Hello, 2026
I don't have any resolutions for 2026. I'll touch on 2025, but I'm not here to dissect 2025. Rather, I'm working on living with a bit more intention instead of trackable goals. I'm sick of tracking things to the point of mental and bodily fatigue. In a world full of robot slop, I'm a human being and not a series of data feeds.
Tracking that led mostly nowhere
I bounce between "if you don't track it, it doesn't exist" and "fuck it, ship it" on the regular. Over the course of 2025, I tracked a lot. I went full Product-Led Growth on my side hustle, which is very analytics based.
I learned what I probably knew all along. PLG is a nice framework, but it doesn't necessarily work for every business. Their narrative is that you didn't give it enough of a chance, but from my perspective, my product offering isn't software as much as it's data.
This is a critical observation that you only get from running a data product for over a decade. While I don't think freemium is dead, I do think when your commodity is data, it's not easily defensible when you give it away.
Nothing is one size fits all, but I learned a lot. Specific wins were improving onboarding, and tracking my time as part of my weekly scorecard. There will be a nice post in the future about the latter.
I'll be tracking less this year, focusing more on just moving projects forward, in a positive direction.
Satiated yet starving
While I don't track calories, I did adjust my diet last year, mostly inspired by a book about the science of metabolism. I was able to dial in what I thought was a decent diet. Eating more raw vegetables, and overall a cleaner vibe.
My biggest concern was making sure I was satiated. I was eating a lot, and I was feeling pretty good. The days I was more hungry, I'd eat more, no big deal. This was going really well as I was able to drop a chunk of weight, nearly getting down to my weight in high school.
This was amazing, because I thought I was getting there because I figured out the right fuel for me. Doing some deeper analysis, best as I can tell, I was filling myself up, but severely calorically deficient.
Didn't help that I had even been asked by somebody if the weight loss was due to Ozempic / a GLP-1. I think this inquiry triggered me a bit, because I had made conscious decisions and adjustments in my life, just to be asked if I was taking a get skinny quick drug.
Subconsciously, I think I was probably furthering my weight loss by getting more rigid on my intake. The whole situation left me feeling less like me and more like somebody doing maintenance on a machine.
While I do like my current food selections, I'm loosening my belt a bit, both figuratively and literally. Not planning to going ham with cake shakes after every meal, but definitely trying to enjoy things rather than engineer systems.
Reclaiming expression
Last year was one big musical detour. Music with my lovely wife is already sporadic at best, and fizzled out after we released our EP. Shortly after that we hosted a foreign exchange student, and I'm honestly still unpacking that experience a year later.
At the top of the year, I started to release "new old tunes". Pre-COVID electronic / ambient music that was rotting on my hard drive, and my old harsh noise project that Hal McGee once called "derivative".
The latter part of the year I started to explore. Exploration is something that I'm starting to realize has been on hold in my life for a number of reasons. Said reasons were constructs turned excuses and contrary to how I attempt to empower and motivate my tribe.
My biggest roadblock is the fact that I can't fucking sing. This isn't new, I was cast as "the kid to hold the flag in silence" in our third grade musical number. Shout out to Morgan Woods Elementary.
Fueled by candy pumpkins, I started to write. I wrote a lot in a short period of time. Rather than just writing words in a notebook to rot like previous tracks, I pushed through and sang... or whatever you want to call how I make noises come out of my food hole.
DIY all the way. Punk rock as aesthetic and not necessarily tone. I explored, and released. Tried out different "voices", some better than others. Most importantly, I cooked for 3 months, and pushed myself to get music out there that embarrassed the fuck out of me.
Still can't sing, but at least the music sounds good.
This whole process started to shape me in ways outside of music. I look in the mirror and some days I don't like who I see. Other days, I'm not sure who I am. But each of those faces staring back at me is somehow the same, and they all want the same thing, which is to be heard, to potentially reach somebody.