Looking Back On 2024, Looking Ahead To 2025

Last year I decided to start a new annual tradition: reviewing the previous year and setting objectives for the coming year. A new year has begun, which means that it's time to continue this tradition by looking back on 2024 and looking ahead to 2025!

Note that this year will be a bit different from last year. You see, this year I have last year's goals to review, whereas last year, I didn't, as I'd just started the tradition. That means things will be structured a little bit differently this year.

Looking Back on 2024

I had a number of goals for 2024 of things I wanted to work on. They were: better sleep discipline, watch less YouTube (and game more), better portion control, make substantial progress on my game, stream a few times per month, knowing God's love for me more deeply, and developing community and relationships. Let's review these!

Better Sleep Discipline

Last year I said I wanted to be better about getting to bed, but the focus was actually on getting the regular daily activities of cleaning my teeth and writing my Dear Patrons... entry done early enough before bed time that they wouldn't interfere with my going to bed.

So, how did I do? I would argue it was mixed. I actually had pretty good sleep discipline in the spring and summer, but I really struggled when autumn rolled around, and the reason for this is pretty simple. I get a low-grade anxiety at night that tends to put me in an alert state that decreases how much I want to go to bed. In the spring and summer, days are longer, long enough that I remember regularly getting myself to bed around 9:30 PM or so while it was still light out. However, once days got shorter, that became a lot harder to do. I've also had a few other things come up that have disrupted my sleep schedule. In particular, the night that led to this article happened at the end of September, and I remember that really throwing a wrench into my sleep. There've been some other things, too (like anime binge-watching sessions in December) that've thrown things off.

This is definitely an area I need to continue improving in. Of particular note, I need to figure out how to handle days that have later activities, since I usually want a period of time to wind down after them, which makes it hard to get to bed on time.

Watch Less YouTube (and Game More)

This goal was about feeling like YouTube, while enjoyable and of some value, was occupying more of my time than it was worth. Additionally, I wanted to spend more time playing games, both because it's fun and because, as a game designer, I learn from doing so.

So, how did I do? In some regards, quite well, actually! I'm watching, at least at this point, substantially less YouTube than I used to. However, I've to some extent replaced that with watching anime. Though, I'd argue that anime is the superior passive entertainment because I can learn from the storytelling and worldbuilding there. I do also play Guild Wars 2 pretty regularly these days, and it is often a go-to entertainment option, which is of some value. I do want to play a greater variety of games, though that's more of a goal for this coming year.

To accomplish this goal, I have dramatically pared back the number of YouTube channels I'm subscribed to. Sometimes that's painful, but the simple truth is I do not have the time to do all of the things that I perceive as having value, which means I have to sacrifice some stuff for the sake of other stuff that matters more to me.

Better Portion Control

The goal here is pretty simple: eat less food by grabbing less food when I'm portioning things out. I feel compelled to clean my plate (training from my childhood combined with an aversion to food waste), so the way to eat less so I can lose weight (or, more accurately, fat) is to serve myself smaller portions.

So, how did I do? I made progress. I've got a ways to go, but I'm getting a better sense here. It's still a challenging learning process, though. At this point, I have gotten a lot better at realizing I've grabbed too much food, but figuring out how to apply this understanding before portioning is a different thing entirely. Still, I am improving, which I'm grateful for.

One big challenge here, though, is meal timing. There's a lot I don't quite understand yet. Sometimes my body simply wants a bigger meal, then won't get hungry for many hours, and other times I want more smaller meals. I don't know why this is. I find it unpredictable, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. I tend to get it into my head that meals are supposed to happen at specific times, but my body doesn't always agree, and sometimes coordinating with others means it's hard to shift those timings to better fit whatever my my body's schedule is for the day (my sister's late shifts on Tuesdays and Wednesdays are a huge culprit here), which is a weird, complicating aspect to this.

Make Substantial Progress On My Game

I don't even remember what game I was working on when I wrote this goal, but I do agree with it. In short, the objective is to eventually finish an RPG Maker MV game. To summarize things from last year's article (and, you know, life experiences), I keep running into design challenges that trip me up and cause me to stall out. I've been learning from them and starting over, but that has kept happening. Eventually, I want to actually finish something!

