Dear Reader,

The year is almost over. In a couple of days, we’ll be celebrating the beginning of a new year. I’ve never been one to celebrate New Year’s Eve because to me it feels too arbitrary. I think one’s birthday is a more accurate and personalized new year for a person because they’ve gone around the sun once. If we were to celebrate the earth completing a revolution around the sun, we should celebrate it either at the summer or winter solstice. And since 31^st December is so near to the winter solstice, it really triggers my OCD!

But I get the excitement people have for the new year. New things always generate excitement in normal people (and by normal people, I mean those who don’t overthink things like me), even if that new thing was decided randomly to fall on a certain day (and then was moved by three months for some reason).

This year, even I am feeling a certain amount of excitement. I’ve been lost for almost two decades now, and it’s exciting to start a new year where I finally feel like I’ve found a way to move forward. I started the last couple of years in a similar mental space and then things kind of went astray as the years progressed, but this time there’s one thing that’s different and this gives me hope that 2025 will be better.

That one thing is philosophy. I’ve started getting into philosophy this year and it has given me a foundation that I’ve been lacking for many years. I have always been an overthinker but I wasn’t a philosopher. By that I mean that I used to think a lot but I didn’t check my thinking. This made me follow different intellectual trends over the years. It’s very easy to get sucked into an intellectual movement if you don’t know how to spot your own biases and how to analyze the writings and words of the people you’re following.

Over the years I’ve been a socialist, a spiritualist, and then a Jordan Peterson fan leaning fairly right. When I got severely depressed in 2018, I stopped thinking about everything and took a break from consuming this kind of content, and when I came back, Jordan Peterson had become very hateful and angry and that helped me see my own biases. Which made me wonder about how one could check one’s thinking and that led me to philosophy.

This year I’ve worked on and developed my own philosophy (sort of) and it informs all of my decisions and so far, these have been working pretty well. One of those decisions is that philosophy is only a small part of my life. Even though it’s the foundation, I don’t want to fall in the trap of overthinking again. Philosophy is for figuring out how I should live and then the majority of my time will go into actually living my life that way.

This year is going to be all about learning to express myself and becoming an artist. Instead of a handful of resolutions, my only goal is to walk consistently on this path that I’ve started on and not to second guess myself and change directions.

What are your goals for 2025? You can reply to this email and it will be posted as a comment on the blog, or if you’re reading this on the blog, you can comment directly below.

Thank you for being a subscriber,

Have a Happy New Year!

Rudya Aditya