I will remember 2025 as a year of reading and writing.
It was the second full year of my lifetime reading plan. After the Bible in 2024, I devoted 2025 to Christian literature. I read some excellent books like Confessions, Paradise Lost, East of Eden, The Divine Comedy, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Ben-Hur, On the Consolation of Philosophy, Pensées, and spent a lot of time with thinkers like CS Lewis, GK Chesterton, Tim Keller, Meister Eckhart, Simone Weil, Kierkegaard, and Gregory of Nyssa.
Admittedly, I had to cut several books from my initial plan. Partly because I continued reading the Bible first thing every morning, realizing it wasn’t something you ever “finish” reading1, and partly because, while I was looking for a place to happen, I got a job.
While some of my reading is structured into a kind of focused curriculum, some is spontaneous and unplanned. Last year, I probably read another twenty-odd books that had nothing to do with Christianity.
As a general rule, I try to keep margin in my days to follow joy, to anchor on joy, to discover how often the unbelievable comes true, to see where the thread of curiosity leads me, sometimes out of the labyrinth but sometimes deeper in. I want to be someone who leaves room in my life to be interrupted, expecting and even honouring the interruptions. I want to make myself available to be changed. This is an act of opening; opening past the point of pain, opening to what is unknown.
If nothing interrupts me, I am not living. I am a machine, a kind of rigid and cold assembly line. I am breathing just a little, and calling it life2.
Part of the beauty and allure of a physical bookshelf, one extensive enough that I forget some of its contents, is that I can scan the spines on the shelves and sense into which book is calling me in that particular season or mood of my life. I think I had faith in books before I had faith in God, silly as it sounds, that the right books find us at the right moments, as long as we let them. (Same with people!) At least, it’s proved true for me.
It is really cool, if you think about it, that for ten dollars you can witness some of the best thoughts from some of the most brilliant minds that have ever kissed existence. That you can hang out with Stevenson or Hrabal or Steinbeck or Austen, inside their mind, and they can reach across distance and space, sometimes thousands of years, and shatter the shackles of time, defeating death and the grave, to speak clearly and directly to you. That this can cure loneliness in a way almost nothing else can. That there are some books you will read and never be the same after.
Reading this way is also humbling. It’s hard to think you are intelligent or have even the faintest grasp of language afterwards. Men can have pride about their sin, but never about their stupidity.
I’ve learned just because I read what is excellent does not mean my life will suddenly become excellent. But a life sown with good books and good stories is better postured to think and to dream. To ask the beautiful questions.
The five most popular essays I wrote in 2025 were:
If you missed last year’s reflection, the five most popular essays before 2025 were:
In 2025, I also finished the longest, hardest, and most meaningful thing I’ve ever written on returning to faith. Writing it nearly killed me and sharing it publicly certainly terrified me but it’s the essay I’m most proud of and still a little amazed by. Despite being somewhat of a novella, people surprised me and actually read it and continue to read it at an alarming rate. (Quality long-form won’t have the same immediate popularity but tends to have a nice, slow burn). Already, some incredible and unexpected stories have come out of it: people opening or re-opening the Bible, visiting a church, starting to pray, and generally deciding to wrestle with the most influential book in human history for themselves, rather than let someone else filter it for them.
My relationship with writing also went through a painful liminal period this year, a certain threshold crossing. While a salaried job took the financial pressure off, allowing me to do neat things like buy groceries, and imposed an external structure on my day that helps keep me sane, with new time and capacity constraints, my old and untrammelled relationship with writing had to die and something new had to be born.
Writers have to navigate a trade-off triangle between length, quality, and volume. Usually, you cannot have all three. I chose quality, being somewhat agnostic to length, and relaxed a lot around volume, not needing to meet any due dates or deadlines for the first time since starting to write online four and a half years ago. When I was working on my essay on Christianity, I didn’t publish anything for nearly three months, because I refused to work on anything else until I finished it, knowing that would be the only way.
As I’ve become busier and stepped into more leadership at church, I’ve had to be razor sharp with my priorities and cut everything unessential away. I stopped taking online courses, taking random zoom calls (or taking any zoom calls really), using a smartphone, and consuming any information besides at-least-a-century-old paper books.
Most of my week is routinized with an almost silly degree of consistency, but the less I have to decide when to wake up every day (5am), when to exercise (every morning at 7am besides Sunday), or what to do after work (BJJ, archery, or church stuff, long walks otherwise), the more my mind is free to roam.
The other benefit of consistency in routine is that it makes me available to be found; to see and be seen.
I wrote less this year than in 2024, yet I’ve continued to raise the bar for quality. I also learned that I am most likely in it for the long haul, for the plain and simple fact that I could not stop, even if I wanted to. Necessity has been laid upon me.
Sentences pressure up through the seams of me at basically all hours of the day, ideas that burn like embers and demand articulation. I am always jotting down little notes, little fragments, little observations, seeds of ideas. When I started my job earlier this year, I tried to only write weekend mornings but basically failed after a month because I thought I’d implode. At least, the internal barometric pressure was enough to make my ears pop and I found myself back at the keyboard, six or seven days a week, typing away. Being a writer is absurd and frustrating and hard. But here I am.
When you put your soul into something, you cannot be repaid.
Yet I take some comfort that writing is kind of like a marriage, or any love relationship (because I don’t really know what it’s like to be married), in that there are seasons of feeling very intimate and close, where everything is easy and exciting, and other seasons of feeling frustrated and impossibly distant. But the key is to keep showing up, even when I don’t feel like it.
Ritual and vows and discipline carry us through the ebbs and flows of emotion when our tired muscles won’t.
