I’ll be honest: my main goal for 2025 is to make sure that all of the people I know and love are still breathing at the end of it. With the way the world is turning, bureaucracy’s inertia or not, I’m mostly concerned that people I know and care about will be targeted for simply living their lives as their most authentic selves. Pretty much everything I have in mind for the rest of this incredibly fresh year is geared toward doing what I can to make that happen. It isn’t much, given the relative imbalance of myself and the systems that might be leveraged against them (and, of course, the inability to shield anyone from the random misfortunes of the world), but I will be doing what I can. Effective activism is often a subtle thing in this day and age, especially compared to the performative stuff that fills social media. I’m not going on diatribes about what I’ll do to anyone who hurts my friends, but I am calling my senators. I’m calling my state and federal government representatives. I’m doing what I can to directly support people in dangerous positions with direct financial contributions, at least when I can afford them. It never feels like enough, it is rarely lauded, and it almost never feels even remotely effective, but at least it beats sitting on the internet, joining the chorus of voices who say they will kill/die for those being targeted but can’t be bothered to try organizing locally.

I’d do more of that if I could, but I’m not very plugged into my local scene. Most of that hasn’t done anything to accommodate Covid-19 concerns, so I’m trying to stay as involved as I can without showing up places that will put my physical health (and ability to help in the future) in jeopardy. I wish there were more masking-conscious local groups–if there are any, I haven’t heard of them or managed to find them in what searching I’ve done. It would really feel nice to be a part of something bigger, to be able to take more direct action, but one of the things you learn pretty quickly, if you’re going to be remotely active, is that this stuff isn’t about how you feel. It’s about what you can do and keep doing. I wish I could say that I got some amount of satisfaction from the work I’ve done, but I’d be lying if I did. Still, I’ve always been pretty good at carrying on in the face of what feels like futility (this blog is often an example of that, given how often I consider the idea of just giving up on it in the face of the growing reliance on text generation by language models as the only “useful” output of so-called “AI tools”), so I’m not about to let that stop me. It’s not much in the way of a “New Year’s Resolution” or hope for the future, especially since I’ve been doing this for years now, but it’s all that comes to mind as I think about the future and how it might twist and turn over the span of the next 363 days.

If I start considering unrealistic things, the sort of stuff I’d throw out next to “win the lottery,” I’d include stuff like “a promotion at work” or “a significant raise that moves me out of needing to work as much as I do to make ends meet and have enough left to work on paying down my student loans.” Those would be great if they happened this year, as would “paying off my student loans” but I don’t know that they’re reasonable expectations for the next calendar year. They might be! At least the first two. Those feel semi-reasonable. It’s difficult to really say, though, given the slow timeline of advancement at my current job and how the tech industry as a whole is in a rough spot as more and more jobs are eliminated. I’m nervous at the idea of leaving, given how much it would suck to leave, move somewhere else, get laid off, and then have to hope that I could either find something new or get my old job back again. The instability of the tech sector is really making me nervous about the prospect of changing jobs. Which is, I suppose, half the purpose of those kinds of mass, industry-wide layoffs. Keep the workers scared and grateful for whatever slivers of wealth they deign to give us. I’m not worried about losing my current job and I’m increasingly weighing the stability of it against the potential to earn more money or get a more-fancy job title somewhere else. Which sort of represents how I’m feeling about life in general, especially in this time of potential change.

I wish I had more to feel hopeful about. I wish I believed in the ability for things to really change for the better on the timeline of a year. I wish I was more optimistic about what the future might bring. I think the life I’ve lived, the things I’ve been through and born witness to, precludes that kind of optimism, though. I no longer feel any real degree of hope about the future, but I’ve never let that stop me from doing the work to try making things better. I do not think positive change happens even remotely as quickly as negative change (or at least that positive change lacks the ground work that negative change has been putting in place for decades), but I’m still going to keep pushing towards it as much as I can. I’m not hopeful, but I am determined. And, when that eventually fails, as it has numerous and countless times in my life, I’m at least disciplined enough to keep going until it comes around again. Not to be too saccharine about it (but maybe also to be a little saccharine about it, since there’s nothing wrong with a little genuine sweetness), you’re only beaten when you give up for the last time. As long as you pick yourself up again and carry on, you’re not truly and finally beaten. Temporarily? Sure. Life is full of disappointments and loss. But as long as you keep going again, once you’ve gotten some rest or taken the time to grieve or feel whatever emotions are appropriate, you’re not truly beaten. That is the energy I’m taking into this year and it will carry me until the day I die. Hopefully decades from now, of course. I didn’t meant this post to end up sounding so grim. Grim determination, though, is what’s keeping me running today, so maybe that’s alright.