Image © Jose 2025
This year’s series didn’t start as a writing project, and that’s probably the most honest way to frame it. In 2024, I set out to write. Explicitly. I called myself a “writer wannabe,” lowered expectations, and made a deal with myself: show up every week, say something, don’t polish it too much, don’t optimize for engagement, and see if I could sustain the discipline for a full year. Fifty-two posts later, the result felt like a mosaic: work, family, music, leadership, design, grief, curiosity. Wide-angle. Restless. Uneven by design. The point was stamina and attention, not cohesion.
2025 was different from day one.
This year had a gravity to it that I didn’t fully anticipate. Buying an old house anchored the writing in a very literal place. The posts became less about scanning the horizon and more about standing somewhere specific and paying attention. Boots, walls, ceilings, deadlines, contractors, micro-decisions. The writing narrowed, but it also deepened. Not because the prose got better, but because the constraints were real.
I wasn’t trying to “document a renovation.” I was trying to understand what gets exposed when you commit to something long, expensive, imperfect, and shared. A house is unforgiving that way. It doesn’t care about your theories. It responds to decisions, compromises, delays, fatigue, and follow-through. Writing alongside that process became less of a weekly performance and more of a companion practice.
If 2024 was about range, 2025 was about friction. I wrote a lot about decisions this year. Make or buy. Preserve or replace. Cover up or leave exposed. Speed versus care. Ideals versus deadlines. I don’t think any of those posts landed because of clever insight, they might have landed because the stakes were no longer abstract. When the contractors are in the house ready to do the work, philosophy collapses into action very quickly.
One thing I became more aware of is how often I default to analysis as a form of control. Writing helps me slow that down. Not solve it, just notice it. There were moments this year where I wanted the writing to resolve something the renovation wouldn’t. It didn’t. The house kept doing what houses do: resisting closure.
There’s also something to be said about visibility. In 2024, the posts floated freely. In 2025, they circled the same few themes again and again: labor, craft, migration, specialization, time, value, care. At times I worried I was repeating myself. In hindsight, I think I was circling something rather than advancing it. That’s not a literary strategy, but it might be an honest one.
I’m also aware of what these texts are not. They’re not essays in the formal sense. They don’t build arguments cleanly. They don’t resolve. They don’t pretend to be universal. English still isn’t my first language. If anything, this year I leaned into clarity over elegance. Say it plainly. Say it once. Move on. The Sunday ritual stayed intact. That matters more than I expected. Publishing on Sunday evenings remains a small act of resistance against optimization. It’s not when algorithms want content. It is when I want closure. That distinction still feels important.
I don’t think either year made me a better writer. But both made me more attentive. To people. To work. To materials. To the quiet labor behind finished things. To how much gets decided by those who show up every day and how little gets noticed once it’s done. If there’s a through-line across both years, it’s this: writing, for me, is not about expression. It’s about calibration. A way to check where I am in relation to what I’m doing, building, choosing, avoiding.
The house will eventually be finished. Next year posts will be about something else. What I wanted to see across two very different years, was whether attention could be trained the same way endurance can. Show up. Look closely. Say what you see. Don’t rush to turn it into a lesson.
This is still the experiment.
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If you read along this year, thank you. Not only for the engagement, but for the quiet company.
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