2025 Recap

My personal annual report for 2025 is organized in the following sections:1

  • Year in Review – I get teary-eyed talking about my lovely family.
  • What role are you playing? – An idea I’ve been chewing on related to human behavior and motivation.
  • Miracles – I highlight a strong message from one of my favorite podcasts of the year.
  • Fitness – A brief summary of my year in fitness, or lack thereof.
  • Books – A list of the books I read this year, and how they were connected to a dream.
  • Media – My annual media diet summary, with podcast recommendations.
  • Goals Results – (1) No alcohol, (2) Daily morning walks, and (3) Go into the wilderness alone.

Year in Review

It’s weird, 2025 felt empty and full at the same time.

This year featured far fewer goals, a very light reading list, and really only one big endurance event: fatherhood. My son is now a big toddler and also a big brother! In November, we welcomed my daughter into our family. Everyone is doing great and I am extremely grateful. Nevertheless, 2025 was about survival and figuring out how to navigate this new world.

I felt my ambition and intellectual curiosity were somewhat dulled in 2025 (aside from at work, where I excelled!). I had practically no time to read, and other than a handful of exceptions, my wife and kids received nearly all my extracurricular energy; 90 percent of which was spent trying to solve the rubik’s cube that is getting my perfect little angel of a son to take a nap.

Instead of hiking 14ers, running trails, and taking dips in cold creeks, I spent most of my free time taking walks around the neighborhood, chasing my son around the playground, reading Little Blue Truck 17 times a day, and just hanging out around the house with my family. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The year was filled with countless points of daily inspiration that made my heart sing: the pitter patter of my son’s feet racing from room to room, his first words, and the cascade of words that followed, the sweet kisses he gives his baby sister; my daughter’s first smiles, even though at this point they usually just indicate she’s passing gas; and my strong, beautiful, and amazing wife.

These are things you can’t directly plan or set goals for. They don’t appear on many bucket lists. They just happen. All you can do is look out for them, soak them up, survive the emptiness, celebrate the fullness, and swim along best you can.

What role are you playing?

I have a half-baked idea, that’s not entirely novel (it might not be novel at all), on human behavior that I’ve been thinking about over the past year or so. I feel we see our lives as a story and much of what we do is based on the role we’ve taken in that story. We impersonate role models, which can come from all kinds of sources: family, peers, movies, TV, an ideal, an ethic, a religion, etc. We make decisions based on what we think those role models would do if they were in our shoes. Our roles change depending on time and place. We choose these roles, but once we’re playing the part, it seems like our behavior is largely pre-determined.

I saw this idea pop up throughout this past year. For example, from All the King’s Men (emphasis added):

So the College Boy, who had thought he was such a [Gd]-damned big man and knew everything and who had, that evening, looked across the little space of leather cushion and had thought the stale impersonal thoughts almost as a kind of duty to the definition of what he considered himself to be – so he hadn’t reached out his hand across that little space and now as a result of that fact stood buck-naked in a shadowy room before an open window and stared out into enormous moon-soaked, sea-glittering night while off yonder in the myrtle hedge a mocking bird hysterically commented on the total beauty and justice of the universe. That was how the nights became Anne Stanton, too. For that night in the roadster, Ann Stanton had done her trick very well. It was a wordless and handless trick, but it didn’t need words or hands. She had rolled her head on the leather seat back, and touched her finger to her lips to say, “Sh, sh,” and smiled. And had sunk her harpoon deeper than ever Queequeg sunk it, through four feet of blubber to the very quick, but I hadn’t really known it until the line played out and the barb jerked in the red meat which was the Me inside of all the blubber of what I had thought I was. And might continue to think I was. (Page 417)

There’s also a line from the show Mad Men that touches on this concept: “This is America: Pick a job and then become the person that does it.” (Season 2, Episode 5)

Personally, I think about how my new role, as a husband and father, has dramatically influenced so much of my behavior; it’s changed who I am and the kind of man I want to be.