One of my goals for 2025 was to write more as ethos. I wanted my essays to be deeply rooted in how I lived my life, both influenced by and influencing. For my essays and the self that I am to exist in a kind of ecology of mutual building up and encouragement. To be ideas I kept returning to, revisiting, breathing. Pillars, not pebbles. Foundational to the man I am becoming, not forgotten philosophical pandering that I fail to hold myself accountable to. This, on reflection, was a surprising success. For the longest time, I felt like a fraud because I wasn’t really living what I was writing. At least, the gap was evident enough for people to use it as a blunt object in arguments. This year, I think I caught up to my writing and even surpassed it, embodying a kind of wisdom that I can’t quite express or put words to. (This is basically what faith is.) Although I don’t consider myself wise, I think I am less foolish.
I’ve also made my process more tactile in recent months, writing and editing by hand (which is how the writers I admire created their work!) And if it’s not obvious from my misuse of commas or abuse of adverbs and run-on sentences or strange yet evolving relationship with semi-colons, I have never used anything other than real, unartificial intelligence in my work. All my essays are written in blood, edited in ink3.
I do not wish to outsource my capacity to think and make sense of the world. Even when it’s frustrating and hard.
Another big change to my process has been the “anti-grinding rule,” which is a strange and harsh and slightly erotic way of saying: only writing when I feel like it4. I think this rule is dangerous for new writers and probably dangerous for experienced writers, but the gap still surprises me between what I can write when I’m feeling excited and inspired versus when I’m feeling tired or distracted or forced. The other thing is, I almost always feel like it.
In 2026, continuing with my lifetime reading plan, I will focus on Russian literature. I have some classics planned, like Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, The Master and Margarita, Lolita, The Gulag Archipelago, Fathers and Sons, Dead Souls, Eugene Onegin, and Doctor Zhivago, as well as some more esoteric writers like Bunin and Lermontov and (just try and pronounce it) Krzhizhanovsky. All of which I’m rather excited for.
I’m sure I will read a bunch of other stuff too. Calvino has been calling my name for a while, as has Borges, Zweig, Gabriel García Márquez, Eliot, Didion, Dickens, more Steinbeck, maybe Fitzgerald. David Foster Wallace, always.
As far as writing goes, I will continue to be spirit-led and see where it takes me. I may start writing a book. I may not. These days, I’m living and breathing a lot of faith-based stuff, so I will likely write more about that. Perhaps something on money and spending since technically I am a licensed investment advisor. I’ve learned the hard way that if I’m not pulling source material from my own life, I probably shouldn’t be writing about it. People call this “credibility,” but it’s more like “firsthand confrontation with the raw mass of reality”. And reality is where all the interesting and surprising detail lives.
Also, I want to develop a keener sense of rhythm and contrast. I think one of my weaknesses as a writer is that I somewhat beat people over the head with my brain, trying to make every sentence profound and insight dense, when most great writing is very casual and relaxed, with a crazy sentence thrown in that pops in its profundity. People don’t want to hang out with me in the deep end all day. So my goal is: communicate profound, insight-dense things in a casual and relaxed, almost ordinary way. I’m also playing with more repetition, surprised by how much I enjoy it as a reader. If you haven’t noticed.
A publisher approached me about writing a book on the whole ‘online era’ idea since those two essays have been quite popular and there seems to be a hunger for it, but I haven’t decided if I have anything else to say and if I want to orient my book around what would sell. Writers tend to be rich in social-capital but poor in capital-capital, which can lead them to make sacrifices on topic or “sell out,” and then regret it later if they’re honest with themselves. I’m fortunate not to be desperate for money, which provides freedom in those decisions.
More importantly, heading into the next year I am increasingly wary of the vanity of the substack game of notes and likes and subs, being bummed and bewildered when an essay doesn’t get as many likes as I thought it would, posting a note I think people will like to compensate, not getting many likes on that either and feeling doubly worse and now a little desperate, comparing myself with other writers who get more likes than me and wishing I was as authentic and interesting as them. Even if you win those types of games, you still lose.
One of the most important essays I wrote last year was on the spiritual cost of being a writer. How, in one sense, I think writing makes me notice and see the world in a way that makes it come alive, in a way that allows me to go deeper than the surface. But, in another sense, there’s a real spiritual cost to writing—the vanity, ego, intellectual pride, worshipping my thoughts, etc—and maybe a lived cost too—being removed, in my own head, abstracted from the world, distant. This is a tension I cannot pretend to have resolved and can only hold the space for.
I don’t know where next year will take me, but that’s the exciting part. Despite the difficulty and seasons of distance, given my capacity to grow I think I am far from done.
I’m expectant of the absurd.
Wishing you way more than luck,
If you’d like to support my work in 2026 and help create more financial freedom for me to write often and audaciously, the best way is to become a patron:
Or, you can contribute in a smaller way and buy me a coffee.
For patrons, I’ve created a live list of what I’m reading every month.
This, by the way, is one thing I enjoy about reading the Bible. Since it’s basically a lifelong pursuit, the daily page count doesn’t matter. It’s not about completion, but embodiment.
“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”
— Mary Oliver
This, now that I think of it, is almost a prayer: “Come and interrupt me. Come and change me. Come and rearrange me.”
JUST to be clear, I am not literally implying that I use my own blood to write things down. It would be impractical. I write too much. More so what Hemingway was going for: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
— Walt Whitman
Your conversational style suits your writing. I can rather imagine sitting with you on the other side of the sofa as we natter away about the world and his wife. Your breadth of reading and the infectious enthusiasm which you share always add value.
I love this and your writing style! (And I whisper to myself, please let it be all human written and not machine generated). I am not religious about anything except art, and this essay spoke to me. Thank you.