2024 Letter

• 01 January 2025

After I had written what I thought to be an 80%-finished draft of this post, I by coincidence stumbled upon quite a different sort of 2024 post - a 2024 letter. That author wrote that he got into writing yearly letters by reading yet another writer's annual letters. As I read one letter and then the next, I realized that I was taking a Spotify-brained approach to my own year in review.

I had thought a year should be distilled into data points and bulleted lists: an efficient, mass-produced summary with which different years could be compared. But in these letters, the authors luxuriated in their experiences and reflections from the year, slowly winding their way through topics of their choice. More than a summary, it was an essay, a synthesis of a year's worth of life lived. They were beautifully written (these guys are scholars), and they were long. Very long: 8,000 and 13,000 words apiece. That's like a year's worth of blog posts! Which, okay, it's a year in review after all, but man!

And yet reading these long-ass letters was a delight. So when at the end of the letter, my new brother-in-arms of year-in-review writing exhorted, "I don’t understand why more people aren’t writing [year-end letters]," I understood that "more people" was me. I knew I had to scrap my entire post and rewrite it: not as a post, but as a letter.

So you - whoever made the foolish decision to read my year in review letter - are quite lucky. Now I'm a part of this conga-line of annual letters. And in place of the easily digestible bullet points and brevity of my initial draft, instead you get to slog through the clumsy prose of a guy who's doing that thing where you subconsciously imitate the tone of the most recent book you've been reading^[1].

But don't worry.

Unlike those bozos (god bless them), I'm not a scholar. I'm a clown^[2]. A bozo, if you will. And I know who I am! Sort of. So I will keep this letter authentically me. It's already better than that accursed draft, with its bullet points so robotic and sterile. I'm not a robot, I'm human -- just look at how good I am at captchas! And I'm not sterile, I'm... fertile? That sounds a bit funny.

Hey, speaking of "funny"! Well, I should probably get on with the letter, but just keep that word "funny" in your head, and let's start with the part of the letter that's about:

What I did this year

A lot happened this year. It felt like a year more full than most in my life so far.

One thing it was filled with was new activities -- I tried a lot of things for the first time in 2024. For example, in January I finally lived out my dream since adolescence of performing standup comedy.

That's right, comedy. Remember "funny"? That's called a CALLBACK joke! I'm a comedy GOD!

Anyway, I bombed. I went to an open mic on three different occasions, and earned a total of perhaps two chuckles. I knew I was in trouble when I was walking to the mic and realized that even I didn't think my jokes were funny. Were they even jokes? I can tell you today: they in fact were not. I spent weeks writing what I thought were jokes, only to realize with horror that they were, at best, premises. I'm still glad I had this experience though -- I learned a lot about comedy writing, and have a renewed appreciation for successful comics.

I've put comedy on hold since then, but I swear it's not because I bombed! It's actually kind of funny being up there telling joke after joke and getting no reaction. No, the biggest reason I haven't continued going to open mics is that almost every other comic was just as bad as me. I'm not being mean here, I'm just saying we all sucked.

Every open mic was five-minute set after five-minute set of dead silence, punctuated by the occasional "Nothing? Okay, not using that one" or "Fuck you guys". Some say this is expected -- the common analogy is that an open mic is like going to the gym for a comic. You go there to get reps in, and to get better; bombing is expected because the open mic is where workshop specifically those bits that aren't working. This makes sense to me, though in most gyms you don't show up and struggle to lift the lowest weight for five minutes, then blame it on the weights and proceed to sit watching everyone else work out for an hour.

Because really, that's what the calculus for me became: do I want to spend hours at home in my underwear writing jokes, take an hour bus to the open mic and sit through another hour of unfunny standup, just to perform five minutes of comedy to a bunch of jaded comics who are on their phones anyway? It's honestly more fun than it sounds, but it's also kind of hell.

Still, I would like to come back to writing and performing comedy at some point. There's simply no feeling in life more electric than making people laugh. And honestly, I'd settle for just performing a set that I feel good about, and giving a well-deserved "Fuck you guys" at the end.

MORE STUFF I DID

I was all over the place this year, geographically. I visited the UK and France for the first time, including attending the Cannes Film Festival (did you know you can get free festival admission if you're 28 or younger? Check that link!). I attended Manifest, the valhalla of nerds. I also got to spend a lot of time traveling with family in Las Vegas, Minnesota, and Alaska.

And I capped off the year with a fantastic two-week trip to Taiwan. I would love to luxuriate in the details of that trip, which is now one of my favorite all-time trips, but by strange coincidence one of the letter-writers I mentioned earlier already made the case for Taiwan in his 2024 letter. And if there's one thing I learned from performing Jerry Seinfeld's entire act verbatim at an open mic, it's that people do NOT like it when you steal material.