So, how did I do? Well, I am working on a game project that I feel I've made good progress on and that is progressing in a satisfactory way. I have started pining after other design ideas I like, but I want to set them aside for now so I can focus on finishing this game. A big thing that's helped is that I think I've identified most of the things that cause me to stall out and this project successfully addresses them. That's huge for me! So while I do have other design ideas I want to try, I've also successfully managed to identify the development landmines that actually tank a project for me. Well, at least the ones I've found before. I could run into new ones, but I hope not. Regardless, I'm feeling pretty determined about my current project right now.

Stream a Few Times Per Month

I had this goal after not streaming for a long while. The reason I wanted to stream some each month was for community.

So, how did I do? I definitely got more streams in, though they were also decidedly haphazard. In the end, however, I've reached a simple conclusion: streaming can be fun, but I don't have what it takes to be a successful streamer. That requires a level of scheduling consistency that doesn't match my personality. Well, it's possible to have a chaotic schedule if you stream often enough and for long enough, but I simply have too many other things I want to do for that to work for me.

Honestly, I'm likely to back away substantially from streaming this year, as I don't think the overhead of doing so is paying off for me at this point. That said, I do have a few things I want to do with it, but more on that later.

Knowing God's Love For Me More Deeply

I wrote a lot for this goal last year, so the summary I give here will fall woefully short, but to summarize: The goal here was to increase in my understanding of God's love for me. I recognized that doing that requires me to love myself more fully and to discard any internalized self-condemnation that I've developed thanks to culture.

So, how did I do? I've made a lot of progress here, though I've got more to get through. Interestingly, I made enough progress here for several new things to branch out from it, but I'll talk about those in the goals for this year. Still, I am glad that I've grown in my knowledge of God's love for me, as well as my understanding of love and relationships more generally (as both are important aspects of this).

Developing Community and Relationships

This goal is about the desire to have friends I can hang out with, if I put it succinctly. More broadly, it is also about the challenges I face when it comes to problem solving. While it's easy to identify the problem—a lack of the type of active community I want in my life—the solutions I think of first require societal changes which I cannot effect. This leaves me feeling like my situation is hopeless. At this point, I don't actually believe it is, I just have to figure out solutions that work without require sweeping changes to society.

So, how did I do? Frankly, at least superficially, I did poorly. I would say little changed this year, though one could argue I went backwards in some regards: in May, I left the Young Adults Bible Study I'd been a part of since around October of 2018. However, there were some experiments, too: I investigated OnlyFans to see if that would be a way of connecting with a kind of person I want to befriend (for numerous reasons, this did not pan out). I also found that streaming didn't really help much with this desire, and for two very good reasons: first, I want people to share physical space with, and second, my stream is small enough that whether or not I'd even have someone watching I could interact with was unreliable.

That said, I do think I've made some notable progress. I drew closer to a church friend at our annual retreat this past year, which is notable. In general, I feel like church relationships have improved on average. Additionally, I think I've actually had to work on a number of personal things related to the previous goal—in short, I've had my own internal barriers to actually connecting with people that needed to be addressed, which I think I've made substantial progress on this last year. I'll talk about these more later. I do want to also note that I made something of a lateral move from Twitter to Blue Sky this year. I do think the latter site is a more positive place for me overall, but I don't think it has (as of the time of this writing) addressed this particular issue very much. Simply put, I need more mutuals to interact with there. I'm very grateful for those I do have, mind you.

Summary of Last Year

Looking over all of these, I definitely made progress on all of my goals, at least to some degree. If nothing else, I've been learning, which is always a good thing. It's also been good to go back and review these goals. Doing so has reminded me of things I'd half-forgotten, and I can see the seeds of where I am now in what I wrote last year.

Looking Ahead to 2025

Most of my goals for this coming year are going to be building on goals from last year in some way, either as a direct continuation or as a refinement. That said, one of last year's goals will be noticeably absent: streaming. Simply put, streaming can't be anything more than a hobby for me, and further, any streaming I do do will have with it the mindset that I'm creating videos for my YouTube channel. That means it'll be more project-focused.

