2025 was a year of change.

Change oozing through in different levels of extreme. From joining a new company after three years, to a break-up and to the death of my beloved grandmother.

Two of the aforementioned events were particularly sad. Grief can be all-consuming. It’s easy to grieve and let it send you down a downward spiral. A spiral telling you that you’re not good enough, that it’s all for nothing. But, it can also offer you a chance to reflect. To think about what you love about life and to index on those things.

Oddly, a quote from South Park came to mind - in the episode, Butters goes through a break-up. Stan, who went through a break-up earlier in the episode and joined the Goth Kids asked Butters if he wanted to join them. Butters responded with:

“I love life...Yeah, I'm sad, but at the same time, I'm really happy that something could make me feel that sad. It's like...It makes me feel alive, you know. It makes me feel human. The only way I could feel this sad now is if I felt something really good before. So I have to take the bad with the good. So I guess what I'm feeling is like a beautiful sadness.”

So these moments of sadness, and the opportunity to use them as a tool to reflect, gave me something significant. Clarity. For the first time in years I began to feel like I know what I actually wanted out of life. Fulfilment in the work I do, conversations about ideas and immersing myself in the beauty of humanity's creativity.

And with that, knowing what I want to avoid. Boring and vacuous people who are terrified of saying what they truly think for fear that they may offend someone or say the wrong thing.

This feeling partly came to me when I went to Labour Party Conference in October. After a bad year for the party and an uncertain world, I expected to hear ideas about how all of this could be turned around. But to do that meant you had to admit things weren’t good and give an honest analysis of what that was. So people chose to embellish. Instead of highlighting the clear problems and coming up with solutions, the answer was to resort to the type of groupthink that causes this part of politics to bore me.

That led me to realise that in the new year, I want to do much less with politics. Instead, I owe it to myself to chase ideas, and people, that energise me.

I’m working on an AI assistant for parents that will speed up the administrative burden for parents. Talking about it with friends, and potential investors, gets me excited. But not as much as working on it, turning it from an idea into pixels.

Yet despite working on an AI application, I also want to reduce the impact of AI from other parts of my life. Instead of delegating thinking and being in the dead internet of bots talking through one another, I want to keep my original thought. We’re at risk of delegating critical thought to a system and making ourselves dumber in the process.

Sure, an AI can write an email for you and do it much faster. But don’t give it things you should actually think about. Don’t ask it to summarise a book for you, or critique an idea. Let yourself sit and truly think through things.

So in 2026, I’m doing a few things considering this - I’m exposing myself more to art, through reading art history books, to going to museums and exhibitions. Because art is subjective, you're supposed to look at it and think about what it means to you.

The next is I’m starting a book club for books about technological progress. I want to surround myself with people who are interested in similar ideas as me and I also want to know their opinions. What do they think of the book? Is it different to mine? How is it different? Does this change what I think about it? Exposing myself to conversations that challenge my thinking. For one simple reason, it means I have to think more.

And finally, I also plan to switch off more. Reducing doomscrolling is my biggest personal development goal. Because doomscrolling isn’t thinking. Scrolling aimlessly through Twitter or Reddit isn’t challenging the mind, reading a book is. That’s not to say screen time is a bad thing. I’m using a screen right now, but I’m also thinking as I write. It’s been a very long time since I last sat down and wrote something of this length and I can feel how much clearer it’s making my mind.

I wish you a peaceful and successful 2026 in whatever you choose to do.

2025 highlights (good and bad):

  • Turned 30
  • Trip to Paris
  • Moved to a new part of London
  • NYC friend visited London
  • Saw Arsenal beat Real Madrid
  • Ex and I broke-up
  • Met people at a party who quickly became good friends
  • Trip to Vietri in Italy with a friend and beach-maxxed
  • Road trip to Lake District with friends
  • Saw Oasis in NYC
  • Joined the Guild of Young Freemen
  • Attended a banquet at Mansion House
  • Started attending church weekly
  • Gave Russian peptides a go
  • Saw Lorde perform live
  • Claude London pop-up
  • Thanksgiving dinner with friends
  • Attended a Christmas banquet in the City
  • Posted a tweet that got ~100k views and brought me a lot of abuse from right-wing Twitter
  • Saw in the New Year with friends new and old

2026 plans:

  • Launch AI assistant for parents
  • Quit nicotine
  • Make my book club a success
  • Visit an art exhibition each month
  • Write a poem a week
  • Start my wine collection
  • Get WSET level one certified
  • Sell my house in Coventry
  • Consume less, create more
  • Get phone screen time down to about an hour a day
  • Fix my bad posture (I’m looking at you, nerd neck)