2024 was a tremendous year on my end and it wasn’t for the reasons I expected. The past year saw the harvest of many of seeds I have been planted and cultivated over many years in many domains of life. However, the one big accomplishment for the year was learning how to finally relax.

It was a year of worrying less about the future (and the past for that matter), enjoying the present a lot more and not feeling guilty about taking time for myself.

Even concerns about what needs to get done for work slowly dissipated in favour of keeping my sanity in check, knowing that all things will eventually be completed because they always do.

Last year was also one in which I sought support for my mental health and made huge strides in understanding my own peculiarities and insecurities. There has been an overwhelming freedom that has come from it that has not only changed my perspective on life, but also on myself.

While the year also brought challenges, they paled in comparison to finishing it by celebrating my wife’s 40^th birthday in Disney World with the family.

It felt like a year of abundance, despite feeling like I took several steps back in the numerous projects I tend to take on. This leads me to understand my vision is more focused, which is keeping me in a better state of mind, a more relaxed one and one that I want to continue. Hence, if there’s one resolution I will make for 2025, it’s to focus on less to do a lot more.

With that, I will graciously bow out of the productivity race.

And yes, there is still a book in the works: March 20, 2025.

If there’s one thing that sucks about working with people, it’s not knowing what’ll happen after you’re done with them. This was a fact I had to accept as a missionary, a chaplain, an educator and most importantly, a parent. As much as you want to shape the people you’re with, pruning and cultivating them the way you would a prized garden piece, they’re going to retain their autonomy. 

All you can really do is plant seeds and hope it grows into something fruitful.

Sometimes those seeds take a long time to cultivate, sometimes they sprout quickly and other times nothing happens with them at all. You may never know and you have to come to accept it. However, the law of numbers would indicate the more you scatter, the more likely you are to see growth.

With the current trajectory of our world, it’s clear we’ve planted numerous seeds of knowledge and health. While the wisdom to process information as true or not is still a needed skill in development, knowing how to access timely information has allowed us to speak about topics on a mass scale that were historically reserved for the elite few. And despite the rise in certain diseases worldwide, we’re aging way better than we’ve ever had thanks to seeds of health research being taken seriously.

All this to say that whatever seeds we’ve been planting to improve the lives of society have been working. However, as I mentioned above, we can always find places where those seeds don’t take root. Given the numbers that do, it’s safe to say we should continue to sow.

Unfortunately, there’s on seed that we’ve been stringent with and hesitant to cast: the seed of hope.

Not to be confused with wilful ignorance or wishful thinking, but the hope that if we make efforts, things can improve. It’s the seed that tells us there’s a future ahead and succumbing to nihilism should be last on the docket. I actually like the term ‘urgent optimist’ given by Hannah Ritchie, but a genuine hope that is tangible for people is a seed we need to throw as much and as far as possible.

Call me an idealist, but you know what? 

We’ve tried “being real,” we’ve tried “accepting things the way they are,” and we’ve tried the self-defeatest attitude of “it’s never going to change, so why bother?”

The world isn’t fair, and it owes you nothing, but I’ll be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t want tomorrow to be better than today.

Perhaps having idealists plant seeds of hope isn’t a bad idea after all.

It certainly feels that way. 

However, if we’re going to be honest, we can say that every generation has felt this way. To the extent we feel it today is on a different scale thanks to the advent of our mass communication infrastructure, which has us constantly inundated with what’s happening globally.

Maybe this time will be different?

After all, when you see the way people are behaving, the conflicts that are uprising and the extent to which we are precariously close to having our support systems collapsing (social, economic and environmental)—it provokes anxiety to the highest level.

Sometimes you just want to reach through the technological ether and shake people in hopes that common sense will snap into them. Other times you wonder if you stepped into another reality and need to find your way back. Whatever the observation or feeling, it certainly seems like we all mass dosed crazy pills and need to detox from the horrible effects of them. 

Although, I speculate we are currently transitioning towards a new world and transitions are never easy… or smooth. In my experience, people don’t like change.

Especially when that change involves a loss of power.

Or causes things to look and feel much different.

For our sake, I hope we’re about to enter another Renaissance era, or Enlightenment period and we’re witnessing people fighting against that in the most irrational ways, forgetting that digging their feet in the sand will not stop the tide.

So we’ve either all lost it or we’re all digging our heels while history shifts.

In the last few days before the winter break, classrooms suddenly find their attendance plummeting. This presents a catch-22 for teachers as they still plan for the days, but the lack of attendance means they need to modify their plans, to which students remark that nothing is planned and thus don’t need to attend. I admire the teachers who dig in and still plan assignments, tests or quizzes for these days as they commit to the end.

Unfortunately, our current education system accommodates such behaviour and fighting against the current requires a huge resource of energy. Until (If?) we rebuild the dam, is this really worth the battle?