I will just share a few tidbits that I loved about Taiwan. Each of Taipei's metro lines has a unique theme song that places when a train is arriving. Taipei has a wildly convenient network of docked bikeshares that cost only 60¢ per hour, and plenty of bike trails to use them on. The hot spring resort in Beitou was so relaxing I cried. The quantity, quality, and low price of restaurant food was a marvel -- I ate so many delicious meals while rarely paying more than three or four dollars. The precision and calm of a traditional tea preparation transfixed me. And above all, nearly everyone I met was not just kind, but above-and-beyond kind -- an "invite you to breakfast with their entire family" sort of kind. It's really a special place.

When I wasn't traveling, I tried even more new stuff. I was an assistant director for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, I took a west coast swing dance class, I went to a speed dating event for the first time^[3], and I took a satire writing workshop. Many (actually most) of the above did not go as well as I'd hoped. And that's okay! I'm still grateful for the new experiences and all the knowledge gained.

I also resurrected activities from my past, returning for various durations to improv, lockpicking, running, and language learning. I've come to recognize that this is just a thing that I do. I crave novelty, and I pick up new interests and hobbies as quickly as I retire old ones. That may be the reason that I'm not the Houdini of lockpicking or the Bozo the Clown of unicycling, but those interests will always be waiting for me when the time is right to return. Just like an old friend -- you know how old friends will always be waiting for you, even if you completely neglect them for years at a time, and when you see them again they look like a stranger to you, and you can't even figure out which hole to put the pick into.

The self-referential part

And how could I forget that 2024 was also the year I started this blog! My original plan with the 30 days of blogging was to write a recap reflecting on the experience of writing for 30 days, and then share that recap post as the triumphant hard launch. But without the 30-days momentum to gas me up, I... Well, just look at the post history. That recap never happened, nor have I written any posts since then.

So the question is: do I unpack that experience now, here, at this perfect juncture and natural time for reflection at the end of the year? Or do I punt that responsibility and leave it for a dedicated, future post?

Let's start:

Unpacking the blog

. . .

lol jk fuck that

Big changes but also small

I made two big changes this year: I moved to a new apartment in a different neighborhood, and I switched to a new team at work.

My new apartment is bigger and more expensive, and I do the same exact things in it as I did in the old one. I suspected that having a larger apartment might make me feel more comfortable hosting guests and organizing events at my place, but in reality I've done very little of that in the six months I've lived in it so far. The lesson, of course, is it must still be too small, and if I just had an even bigger apartment I'd finally be the socialite I've always aspired to be.

I have a guest room, which has gotten a bit of mileage, but not nearly as much as I'd hoped. This is despite my best efforts insinuating to anyone who'd listen: "I have a guest room, you know!". Even my own brother responded to my offer by saying, "I might stay there if there's a time when you'll be out of town." Dear reader, whoever you are, please know: I have a guest room with your name on it. I can't promise to host you long term, but if you need somewhere to stay for a short period, you're welcome^[4].

The new place is much more centrally located, which has already borne fruit. It's much easier to visit friends and events, whether via public transit, bicycle, or on foot. I sincerely appreciate the car-free life. Naturally, my new place also includes a reserved parking space. For my guests, you see!

My new neighborhood is full of fresh new restaurants to eat at, though somehow that vast culinary frontier is already beginning to feel small. Thankfully I also have a humongous kitchen, complete with vast counter space which I liberally use to store junk mail and tchotchkes, and a modern range perfect for cooking instant noodles.

I really do like my new place quite a lot. But I'm not sure my lifestyle demands a place as spacious as my current one^[5]. For my next move, I may downsize, or else I'm considering living with housemates for a bit, which I haven't done since college. I think it sounds great, if I can find the right likeminded people who'd be fun to live with. If you want to live with me, or have a room opening up in your home, let me know!

As for my new team at work, the new role is a wonderful fit. For the majority of 2022 and 2023, my role at work was decidedly not a good fit, and I was perpetually on either side of the threshold of burnout. While my work performance during that period was fine and I thankfully kept it from having much negative impact on my personal life, I wasn't thriving. So I devised a multi-step plan to regain happiness at work, and I'm pleased to say today that my plan worked! I now get to work with a spectacular, largely in-person team on work that I enjoy and am good at. It's made a world of difference.

These are big changes, right? I suppose. And yet in a way they're small -- they're incremental changes, safe changes, "I should do this" changes. It's true I technically could have stayed in an apartment or role that I didn't enjoy, but the changes I made seemed obvious.