That said, I have several things I do want to stream, I just don't know what that's going to look like in terms of frequency, as other projects are naturally going to take priority (as they often have). First, I want to finish the "Unlock All Skills" playthrough of Guild Wars 1. I also want to stream a playthrough of Middle-earth: Shadow of War, as that's a game I'm quite fond of. I had started to stream a playthrough of it over two years ago, but that's when the graphics card in my previous computer died, which halted the effort, and I have yet to get back around to it. Finally, I want to stream a playthrough of Guild Wars 2 where I play without the minimap. I'm curious to see how the game plays that way, but I also think doing so will help me learn the maps better, which is something I'd like to do.

Now, don't go thinking those streaming projects are specific goals for this year or anything. If they happen, they happen, and if they don't, they don't. My actual goals are focused elsewhere.

Take Care of My Health—Both Physical & Mental

This goal is really combining a number of the goals from last year, particularly on the physical front. I want to continue improving regarding the food I eat, both in quantity (less) and quality. I want to try and improve at sleep, too, by which I mean, getting to bed at a more regular time. That's gonna be hard, but I do think I made some progress last year, and I'd like to build on that. I also want to exercise more (helped by sleeping such that I can wake up early enough to take regular walks with my sister). Notably, it'd be good for me to figure out ways of simply moving more. Research shows that our bodies are made to move, and I'm a little too good at being still. I do think there are environmental things that could be different that might help with that, but I don't want to use that as an excuse, either. This'll be hard to change, though.

Mental health is a new goal, but one I want to be more aware of, particularly leading into a political season that's gonna make a lot of people catastrophize. Social media (or parasocial media, as I should call it—more on this later) is especially bad for this. I've come to realize that I simply cannot pay much attention to people who spend most of their time advocating for causes, even (and especially) if I agree with those causes (if I agree, I'm more likely to feel like I ought to pay attention, hence the "and especially"). The reason is that doing so reminds me that the world isn't how I'd like it to be, and that simply isn't good for my mental health. So I need to be careful about how much of that I'm paying attention to.

Play More Games I Haven't Played Before

This is pretty straightforward, but I want to make it an explicit goal for this year. I have a real tendency to develop a favorite game that I can sink a lot of time into, whether that's Elden Ring or Guild Wars 2 (to name a couple of recent examples). While they're a lot of fun, it would behoove me to get experience in a broader range of games. I certainly own plenty. This is a common gamer problem, of course, and one not unlike the one I hear about readers who buy more books than they have time to read. Still, the point is that, for many reasons, I think it'd be good for me to play more games rather than just more of the same games, so I want to find ways of making that a priority.

Make More Progress On a Game

This is basically a repeat of the similar objective from last year. I have an RPG Maker MV game I'm working on that I want to finish. I feel like it's achievable, and I want to make good progress on it. I don't know if that progress will be good enough to release it this year, though I'd like for it to be. I do like the overall design of the game I'm currently working on, and I think I've managed to avoid the roadblocks that torpedoed previously projects (talk about your mixed metaphors, huh?), so I'm optimistic about it. However, there are a lot of details that need to be completed, and doing so will require diligence and discipline.

Accept the Me God's Made Me to Be (And Trust In Him More)

One of my challenges when it comes to writing is that I tend to hold thoughts in my head like a graph, where there are a bunch of ideas with connections between them. The challenge with this is that turning that into a linear form that can be expressed is often difficult because I struggle to figure out where to begin, since so many ideas seem interdependent on each other for meaning. I say all of this because I'm particularly struggling with linearizing this goal. I think my best approach is, therefore, to talk about the related idea nodes so that I can build up the proper context for understanding this particular objective.

Let's start in a religious place. This is perhaps the closest point, though not the only one. But even here, this is composed of smaller concepts, it seems, if my inability to identify a starting point here is any indication. So let's start here with a growing understanding of what it means to "be like Jesus," the thing I constantly hear fellow Christians say we need to be.