Despite the context, this post is not about the attendance habits of teenagers in school, but rather the insistence on avoiding idleness in our lives. I was struck by an essay in this regard by Bertrand Russell in 1935, who argued for us to all work less so that we may all have more leisure:

“The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England in the early nineteenth century fifteen hours was the ordinary day’s work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busy-bodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say, “What do the poor want with holidays? they ought to work.” People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much economic confusion.”
-Bertand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

Russell is correct in saying that people nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment of idleness being the devil’s playground has not gone away. Working hard and long has not made us any happier, nor has the increased industry of our world, which has produced more than we can possibly consume in multiple lifetimes.

The world seems to be waking up to Russell’s argument, which actually has its roots in ancient Greece with Seneca, who commented that “busy men find life very short.” So if the current is sweeping us all into accepting that more downtime is going to happen, why fight it?

Hell—some of us may even enjoy it.

The downside of being a consumate thinker is having this rub off on your children and then, the horror, encouraging such conversation. My son has a tendency to ask philosophical questions minutes before going to bed, most likely as a stall tactic, that are quite profound for someone his age. The challenge is responding in a way that is appropriate, while also telling him to go to bed already.

Recently, he was inquiring into what makes us who we are and why we’re different now than yesterday.
In essence, he was asking the epistemological question of what identity means. If thousands of years of philosophical and theological thinking isn’t going to give a solid answer, what can we really say about this subject?

Rather than wax poetic about the Buddhist idea that the self doesn’t exist, the Christian concept the self is ordained by God or the existentialists who claim we create our own identity, I think it’s fair to say we haven’t really met ourselves yet.

We meet other people who tell us about ourselves and we internalize these ideas and project them back, but to actually leave ourselves to see us for who we are is beyond what we’re capable of in his life. It’s the equivalent to stepping outside the universe to observe what the universe is without our human bias.

Until we can finally meet ourselves for who we are, we are better off accepting the avatar we’ve created. The good news is because we’ve created this identity, we don’t have to be committed to it if it no longer serves us.

I’ve been struggling with the topic of AI generators quite a bit for the last few months. 

To start, there’s the many copyright issues that are currently in the air about the use of these AI technologies who have been using, without permission, artists work to train their models. As a writer, I can understand the serious issues with this, but the pirating of writing and the devaluing of its work has been a slow and long time coming. You only had to look at the music industry to know what was up ahead. 

If it wasn’t someone out right plagiarizing your work, or at the very least using it heavily for inspiration, then the advent of e-books and the ease at which they could be pirated was certainly prominent. Part of this also falls on the publishing industry for not embracing new technologies, combined with horrendous contracts for authors, that allowed them to get behind the curve on this. 

However, we’re not at the point where this can’t be ignored any longer. 

I recently used a few of these AI tools to read the posts on this site and mimic me to see what would happen and the results were a little defeating. It did a decent job.  

Not great, but we’re still at the beginning of where it can go and it still does a tremendous job of being a decent writer. I then asked it to combine my writing with other writers I look up to and that produced greater results. 

So, I have to ask myself, if I’ve been working at my writing for decades, evolving it, experimenting, finding my own voice and someone can prompt an AI to produce the same results in seconds—what’s the point? 

It almost feels like these AI generators are the sewing machines of the writing world. Get the right pattern, pick your fabric and make it happen while fixing minor errors along the way. Thus, my goal isn’t so much to craft together words, but to program prompts for an output of my thinking. 

While this spiraled me into a mini existential crisis, even to the point where I considered not renewing my domain, I’ve come to accept that these technologies are going to evolve regardless of consequence. Or perhaps it doesn’t matter if they evolve because we hit the limits of writing itself. This already happened in the art world when you consider that contemporary art is nothing more than artists trying to push the boundaries of what art is. 

After a few months of thinking on this, I’ve come to accept we’re not going to get another Tolstoy, Austen or Twain. That years of studying how brilliantly King paints images in your mind or how Roberts can shift viewpoints seamlessly and invisibly, can now be replicated without effort.  

A writer still has to know what they are looking for when they do this, so there’s still a need to study, but more importantly, there will always be a need for thinking and new stories. In fact, what the world needs right now is a new narrative because the ones we’ve grown up with have all broken down. 

While longform writing may be falling to the wayside in lieu of other mediums that have progressively become easy and cheap to produce, there will always be a future for text. And if there’s a future of text, there will need to be someone behind the scenes to produce it. 

This is leading me to understand that the limits of my writing up until this point have shifted to a new path where the limits have expanded beyond what we can see because the path hasn’t been set yet. It doesn’t mean I will be using AI to write (call me a purist in the same way that some writers still write longhand) but understanding the whole purpose of my writing is to articulate my thinking in a clear manner. Now, I suppose, I can spend more time thinking and less time putting pressure on myself to egotistically showcase that I can write. 

After all, that part doesn’t matter so much anymore.