I make this contrast because each of the past few years I tend to also dream of larger, blow up my life style changes. I should move to New York -- no, I should move to Taipei! Perhaps I should quit my job! I have some sense of being stuck in a pleasant, sustainable rut -- perpetually in conflict over whether the grass might really be greener if I could just jump off this (figurative) cliff. It feels hard to distinguish whether I'm wisely identifying a difficult but necessary life change, or if I'm just using an escapist fantasy to deflect from some actually difficult inner work.

In 2023, I very seriously contemplated moving to New York. But in the end I decided to commit to my life in Seattle, reasoning that the changes I wanted to make by moving cities could just as easily happen here as long as I applied myself and made concerted efforts to reshape my life. Looking back on this a year later... I don't think much has changed, despite that re-commitment. I feel as much of a drive to move cities, and as much of an alienation from Seattle, as I did before. But is that because I have accumulated an even firmer bedrock of wisdom and clarity, or have I just spent another year shielding my ego and identity from that elusive inner work? I wish I knew.

So maybe 2025 will be the year of the non-incremental change, the year I muster the courage to make a big, risky, scary, disruptive change. Or maybe it won't and I'll continue to be my normal, generally happy where I am, risk-averse self. Patterns of behavior can be hard to change. Even so, I'm looking forward to taking some time to figure out what's important to me for 2025.

Goals for 2024, in retrospect

Speaking of plans for 2025, it turns out I set some goals for 2024 back on Dec. 31st of 2023, then forgot about them until I decided to write this year in review. Let's see how I did!

#1: Regain happiness in my work

Hooray!

Grade: A

#2: Perform standup at least twice

Technically the goal said nothing about comedy (i.e. laughter), just standup, so... mission accomplished?

Grade: A

#3: Exercise regularly -- both cardio and weights -- through the whole year

I picked up running this year and have been running consistently since March. I did not lift weights. 50% is a B, right?

Grade: B

#4: REDACTED goal around dating

Suffice it to say: I am single and interested in women. Use that knowledge however you like, reader!

Grade: "D"

#5: Donate approximately REDACTED to charity

I didn't achieve the exact text of this goal, but I kept to the spirit of the goal and increased my donations from last year.

Grade: B+

#6: Make a new close friend

I'm not sure this one was ever attainable, since I feel like when I wrote this goal I was thinking of "close" in the way that friends you have known for 5+ years are close, which by definition isn't something that can be accomplished in one year.

I did, however, deepen my friendship with some existing friends while also making a few new ones. That feels pretty good to me.

Grade: B

#7: Exit the year with a good idea of how I want to find purpose and meaning in my life

This was a tall order, 2023 Logan! I can't say I discovered any wellspring of meaning. But I don't feel meaningless -- I feel pretty good. And I made progress trying new things and noticing what does and doesn't fulfill me, and tweaking how I spend my time accordingly.

Perhaps this is a case of "shoot for the moon, and if you fail at least you'll land among the stars." I've made progress, even if I haven't yet achieved the outcome (or: the real outcome is to realize that there's nothing to achieve, and the search for meaning is the meaning itself?).

Grade: B-

A brief reflection

If you sum those grades up, you get AABDBB.

That looks a bit like a rhyme scheme to me.

Happily, I stayed focused on what was important this year.

Which is good! Because years don't come cheap.

As my friends get pregnant and married, what feels near, what I fear

is the passage of time. Time feels so dear.

Slow down there, cowboy

As I've been working on this letter, I've noticed that depending on my mood, my writing alternates between manic mischief and melancholy introspection. Though it's probably whiplash-inducing for a reader, it feels fitting. I am both of those things, sometimes.

Do you think of the passage from December 31st into January 1st as a discontinuity, a sudden shift from one year to next? Or do you consider it a smooth transition, just one day turning to another on a long gradual journey? I'm more in the latter camp.

When I look back on the year, I can't just assess how I feel on new year's day. Nor can I restrict my view to how I felt the day before, or on last new year's day. I have to take the full 365-day journey into account -- and yet just taking a 365-day average of that journey would be just as inaccurate. There were both mischief and melancholy aplenty along the way, and it feels like brushing some vital truth under the rug not to acknowledge both. And sometimes melancholy is its own form of mischief.

All this is to say: if this letter feels absolutely all over the place, and you don't like it? That means you don't like me, and you're a bad person and I hate you.

Machines can think now? Wait, that wasn't on my list of goals

A lowlight this year is that I have been, and still am, quite concerned about AI risk. It seems very possible that transformatively intelligent AI will be developed within the next decade, leading to a staggering degree of societal change -- hopefully good, but potentially bad or catastrophic.

