2025

an essay

A common practice at the beginning of the year is to choose a word to serve as a mantra or an ethos. An even more common practice is forgetting that word sixteen days into January. I remember mine only because I wrote it on a notecard and stuck it in my closet.

“Undercomplicate / Overcultivate”

And in the interest of complete transparency, I’m not here to tell you I lived it. I’m here to tell you I tried.

But thinking about this, I realized I’ve never assigned a word to a year after living through it, while standing at the edge of the next. By December 1st, I feel like most of us are all, “ONTO THE NEXT,” but maybe it’s just as important as putting a coda on the year that was, so you can go into the next year with some kind of coda or context on what just happened.

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When I think about 2025, the word that keeps surfacing is the most useless one imaginable: Weird.

And while it feels valid, it also feels unhelpful because isn’t this always the case? Don’t we say that every year? I bet people in 1912 were like, “Man. That was a weird year, yeah?” beforeimmediately going back to inventing new ways to die in factories.

Still, it’s hard not to feel like we’re a little more justified with that description about it now than people in 1912 were then.

From the AI slop flooding every corner of the internet to the Bad News Bears squad of do-nothing chungus-brains governing Washington, the dominant vibe has been an aggressively weird, inelegant surreality. It’s all attention-addled with very little shame to go around, and it all works to make everything feel 25% louder and stupider than it needs to be.

Culture didn’t help. While we’ve rightly observed the slow death of the monoculture, it was somehow given a movie as layered and sincere as Sinners, while also receiving the full-bodied intellectual nihilism of the “Six Seven” meme, which is to say that it was a year that felt both capable of meaning and allergic to it at the same time.

Most diabolically, 2025 was weird because it existed under the persistent sense that we were meant for something different or better or nobler, but as the year went on, we lost our ability to see the pathway there. And in that fog, we started hating and lamenting everything around us, mistaking proximity for responsibility and confusion for failure.

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The other night, I introduced my son to No Country for Old Men. When I first watched it eighteen years ago, I related to Josh Brolin’s character, a younger man who is capable, scrappy, and trying to outrun the chaos of the world just long enough to build something resembling safety for himself and his family.

Watching it now, though, I relate much more to Tommy Lee Jones’ Sheriff character: older, quieter, and staring at the shape of a world that often confuses me more than I understand it.

Or maybe this scene sums it up better…

…as some days I, too, actually feel more like that bewildered gas station clerk, just trying to do my job and live my life. Not in front of a force of malevolence with a bad haircut, but within a culture filled with younger generations forcing me to squint at Taylor Swift and describe her as either more “skibidi toilet” or “sigma Ohio” as if either answer means anything and might be recorded somewhere permanent.

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If I’m being honest, I’m probably biased because 2025 was a weird year for me, too.

Professionally, it brought new beginnings, but also abrupt, disorienting endings and that same split ran through my writing life. I feel closer than ever to my voice (what I want to write and how I want to write it), and I wrote some of my favorite pieces I’ve ever done this year.

But at the same time, I couldn’t be colder when it comes to publishing traction. The work may FEEL alive, but the momentum is VERY dead.

BEHOLD:

These are just some of the responses I’ve gotten. Mostly, it’s been a lot of no responses when pitching, querying, or just emailing, but I didn’t include those because there’s no CINEMA in showing how someone never emailed you back.

Important note: I share this not as a bid for consolation or empathy. I have a loving wife, healthy kids, one well-trained-ish dog, and access to a zero-turn mower whenever I need it. God may never have made anyone with more reason to be content.

I share this because it clarified something uncomfortable but useful: sometimes the world feels weird because you are out of step with it. And that isn’t personal. Sometimes, it just is.

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Earlier, I threw out 1912 as a random comparison, a year I assumed wasn’t consumed by war or upheaval, but that assumption did not survive even a cursory Google search.

I forgot that in 1912, the Titanic sank and I didn’t know that China became a republic or that New Mexico and Arizona became states or that Teddy Roosevelt ran for president as a third-party candidate, got shot during a speech, and finished delivering his address anyway because the bullet was slowed by a steel glasses case and the fifty page manuscript of the speech in his pocket, all of this showing that the past could be loud too with chaos and tragedy and lunatics hungry for violence.

Which made me wonder, is it just that every year is weird, and our specific throughline to the weirdness informs how we scale it?

The latter question reminded me of a line from No Country for Old Men, spoken to Tommy Lee Jones’ character as he laments his fading grasp on the world:

What you got ain’t nothin’ new. This country’s hard on people. You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.

That moment is almost indecent in its clarity because we rarely hear pristine truths like this anymore. From work, the news, social media, or even the pulpit, the message is almost always the same: you are the point. You are the answer. You are the only thing standing between everything you love and total collapse.

But that isn’t true. This world is designed to move past us in a thousand different ways, and, frankly? I love it for that. It means we don’t have to be everything all the time because we were never meant to. It’s why child beauty queens are unsettling and old quarterbacks are sad to watch. Because we know it’s all meant to be seasonal, ourselves included.

One of the worst things theology can do is prioritize the later at the expense of the now, but I urge you to defy that presettling of your accounts because the promise of meaning in the future drains the present of its cosmic weight.

One of the worst things culture can do is demand the stasis of relevance, through nostalgia, through power, through pretending we can slow the consequences of aging. But we can’t stop what’s coming.

Which is what makes what we have so precious, here at the crossroads of right now, one weird year behind us and another weird one in front of us, both shitty and flawless in all its possibilities.

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What is your word for last year AND / OR what is your word for this year?