René Girard’s mimetic theory and mimetic desire might come closest to defining what I’m talking about. Mimetic theory might even have my concept covered entirely already. Thus, I need to read up on Girard and mimetic theory to flesh this out. Here are a few of my initial sources that I plan to investigate in the coming year:

Miracles

“Miracles are not the hand of [Gd] reaching out and changing the world for us, because we believed, because we prayed, because we asked nicely. Miracles are the human being doing the work and getting there, and a world built so that doing the work achieves the great and the good.” This is from Haviv Rettig Gur, an excerpt from Episode 67: Miracles in the Dark: A response to Bondi. I recommend and talk about this podcast more below in the Media section, but I particularly loved this episode and message, and wanted to call it out here too.

Fitness

I had very little time or energy to go after big fitness goals, so this year was all about maintenance and just not getting too badly out of shape during this stretch. Thankfully, StrongFirst has a protocol called “The Quick and The Dead” which is designed precisely for times like these. They’re short workouts that, for me, consisted of various arrangements of kettlebell swings and push ups. I also incorporated occasional rice bucket exercises to strengthen my wrists and forearms. I barely did any running, but toward the end of the year (after my foot problems on the Colorado Trail, detailed here) I felt motivated to focus on foot strength and barefoot running. I started daily foot rehab and strengthening protocols from the book, “Older Yet Faster: The Secret to Running Fast and Injury Free”, by Keith Bateman and Heidi Jones. I’ll eventually get back to lifting heavy and running far, but I’m fine taking it slow during this chaotic toddler-chasing, baby-holding, middle-of-the-night waking chapter.

Books

I only read three books in 2025.

1. Hell’s Angels: The Strange And Terrible Saga Of The Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, by Hunter S. Thompson (1967). I first read this book in my 20s. I remember enjoying it, but not as much as Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is an all-time favorite. Of all the books on my shelf, what made me pick up Hell’s Angels again? I had a dream my copy of the book was going to be thrown out – along with my copy of All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren – and that I had to save them. I took that as a sign to re-read both books in 2025.

I enjoyed reading Hell’s Angels this second go-round. It’s a fun trip to the past, with wild characters, including the author; though it’s not quite the full Gonzo experience of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Reading Thompson again, hearing his voice after years of distance, was like reconnecting with an old friend. His writing is sharp and fast, but still clear and succinct, with a great sense of humor.

I also believe I understand why I was signaled to read this book this year. I finished Hell’s Angels in March. Around that same time, I feel like it was about a week after closing the book, we learned my wife was pregnant with our second child. Thus, we named our daughter Huntress Thompson Fuller.

2. Vaccines, Autoimmunity, and the Changing Nature of Childhood Illness, by Thomas Cowan, MD (2018).

3. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren (1946). Similar to Hell’s Angels (above), this book was a re-read, inspired by a dream. I first read this book in 2017 after hearing it referenced in an interview with Garry Kasparov on Conversations with Tyler. I remembered a few things from that first reading, but as I read it again, I was shocked at how much of the story I had completely forgotten. It was a great re-read. Here are a couple excerpts I noted:

“The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him. There’s the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know.” (Page 14)

“I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.” (Page 656)

I’m still somewhat unclear why the universe wanted me to read this book again, but I do see one connection. Episode 44 of Ask Haviv Anything is entitled, “Fateful choices to make in the new year, a comment for Rosh Hashanah.” Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year holiday, and it fell in September this year, right around the time I finished All the King’s Men. Episode 44 is worth listening to in its entirety. But specifically, Haviv’s closing comments on The Essence of Time and Creation are what struck a chord (emphasis added): 