This feeling intensified this year because of the rapid advancement of AI capabilities, as well as because I spent more time on parts of the internet where people worry about this. How does it impact me right now? Well, I'm "pricing in" substantial uncertainty in the coming years, and indexing less on some long-term plans because I can't predict what will happen. And I'm including AI safety organizations in my donations for this year.

But other than that it's basically in the same bucket as "remembering I'll die someday", which is to say my main coping strategy is not thinking about it^[6]. Otherwise, AI risk has very little to do with my day-to-day life -- it's not as though I'm an AI researcher -- but I felt I'd be remiss not including it in this letter as it's an important part of where my head is at right now.

The year in media

I read roughly a book a month this year, mostly nonfiction, and a few stand out.

First, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics. This blew my mind. In addition to being a comprehensive history of psychedelic culture and research, it significantly influenced my mental model of how brains work in general. I strongly recommend it. Here are a few representative passages -- because they're good, NOT just because I need to pump up my word count (8,000 here I come!).

On anxiety and depression:

We should think of the two disorders as “fraternal twins”: “Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.” Both reflect a mind mired in rumination, one dwelling on the past, the other worrying about the future. What mainly distinguishes the two disorders is their tense.

On how psychedelics facilitate behavioral changes (such as helping people recover from alcoholism):

“Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down, it will be drawn into the preexisting trails, almost like a magnet.” Those main trails represent the most well-traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them passing through the default mode network. “In time, it becomes more and more difficult to glide down the hill on any other path or in a different direction. “Think of psychedelics as temporarily flattening the snow. The deeply worn trails disappear, and suddenly the sled can go in other directions, exploring new landscapes and, literally, creating new pathways.” When the snow is freshest, the mind is most impressionable, and the slightest nudge—whether from a song or an intention or a therapist’s suggestion—can powerfully influence its future course.

And one more, provided without further comment:

“Never had an orgasm of the soul before.”

The other book that shook me this year was The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, which chillingly articulates how close nuclear weapons have come to annihilating the human race. It's less about the (unspeakably large) destructive capacity of the weapons themselves and more about how hard it is to prevent accidental or excessive destruction once humans are in the loop. The parallels to AI risk are evident.

On a less technical and extinctive note, I also enjoyed Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama . This was a recommendation from a theatre director friend after I pondered aloud, "I'm not sure if I actually enjoy most of the theater I see?" This book gave me a framework for understanding why that might be. I'll share a few passages from this one too (Screw 8,000. I need 13,000 words!).

This is the central thesis of the book, as a highly relatable analogy:

A lackluster orgy suffers from all of the same problems as boring theatre. People go through the motions, they do what’s expected, they make the sounds they’re supposed to make, but it’s really not as surprising or exhilarating as you hope or imagine it will be. I mean, there are so many people in the room! How can we not be making something great happen here? Obviously sex is not the problem, just like theatre is not the problem. We’ve got all the ingredients to make something really dynamite, but we’re just not getting it right. Most of us are left on the sidelines watching, trying to get off, getting bored, giving up and going home ungratified. Like a bad sex partner, boring theatre doesn’t feel present. The actors do not feel truly in the same room as you. You are not affecting the action and the action is not affecting you. The actors might as well be onscreen, and you might as well be watching porn.

And on why effective theatre should capitalize on its advantages as a live experience, rather than pretending to compete with cinema:

Audiences sense theatre’s inferiority as a medium through which to approximate real life and are not, for the most part, convinced by our attempts to tell them otherwise. Nor are they clear why they should be expected to pay four or five times more to watch not-quite-a-film rather than a real film. We’ll tell them it’s because nothing can replace the immediacy of the live experience, but they will wonder: If being in the same room as the actors is such a vital component, why do the characters pretend we are not here? Why is it never acknowledged or capitalized upon?

The best films I watched this year were Hundreds of Beavers (my first 5-star rating on Letterboxd ever!), Anora (the winner, by a large margin in my opinion, of the Palme d'Or^[7] at Cannes), and Perfect Days (wholesome and cozy).

Did you read this far? I barely even wrote this far!

Overall, 2024 was an incredible year. Though it's not all roses, and I could also recount any number of anxieties and insecurities, these last twelve months I made lots of positive progress in areas that matter to me while enjoying a huge quantity of new, positive, varied experiences. I'm extremely grateful for... everything, really^[8].

And whether you skimmed, or read through the whole letter including footnotes (100% completion achievement unlocked!), I'm grateful for you, reader. I seem to realize more and more each year how much nourishment I get from my friends, family, acquaintances, coworkers, baristas -- all the people who people the world. Including, and especially, you.

To that end: I would love to chat with you about any thoughts you have after reading this letter, or anything at all really. Text me, DM me, email me^[9], or what I'd REALLY love is to go for a walk or grab coffee or see you in person.

Did I mention I have a guest room?

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