"All kinds of stuff can happen in an ungovernable and deranged culture over the course of two weeks, even during the two weeks of the year in which the least tends to happen. But Drew was getting ready to go on a longish family vacation, and I was getting ready to make my annual pilgrimage to Maine for six freezing days of last-minute shopping and Amato's sandwiches; there were only so many options."
"It probably does not qualify as much of a spoiler to say that we both thought 2025 sucked, but we each ended the year in decent spirits, and much more hopeful than we started it. Much of this fun-sized, 36-minute episode is given over to talking about how we managed that. I discussed my personal journey of feeling like shit in 2025 and my dark winter of grim 1970s movies,"
2025 felt stupid, brutal, and mostly awful, yet it concluded with a surprising measure of survivability and cautious hope. Personal struggles, dark moods, and grim cultural touchstones marked the year for some, while others found steadiness in family pride and deliberate limits on consuming bad news. The pervasive sense that everything was ending proved to be an illusion; problems remain but are not final. Political and cultural frustrations persisted, including discomfort with recycled anti-authority postures, yet small good things and stubborn optimism persisted alongside awareness of ongoing difficulties.
Read at Defector
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]