up telling a story in three acts:
In Rave New World, I found myself, and my self-confidence, in Detroit’s rave scene.
In Some Quick Tips on Finding Love, I explained how to fall in love with someone you actually like.
In Having a Kid Is Already Fucking Me Up and He Hasn't Even Been Born Yet, my life changed forever when my then-girlfriend, now-wife forgot to take her birth control for a few days.
More important than the pieces I published, though, are the pieces I didn’t publish. This year—probably because it was the first year I wasn’t holding myself to any kind of set schedule—I set a new record for unfinished pieces, including such half-written potential masterpieces as Why I Don’t Care About Having a Legacy, My Life as a Failure, Longing for Asexuality, and Drugs Were More Fun When Buying Them Was Hard. Perhaps I’ll eventually finish some of these and you’ll get to enjoy them in 2025 or beyond. Or perhaps they’re already finished in a parallel world, delighting readers of Candy for Breakfast’s shadow newsletter in the spirit realm.
Back our realm, 2024 was the biggest year so far for growth in this newsletter’s readership. There are now 1,102 of you, meaning Substack has finally given me that coveted “Over 1,000 subscribers” badge.
Late at night, rocking my child back to sleep, I wonder: who the hell are all you people? Substack provides me with the barest hints of information about each of you—mostly it shows me the other newsletters you subscribe to—and I try to figure out what those other newsletters say about you and, therefore, what they say about me. I wonder how you found me, what your lives are like, what your hopes and dreams are, or at least, your hopes and dreams as they relate to reading this newsletter. I wonder how long will it’ll be before I disappoint you and you unsubscribe.
New Year’s resolutions allegedly originate from the ancient Babylonian festival of Akitu, some 4,000 years ago. During the twelve-day ceremony, the Babylonians made promises to their gods to repay debts and return borrowed items, believing this would bring favor and good fortune in the coming year. They also staged puppet fights, burned effigies, and humiliated the king in a ritual slapping; if they slapped him so hard he cried, it was seen as a good omen for the coming year.
Sadly, we’ve abandoned all the cool parts of Akitu and hung on only to the lamest component: resolutions. I refuse to make New Year’s resolutions for myself, but I did make a few for this newsletter, and here they are:
More Lennon, less McCartney
John was always the raw, ungovernable wildman; Paul, the polished, managerial pragmatist. Without John, a lot of Paul’s solo work is uninspired—but without Paul, a lot of John’s solo work is unlistenable. Like most Type A people, I’ve always gravitated more towards Paul. Yes, his try-hard energy can be annoying, but I admire his work ethic, without which the Beatles would have likely broken up, or perhaps just faded away, a few albums before they actually did. By the end, he was kind of like that kid in school who doesn’t want to be in charge of the group project again, but has realized that if he doesn’t step up, nothing will get done, so fine, sure, he’ll take the lead one more time.
This year, though, I want to embrace a little more of my inner John. More id. Less editing. More typos. Less polish. Let’s get weird. And if that means putting out occasional Au, I guess that’s the price I have to pay.
Humiliate my family
This year, I want to self-censor less. With every essay, I’ll ask myself, Will my parents be horrified when they read this? And if the answer is no, it’s not done yet. (My parents, reading this in dismay: Wait—you mean this isn’t already the un-self-censored version?!?)
This year, I resolve to use this newsletter to fully destroy whatever microscopic chance existed that I might someday run for office. I resolve to alienate my new subscribers, greatly reduce my future career prospects, and make every woman who has ever broken up with me certain that she made the right decision. The theme of 2025 is publishing work that I will instantly regret.
Write less
When I publish at all, that is. After all: the internet is full of people resolving to write more this year, and as with all resolutions, most of them are bound to fail. That’s why I’m going in the opposite direction and resolving to write less.
Every year since 2020, I’ve written less and grown more. 2024 was the year I published the fewest pieces, and also the year I gained the most new readers. In 2025, I will continue this trend by writing even less. Some of my pieces will contain only a single paragraph; others, a single character. (It’ll probably be “q.” Or maybe “^.”) Eventually, I will switch from writing new pieces to deleting old ones. At its apotheosis, this newsletter will be nothing but a blank landing page, the shadow where some writing used to be. You’ll email me—“Hey, what happened to your newsletter?”—and like the wizened old man in a horror movie’s ghost town, I’ll deny such a thing ever existed. I never had a newsletter, I’ll say. I’ve never heard of Substack. In fact, I don’t even know how to read.
Happy New Year from Candy for Breakfast, and here’s to a great 2025!