5 Lessons From 2025

I started this year thinking I knew what mattered. By its close, almost everything on that list had changed. The year had other lessons in mind.

Here are five things 2025 taught me.

I. The Temporality Of Hardship

There’s a peculiar gratitude I feel towards my past self this year. The version of me from months ago who kept working when he had no proof it would pay off. Who showed up exhausted. Who chose discipline over certainty. Who flew weekly to meetings. Who toiled late nights wondering if any of it mattered.

He couldn’t see what I see now. He just kept going, trusting a future he couldn’t guarantee, an act of faith directed at a stranger he would become.

This is the strange temporality of meaningful work. You labour for a self you haven’t met yet. The person doing the work and the person receiving its fruits are separated by time, by experience, by all the changes that happen in between.

Life is lived forwards but understood backwards. The difficult months, when nothing visible was changing, weren’t wasted time. They were investments made by one version of myself to another.

What arrived later wasn’t created when it appeared. It had been quietly forming all along, beneath visibility, in hours of effort that felt aimless.

Here’s the paradox: you never know the significance of hard work until you’ve passed through it. While you’re in it, it feels uncertain, possibly futile. Only from the other side can you see what was being built.

My past self gave me a gift he couldn’t see the value of. He maintained faith in a future that didn’t exist yet.

If you’re in those difficult months now, working without proof, building without validation, you’re not lost. You’re performing an act of trust across time. Your future self will look back with gratitude you can’t yet imagine.

The hardest part of meaningful work isn’t the work itself. It’s maintaining belief before you can see what it’s creating.

II. The Good Life Is A Fiction

Something I’d been working towards for many years in my business career finally came through this year. When it arrived, the satisfaction was short-lived.

What surprised me was noticing what actually did make me feel alive. It wasn’t the things that looked impressive. It was quieter things. Personal pursuits, like this (my public philosophy work), that served no external goal. Work that mattered to me but might not matter to anyone else.

That’s when I realised: I’d been measuring my life by metrics I never consciously chose.

We absorb definitions of success without noticing. A certain level of achievement. Particular kinds of recognition. Financial thresholds. These standards feel natural, obvious, like what everyone knows constitutes a good life.

But they’re not natural at all. They’re inherited. Culturally constructed. And often, they have little to do with what actually brings fulfilment.

This year taught me to pay attention to the space between what I thought should make me happy and what actually did. That space revealed something important: life needed its own definition, not a borrowed one.

The work is figuring out your own metric. Not what you think you should want, but what genuinely makes your life feel meaningful. Not what would impress others, but what would satisfy you even if no one else understood.

Your life is yours to define. There’s real freedom in that, once you claim it.

III. Focus Is A Moral Choice

I used to think focus was mainly about productivity. This year I realised: focus is actually a question of values. It’s about what deserves your life.

Every moment you spend attending to something is a moment not spent on something else. Attention isn’t neutral. It’s the substance of your life. Where your attention goes, your life goes.

This means focus is fundamentally about what you value. Not what you say you value, but what you demonstrate through where you place your attention.

When you give your focus to endless scrolling, you’re choosing that over other possibilities. When you’re physically present but mentally elsewhere, you’re making a statement about what’s worth your full presence.

Nowhere is this truer than with the people you love. Love isn’t just spoken, it’s demonstrated through attention offered. Giving someone your full focus, especially in a world designed to fragment it, is perhaps the greatest act of love. It says: you deserve my presence, not just my proximity.

This year taught me to treat focus more intentionally. Not because it makes me more productive, but because it’s how I align my life with what I actually care about.

I started asking different questions. Not “How can I focus better?” but “What deserves my focus?” Not “How do I eliminate distractions?” but “What am I choosing to protect with my attention?”

Your attention is your life in the most literal sense. Where it goes, you go. You get to choose. Every day, every moment.

IV. The Unexamined Life Repeats

There was a pattern I’d been circling around for years. I could see it at the edges, the way certain situations seemed to repeat, the way I responded in predictable ways. But I never looked at it directly.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: we often repeat the same patterns without realising it. The same conflicts. The same self-limiting choices. The same relationship dynamics. We move through years wondering why certain things never change, when the truth is we’re making the same choices underneath without examining them.

By mid-year, I couldn’t avoid my pattern anymore. When I finally looked, really looked, I saw something revealing. The pattern persisted because I’d been maintaining it through choices I hadn’t examined.

But here’s the hopeful part: examination creates possibility. Not certainty of change, but the genuine possibility of it. Only awareness gives you actual choice.

What you don’t examine tends to run your life quietly. Your recurring difficulties aren’t usually accidents. Your repeated relationship patterns aren’t just bad luck. They’re often mechanisms you’ve never questioned, operating automatically.

This year I started examining what I’d been avoiding. The patterns I’d let run unchecked. The beliefs I’d adopted without inspection.

What I found wasn’t always easy to see. But examination gave me something valuable: choice. Before that, I was just living the same patterns in slightly different contexts.

You can shift these patterns. But it starts with curiosity rather than judgement. With looking at what you’ve been avoiding. It’s not comfortable work. But it’s the work that actually creates change.

V. Meaning Is Your Responsibility

For most of this year, I took up cycling as a commitment to a healthier lifestyle. There’s a forested park I’d visit regularly, and I often saw the same elderly man there feeding birds. He did it with such care, such deliberate presence, as if this simple act contained everything meaningful to him.

I wondered: did he discover meaning in this? Or did he create it?

Meaning isn’t something we find lying in wait. It’s something we create. And we’re responsible for creating it.

We often spend our lives searching for meaning as if it’s hidden somewhere, waiting to be discovered. But events don’t come with meaning attached. They’re just events, neutral, raw. What makes them meaningful is the interpretation we bring.

This is both challenging and liberating. Challenging because there’s no cosmic blueprint validating your choices. Liberating because it means you have agency. If meaning is created rather than found, then you determine what matters.

This year taught me to stop searching for meaning and start creating it. The things that didn’t work out, I chose to make them mean learning resilience. The relationship that changed, I chose to make it mean growth rather than loss. The year of intense work, I chose to make it mean the compound value of discipline.

You have that same creative power. Nothing has significance until you grant it significance. That’s not nihilism, that’s radical agency.

The man feeding birds wasn’t doing something inherently meaningful. He was making it meaningful through the care he brought to it.

You can do that with anything in your life.

Parting Thoughts

The year is ending. If I could sit across from the person I was in January, I wonder what he’d think of where we are now.

He had plans. Clear ones. He could never have imagined how profoundly 2025 would unfold, the unexpected growth, the milestones, the ways he’d change without intending to. And knowing him, he’s already planning how to make the most of 2026.

But here’s what I’d tell him: hold your plans lightly. 2026 shouldn’t just be about execution. It should be about presence.

Next year, the work isn’t building more, it’s seeing clearer. Not chasing milestones, but understanding which ones resonate. Not optimising days, but truly living them.

The questions that will shape 2026 aren’t “What should I accomplish?” but “What am I becoming?” Not “How do I succeed?” but “What does a meaningful life look like for me?”

You’ll be tempted to overcomplicate it. To set elaborate goals. Resist that. The most important work will be the quietest, the daily choices no one witnesses, the moments you choose depth over distraction.

2025 taught me what matters less than I thought. 2026 is about discovering what matters more.

And I don’t fully know what that is yet. That’s the beauty of it. The year ahead isn’t about having answers, it’s about staying open to the right questions.

The year is ending. The next one is waiting.

For the first time in a long while, I’m not bringing a detailed map. I’m bringing curiosity.

That feels like exactly where I need to begin.