For me, "be like Jesus" makes me think very narrowly; I interpret that word "like" in a simulacrum sense. That is, when I hear "be like Jesus" I interpret it as "be a copy of Jesus." This is, I have come to believe, not the point of the sentiment. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul writes extensively about the nature of the resurrection, and in verses 48–49, he makes a comparison that I'm finding helpful. Specifically, Paul compares Jesus with Adam, and the apostle makes the fundamental argument that Jesus's resurrection has instigated a new type of humanity, just as Adam's creation began a type of humanity.

To summarize this point, God loves diversity and wants a wildly diverse humanity to requite His love for them and to live in love with each other. Thus, being like Jesus doesn't mean being less yourself, it means being a redeemed (or refurbished) version of yourself. In some regards, it even means being more yourself.

The next node in this graph of mine is based on Christian culture. Like all cultures, Christian culture has a set of values and tries to push for conformity. It holds up a model and says, "This is what it means to be a good Christian!" But it does this based on its cultural values. It's taken me a while to realize how much this has ingrained itself into my thinking, but I've been learning that Christian values and God's values are not, as it turns out, perfectly overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. In short, God has been showing me that I don't have to contort myself into the shape I've been taught would make me a "good Christian" according to Christian culture. In fact, I should not—that's actually disrespectful to my Creator.

The remaining nodes are secular in nature. They mostly have to do with understanding my place in society, and it comes from both a general place (that is, what does it mean to "be an American"?) and a gendered place (what does it mean to "be a man"?). Both of these are affected by Christian culture, or a particular flavor of it, since that was part of the culture I grew up in, which affects base assumptions and conceptions I hold about the structure of society.

The first of those, my general place in society, is a weird one to process. Largely, the issue is that what I've been presented as typical doesn't work for me, as I like large swathes of my time to be unplanned, which means my mental health suffers if I have too much of a schedule or routine. I've therefore struggled with what "work" means and what it should look like for me. But this is perhaps the area where I've most directly struggled, so I've made the most progress. At the same time, there's a lot that's still unsettled because so much of the understanding I've developed here has happened recently, and I'm still learning how to apply it.

The second, what it means to be a man, has been a different kind of challenge for me. I've written about this in depth over the last couple of years (particularly in this article from the end of 2023), but I've been reflecting on the concepts of gender once again in more recent days. We use gender as a dominate form of identity-making, which has some plusses, but I've come to decide it has a great many minuses, too. You see, while I think gender will always play a role in our understanding of our identity, I think it currently occupies too much space here. To some extent, I think the current arguments around transgenderism (please pardon the word if incorrect) have intensified this element, but in many regards, transgender, and especially nonbinary, identities are, I suspect, at least in part a reaction to outmoded gender roles. Simply put, both technological progress and change in other cultural elements (as one example, the ascendence of jobs that put the emphasis on mental aptitude and education over muscle) have led to greater parity between the sexes (not that females haven't been artificially suppressed relative to their actual ability for most of history), but our gender roles have not adjusted to take this into account. I think this has caused many people to struggle to find their identity as a result; indeed, I think this has affected me. You see, for me, my definition of "manhood" has largely been taken from my father (with a portion from media portrayals of men): someone dutiful, who provides for his family; a handyman able to repair most things around the house; a fan of "manly" interests like cars and sports (interests I don't have); and so on. Heck, this even includes what society says a "proper" man's sexuality is supposed to look like, which mine doesn't match. Simply put, I've struggled with my sense of identity because I'm quite different from my father and typical depictions of manhood I've seen in media, which has left me feeling like something other than a man, which has caused me difficulty with accepting myself.