“Why should physics continue from moment to moment? What allows a bubble of order and limitation to exist in the infinities that should not be capable of producing bubbles of order? There’s a membrane between order and infinite chaos. What preserves the membrane? What keeps physics working moment to moment? And the sages tell us that we are renewed moment to moment by [Gd]. Creation if it can happen in an instant must happen at all times. And that is the precious gift. Time. Time is the divine will expressed in the creation. It is creation itself in the end… And therefore every moment is a beginning. Every new year is a new creation. Every shofar blast is a jarring attempt to blast us out of our complacency. To jar us. To make us look up and see the ram in the thicket. To strip away from us our forgetting that time is limited and precious. Our cathedrals are not in space. Our cathedrals are in time. Because that is the holy thing. And we rely on habits and assumptions and move through the world with inertia because we forget that every moment is the gift. Every moment is a moment of grace. May this Rosh Hashana, this year of pain, may it give way to new paths, new alternatives, new wisdom. Alternatives present since the creation, always available to us. We are too clever, we were made too clever, to believe that we are ever stuck. May we have the wisdom to choose better, smarter paths. I don’t claim to have laid them out here. There are people listening to this who are smarter than me and have better paths than I could even imagine. May we have the wisdom to find them and to pursue them. This is Judaism’s great message and great gift. This new year and every new year. And this moment and every moment. Shana Tova.”

I loved this message. And when I finished reading All the King’s Men, I couldn’t help but notice the last word of the book is Time.

“So by the summer of this year, 1939, we shall have left Burden’s Landing. We shall come back, no doubt, to walk down the Row and watch young people on the tennis courts by the clump of mimosas and walk down the beach by the bay, where the diving floats lift gently in the sun, and on out to the pine grove, where the needles thick on the ground will deaden the footfall so that we shall move among trees soundlessly as smoke. But that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and into the convulsion of the world, out of history and into history and the awful responsibility of Time.” (Page 661)

Media

I consumed a much lower volume of news and media in 2025 compared to past years.2 My sources didn’t change much from last year, and I do not regret my decision last year to unsubscribe from The Economist. The majority of my content came from (1) friends, family, and colleagues; (2) The Free Press; (3) Marginal Revolution; and (4) podcasts, such as: EconTalk, Ask Haviv Anything, All-In, Conversations with Tyler, Huberman Lab, and The Art of Manliness. I have to admit that I occasionally (maybe 15 minutes a day, at most) scroll LinkedIn and X, but it’s usually a waste of time and I feel empty inside afterwards. I also usually watch a bit of TV to wind down at the end of the day.

EconTalk remains my favorite podcast, and I am continually inspired and enlightened by not only the conversations but also the host, Russ Roberts. A few of my favorite episodes from 2025 are: (1) David Deutsch on The Pattern, (2) A Mind-Blowing Way of Looking at Math (with David Bessis), and (3) Read Like a Champion (with Doug Lemov). I’ve recommended EconTalk for years. Since that’s a given by now, I’ll recommend a second show this year.

Ask Haviv Anything by Haviv Rettig Gur is essential listening, especially for anyone interested in learning about Israel and the Middle East. I’ve learned an immense amount from Haviv, and I wish more people would not only listen to his show, but follow his model of diving into the thorny, painful, complicated issues with a deep and sober sense of history and nuance that cannot be profitably simplified. Here are some of my favorite episodes:

Goals Results

I didn’t get around to posting these goals at the start of the year, but I had them jotted down in a notebook. Obviously I kept the goals list pretty tight considering the extraordinary constraints of 2025.

1. No alcohol

Result: Done. Haven’t had a drank since May. This is primarily in service of broader health and longevity goals, such as running an ultramarathon when I’m 70, and teaching my future great grandchildren how to swing kettlebells. I’ll still have a drank on special occasions, but I’m setting the bar for that pretty high.

2. Daily morning walks

Result: Done. Most days, first thing in the morning, I take a short 15-minute walk around the block, barefoot if weather permits. I love these walks; they’re a great way to start the day.

3. Go into the wilderness alone

Result: Done. I backpacked for three days and 54 miles through Colorado Trail Segments 22-24. Read my recap of the adventure here.

Footnotes

  1. Past annual recaps: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013. ↩︎
  2. Past Media Diets: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019. ↩︎