153: New Year

Wishing you a healthy, calm 2025.

29 Dec 2024 — 4 min read

Earlier this year, I took an extended break from the newsletter.

Months prior, in December 2023, I wrote :

Two things significantly impact quality of life :
Health
Relationships
These topics are complex, valuable, universal, and widely relevant. They are persistently hard to model and difficult to simplify. They involve behavior change, nuance, and constant adaptation. They are not easily solved via AI or automation.

Fire Jar 144 https://www.thefirejar.com/new-year-2024/

I had no idea how prescient this would be.

In the aftermath of some major health challenges, I have relied heavily on friends and family to recover, adapt, and persevere. I am grateful for this care and support.

Along the way, many of my preexisting beliefs and values were confirmed:

Life is fragile, precious, and random
Mind and body are deeply connected
Humans rise and fall based on the strength of our communities

Other assumptions have been challenged. And some new beliefs have emerged:

Independence and “self-reliance” are mostly flimsy illusions
Gracefully receiving help is a form of gift-giving
There are mystical forces beyond rational comprehension

Today, I count my blessings.
This has been a most challenging twelve months.

But I am alive, healthy, and recovering.

Fire-Jar-wise, this has been my least prolific year to date..

I shipped eight posts in 2024 :
13 drawings
Four videos
One song
and a playlist.

Business-wise :
The Fire Jar offers only minimal growth, scale, or revenue.

But it feels immensely gratifying to make creative projects and connect with people via the internet. Modern tech is fraught. But I think blogs and RSS are generally cool.

These projects induce satisfying flow states.

And spark serendipitous connections.