Right, those are the supporting nodes to the greater node, and the point of this particular goal. To briefly summarize, these supporting nodes are: What it means to be like Jesus, my place in the church, my place in society, and what it means to be a man. I've struggled with all of these concepts, and had issues in all four areas. This goal is therefore about resolving these by accepting the me that God has made me to be. In other words, I need to have a kind of self-confidence that comes from a confidence in my Creator and His love and desire for me. I want to find identity and security in Him; in His wanting of me. Ultimately, I want to feel desired; that's what makes me feel loved, and God has been working to teach me that He wants me. I can't emphasize the both of those enough. He doesn't want me to be someone else. He doesn't look at me and reject me. Sure, there are some parts where I need to grow, I need refinement, but in my eyes, that simply means becoming a purer form of myself. It's like the character growth we see in The Lord of the Rings where characters grow into themselves and leave the cruft behind. When you see the hobbits return to the Shire and kick out Sharkey, they are able to do it because they have become more themselves. I'm not sure if I'm explaining this well, but it's the kind of growth I want to go through, and the kind of growth I think God is leading me through. And so I need to trust in my Creator that He knows what He's doing with me, what He's made me for, and that all of my quirks and oddities are pleasing and delightful to Him. This is ultimately so hopeful to me, but accepting it and living in it are two things I'm working on, and I want to grow in them this year.

Invest In Relationships

This is continuing a goal from last year, but with more intent. Basically, I want to more intentionally invest in my relationships with others by prioritizing my use of time towards that goal. However, there's more to it than that. For example, much of the Internet is parasocial in nature. In other words, they're voyeuristic, one-way, semi-fictionalized relationships that are ultimately hollow. I want to therefore spend more time with actual relationships that are two-way and have real substance. It isn't enough that I'm interested in someone, they have to be interested in me, too. I feel like I'm repeating myself with different words here, but that's because this is really important.

One particular challenge I have is that I work from home. This naturally limits my social interactions and my ability to meet people and get to know them. Notably, as I've said several times already, I want to spend more time hanging out with friends, which requires friends to hang out with, but how to find them and spend time hanging out with them are currently both mysteries to me. I just know I want to take more opportunities to interact with those I already know, and to take opportunities to get to know new people, especially in physical spaces where I can get hugs, as physical affection is important to me and something that communication technologies simply can't provide.

Related to this is a desire to understand relationships themselves in more detail and to try and figure out some way to help address issues of loneliness. In some ways, this is selfish, as I want these things for myself, but I also genuinely want to help others with the problem of loneliness. After all, I know that pain, and it sucks. I know I'm being a bit vague here, but that's because this is still early. My first goal is to spend time thinking through relationships myself, then do some amount of research and run my thoughts by others I trust, before finalizing a path. My current gut instinct that's informing what my first pass idea is for a final objective is to create some kind of curriculum that helps people learn about relationships and how to deepen them while practicing with others in a small cohort of around 6-12 people (smaller groups are preferable). I don't know if that's practical, or what this will ultimately look like, but I have a deep desire to do something here to help people form connections that can lead to lifelong, positive relationships.

Continue Real-Life Dailies Diligently

Late last year, I was reflecting on how effective dailies in Guild Wars 2 were at getting me to log on and do a little bit of something every day. (Dailies are a rotating list of objectives that you can complete each day in Guild Wars 2 for a small amount of a reward currency that you can spend in a special shop.) I realized that having something similar for real life could be quite helpful when it comes to getting things done, and after a bit of thinking, I realized that the program I made to help me track tasks could actually be set up to assign tasks on a schedule! Mind you, it'd be the same set every day (unless I wanted to put in a lot of effort), but that was good enough for me.

Thus it was that I set up a set of daily objectives: exercise (alternating pushups and sit ups), working on my game, working on a writing project, and initially art. At this point, I have changed that last objective to be working on the relationships project mentioned previously. I wasn't sure how motivated I'd be to do them, but it's totally worked! I might not do a lot, but they do get me doing at least a little bit every day, which is great for actually making progress over time.

So, yeah, this objective is all about continuing this and not giving up on it, as I think it's been beneficial for my life. If it's something that would work for you, I highly recommend it!

Conclusion

My theme for this year is Relationships. It includes the relationship with myself (taking care of my health and accepting my identity from God), my relationship with God, and my relationships with others. Along the way, I want to spend time with video games, too! I'm hopeful about the future, a hope derived from faith in a God who tells me I don't have to have everything figured out, and that I can rely on Him.

Thank you for reading.

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