A part of me tells me this post is meaningless because nobody will read it. Why should they? It’s highly personal, mostly unrelated to design or anything else that I usually write about.
But another part of me says that it helps me process how well (or unwell) I spent a year of my life. It helps me realise what I did well and what not. It’s therapeutical in a sense. It forces me to be more mindful of where I spend my time and energy and checks if I’m on the right track towards the life that I want. So unlike all the other blog posts, this one is a post that I write for myself.
In last year’s review, I wrote:
If I had to summarise 2023 in a few words it’d do it with “chaos” and “new beginnings.” I want the 2024 to be about excitement and independence.
Looking back on 2024 I can confirm it was about excitement and independence. I proved to myself that I don’t need a job to sustain my family. This is a huge victory. And I do approach most things with excitement but being too optimistic often turns them into a source of frustration. I need to address that by either being less optimistic about my availability or managing stress better.
My projects and building a personal brand
I had great success with my projects in the first half of the year. I published blog posts like How my dream design job turned into a nightmare and 90% of designers are unhirable? which attracted a huge audience. More than 100k designers read them on Medium alone. I increased my following there from around 7,000 to 35,000! 😮 I also regularly posted on LinkedIn and increased my followers from 4,000 to more than 9,000. These numbers would be even higher if I kept the momentum going but I couldn’t. I had large house projects that I had to work on. So I spent the second half of the year on that and spending the remaining time with our twins.
I had big plans for relaunching my business but they were way too optimistic so I despaired because I couldn’t do what I had planned. It was a huge source of frustration but I later realised that I don’t need to obsess over my business because my family is financially still ok. I can take my time with the projects on our house and then commit to my business 100%. I’m looking forward to that and 2025 is the year when this will happen.
Finishing our house
Last year I wrote that I want our house to be a beautiful, warm, cosy place that we love coming back to. The house still isn’t finished but it’s slowly becoming that place of warmth that I want it to be. We finished decorating our entrance and the hallway as well as most of the kitchen and living room. Our twins are now 20 months old so they still want to grab everything they see, explore it, and play with it. This means that we can’t have a beautiful, large ficus in our living room. We also had to remove the coffee table and some other decorations (some for the safety of our twins, others for their own safety).
I finished three major projects: Built one of the two decks (see photos below), reseeded the majority of our lawn, and created a workshop in the garage. This leaves me with another (bigger) deck to build in the next few months and re-establish the rest of the lawn come March. This will complete the majority of the work outdoors. Indoors, I still have to furnish the gym and my office. I’m currently furnishing the hallway upstairs which will add a lot of the warmth we’re looking for. It’s just an empty space at the moment and it looks sad.
I wrote last year that I want our house to be fully finished, including the garden and the garage by Autumn of 2024. That didn’t happen. Perhaps I’m too optimistic that it will happen until spring this year. All I can do is try and give my best. But that is often hard, considering the circumstances.
I enjoy these projects, but at the same time, I want our home to finally feel like a home and not a project. A place where we can play, cook, laugh, rest, relax, and recharge. A place that you enjoy coming back to after running errands on a rainy day. A place that shields us from all the negativity and the dangers that lurk outside in the world. I want my family to feel safe and warm in our house no matter what is going on in our lives.
Being a father
I never expected that being a father would bring me so much joy. Maybe because I come from a broken home and a disjointed family and rarely experienced such joy in my childhood. I enjoyed watching our son Lars the other day as he was putting together a jigsaw puzzle. In that brief moment, I saw the grace of my grandmother in his facial expressions, the intelligence of my father in how he approached solving the puzzle, and the stubbornness of my mother in how he never gave up. The more I watch him grow, the more I see how he is a mini version of me in so many ways — mainly his fascination with aeroplanes and letters (so early!).
Our daughter Galia is a mirror reflection of her mother, except for her blondish hair. She enjoys dancing and listening to music. If a song isn’t fun enough for her standards she’ll quickly say “lame” and expect me to change it to something more to her liking. She’s edgy, rebellious, and stubborn, just like her mother. Yet, there are moments when her smile reminds me of my father and her kindness of my grandmother. I like to think that she and Lars both inherited the best things from all these wonderful but flawed people (most of them not with us anymore) and that my wife and I can shield them from that negative past and guide them to a more fulfilling life.
We took a vacation in Bibione, Italy which is just an hour’s drive from our home. After three years of no summer vacation, this was exactly what I needed. Spending time playing with our twins on an infinitely long sandy beach with only one worry on our mind — what should we eat for lunch? I’ll forever remember Galia singing a song she came up with: “Duh, duh, deeee,” as we walked to the beach each day. There was a little forest on the way there and we stopped to listen to an owl hooting every time because they found it so funny.
There was a bittersweet moment on the last day on the beach — the sun was setting so everything was in that deep orange shade of light which has always filled me with sadness. We stayed on the beach longer than other days because we didn’t want to leave. I played with Lars in the sand when he found a small white shell. He handed it to me and gave me a huge smile. I saved this little shell as it’ll always remind me of that bittersweet moment — a moment when I realised that next year it’ll all be different. I’ll never again be in that exact moment with our twins being that age. They were already running around this year but could still be controlled relatively easily. Next year they’ll be able to speak and be more independent. Being a father will be completely different.
Hobbies and reading
I had no time for hobbies in 2024. I guess the house projects could be loosely defined as a hobby but they often have a deadline and little room for errors which makes them stressful. So I really should find some time for my hobbies, mainly painting World War 2 miniatures as I have in the past. It’s a way for me to channel my obsessive compulsions and gives me a sense of control. The latter is the more important here as there’s little sense of control in the rest of my life right now.
Books I’ve read:
- Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
- Solaris by Stanisław Lem
- The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
- 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clark
- Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
I’m still far away from the desired 20 books per year (once a norm for me) but I read more books than in 2023 which is progress!
Photos
I’m still not posting any photos on Instagram, I just can’t find the time. Here are some of the key pictures of 2024.
2025
Things I want to keep up with:
- Exercise 3 times per week
- Movie nights
- I did read more, I particularly enjoyed a couple of fiction books
- Was able to establish a routine for some time
- Keep spending quality time with our twins
- Be more active on social media
Things I want to start and/or do better:
- I only published 5 blog posts (I wanted 20)
- Restart my newsletter (No progress in 2024)
- I never went out to work from a coffee shop
- I should network more (Little progress in 2024)
- Be more involved with my wider family and friends
- Find some time for my hobbies (None in 2024)
- Join a local swimming club and try to start swimming regularly (I still haven’t done this)
- I did not get involved with a community and still feel isolated
So if I had to summarise 2024 in a few words I would use “excitement” and “independence,” as I expected at the beginning of the year but unfortunately I’d also have to use “isolation” and still “chaos.” I want 2025 to be about growth, calmness, and feeling at home. Let’s see how it goes.
