2022 Retrospective
My last year wasn't great.
Lots of anxiety about the state of the world. I cut the news a couple of years ago. I mostly quit Twitter, but of course that doesn't mean I notice what's going on. The steady rise of fascism. The unaddressed climate disaster. War, inflation, energy prices, supply chains. All within the death cult of capitalism.
Lots of anxiety about house things. Everything that involves contractors in any way, shape or form. Installing ACs worked out okay. Installing an oven took months, it has yet to be approved by the chief chimney sweep. Installing solar panels…, well…, we have a lawyer now…
Lots of anxiety about Kaddi. She's struggling with her job and career. Maybe it's burnout. Maybe it's something else. She's on a health retreat now, but that's a temporary thing only. What then? That job is sucking the life out of her and it pains me to see her so down. But it might not be a matter of “just” changing jobs. She might just be done with that whole field of work. But we rely on her income…
Lots of anxiety about my own job. First it was stressful because there was barely anything to do. A big Covid dip. Then it got stressful because of multiple large projects and overlapping deadlines… I like my job. I'm good at it. But I am also struggling. We also rely on my income.
Anxiety stops me from getting stuff done. I feel like I need to do important things. But most of the time I don't even know what those things are. So I do nothing at all.
Having moved to the boonies and a global pandemic wasn't great on my friendships either. I'm shit at keeping contact anyway. It also doesn't help that many of my younger friends decided to have kids. Good for them, but I'm not interested in kids. I don't need to see them. I don't need to talk to or about them. Naturally that doesn't make me a good friend for parents.
Of course there were good things. I have wonderful women in my life whose support and love are amazing. There were vacations and theatre visits. I did see a couple of friends. I had excellent food in various restaurants.
I still enjoy my workshop very much and bought quite a few new tools (thickness planer, band saw, lathe). I did manage to complete a few woodworking projects at least. I think being fully in control and the clear scope of these projects provided a good refuge from the rest of my life.
The limited scope probably also helped with launching my tiny side project indieblog.page which attracted some attention on hackernews. It might also have hit the zeitgeist in general. With the indieweb, renewed interest in blogging and RSS, and the fediverse. So far I am enjoying Mastodon a lot, but to avoid the doom scrolling trap, careful pruning of my timeline is needed.
Buying the Steam Deck was a good decision. Most of my gaming this year happened on it, though I failed to complete some of the larger games I started, despite actually enjoying them (Horizon Zero Dawn for example) - probably an anxiety side effect? Casual games like Vampire Survivors and Brotato were much more compatible with my state of mind.
I don't know what the new year will bring. Probably more of the same… happy new year.