One of my projects this summer was to declutter the house in an attempt to reclaim some space and mitigate the excess buildup that inevitably happens when you live somewhere for a while. Sixteen garbage bags and five boxes later, there was a remarkable difference.

This was quickly reversed by my children who saw all this newfound space as an opportunity to scatter and sprawl with what remained of their items.

In any event, there is an emotional satisfaction when things get released and a renewed focus comes into being. Having this feeling while sitting at my cleared out office space led me to look at one area that often gets ignored in any cleaning or decluttering mission:

the digital realm.

Having spent many years accumulating notes and files in a poorly stitched together organization system stretched across multiple platforms, it’s time to tame this beast. While it may seem odd to suggest we can have the same emotional attachment to digital stuff as opposed to physical items, it still has the same pull.

There are many unfinished stories, most of which I have no desire to return to.
Archived emails from a decade ago that serve no purpose.
Random pdf files of readings I thought were interesting at the time.
Backups of school work for a degree program that doesn’t exist anymore.

It just keeps going.

While it doesn’t have the same physical exertion to rid myself of these items (a few keystrokes is hardly laborious), it certainly has decision fatigue. At the same time, it’s quite interesting to see a trail of what life was like over the past few decades.

The thing is, I no longer wish to be trapped there and would much prefer to clear the slate for the decades ahead. It’s time for a new focus.

It’s back to school and for once, it feels as though things are going to be moving in a different direction. Maybe that’s just my misguided hope, but why not start the year with some optimism, right?

I was raised in the 80s/90s schooling system, when the reforms of the 70s found some grounding and education began moving away from knowledge based to skills based. Since the advent of technology was still far off, there was experimentation with different styles as we learned that a one size fits all model wasn’t serving the needs of most students.

However, this was all still rooted in a culture that still felt like education was important and that within these skills, knowledge must still be learned. At least, that’s how it felt from the inside.

But then the pendulum kept swinging.

And the accommodations and exceptions that were provided were suddenly the norm and students quickly learned how to manipulate the system for their ends. They were backed up by a culture who were getting suspicious that the promises of education weren’t on point anymore.

Then came the technologists who promised devices in the hands of every child would be a game changer.

Then the academics who needed to justify their existence by writing essays, books and giving presentations on why schools needed to be completely reformed, yet did nothing more than give us an Orwellian doublespeak of the 70s as a solution:

“We are moving to level based grading: Levels 1, 2, 3 and 4 and this is the standard that each means.”
Didn’t we used to just call this A,B,C and D?

Then we removed consequences for arriving late, not showing up, submitting late work or just flat out being disrespectful.

Then our culture moved from suspicious to antagonistic towards anything related to education.

Good teachers who could see right through all this were smart enough to just close their door and keep doing what they’ve always done. Give it enough time, and whatever fad was permeating would eventually disappear and be replaced by something else.

However, last year felt like the final straw from within.

The proliferation of AI generators, and supporting apps that attempt to “mask” or “humanize” generated text, had many get back behind the pendulum and push it back the other way. Classrooms always dealt with issues of disrespect, plagiarism and cheating, but it hit a scale that couldn’t be contained anymore. It became clear that learning wasn’t being had and students were outright miserable.

For starters on the swing back, the province I’m in issued a system wide ban on cell phones. From what I hear for those who started earlier, it’s already been a game changer.

There are also schools popping up such as the Michaela school, which is the strictest school in all of England, in the lowest socioeconomic area and free to anyone who attend, who have absolutely dominated the rankings of the G.C.S.E. Not only that, students are proud to be a part of that school.

It’s going to take years to see the effects, but I feel the push back happening.

Hopefully one day the pendulum will find a balance point.

I took my kids out today to a farm/adventure playground with all sorts of adventures to get into. Since we came closer to closing time as opposed to opening, we were gifted a mostly empty place—which is a rarity for there.

There was one particular slide, that was dug into a giant hill, where the wait time was zero. The excitement of this fortunate circumstance had my kids running up and sliding down non-stop, which pleased me greatly because:
A – they were having a blast
B – they were burning a ton of energy doing it

However, at one point, three parents also decided they wanted to go down it as well.

It was watching their sheer joy and genuine laughter that brought a huge smile to my face. It’s cause to reflect that we can get so caught up in how serious life can be, with all its responsibilities, how easily we can forget the joy of our inner child.

Sometimes, it just takes a trip to a waterpark, a bounce on a trampoline, a seat on a roller coaster or a simple solo trip down a slide to bring it back. Hence, I told my kids to wait up… because it was daddy’s turn.

When life picks up, I often think back to the story of Christopher Knight, a man who disappeared into the woods and became a hermit for decades.

What’s fascinating is what he did with most of his time: just sat and stared out into nature.

Nowhere to be, nothing to do and nothing to think about.

He just sat.

I wonder what it would be like if we all took time every day to just sit?