This poast is inspired by my friend and coworker NAT WELCH to write an eoy / start of year post.
I've had very clear milestones for the last 2 years, oriented around managing my career and progressing my relationship with my (now) wife. I've also knocked them all out of the park. The problem is that in 2026, I'm not aiming to make any big changes with work, and I'm not planning to get another wife. Which leaves 2026 as a sort of "gap year" period on these two main fronts. "Continue to do well at work" and "Continue to be married", while requirements, are not interesting as goals. In 2027, I'll probably be aiming for another title bump, as well as my wife and I (probably) having our first child. Which leaves us here:
| Year | Work goal | Family goal |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | title bump | move in with my girlfriend, and then propose to her |
| 2025 | switch industries / get a better job | get married |
| 2026 | ? | ? |
| 2027 | title bump | child #1 |
Here's my plans to fill my gap year:
1 - Write 12 stories
Here's the big one I'm making my project: I am going to try to write some fiction. This is very hard for me to do. I love science fiction, I read and watch it all the time, but the few times I've tried to write some myself, I really struggle. I wrote some in college for a class, and I was able to make it happen because there was a deadline and grade attached. I haven't been able to push through the discomfort of making shitty art without that motivation since. I know how to get better (just do it). I'm going to aim for 12 short stories, 1 a month, as a way to force myself to create a volume of work at a decent pace. Fuck it, I'll even commit to "publishing" the best 3 at the end of the year. I also want to make sure I'm reading more and scrolling less, but who doesn't have that goal?
2 - Fitness:
- place my hands on the ground with my knees and back straight
- hit 190lbs bodyweight
- do 100,000 pushups, run 500 miles, do 1 ring muscle-up
I always set some fitness goals, just because it's my main hobby and they're so easy to quantify. For #1, mobility and flexibility are something I've neglected for a long time. In my old age (26), I'd like to work on these things more. Being strong is great, but I'd also like to not have occasional shooting pain in my lower back. My theory is that this new dimension of training is what will have the greatest marginal change in my QoL. I've been working on these for a couple months now and feel great. Dropping weight is related - I felt really great going from 220 to 205 last year, so let's do another 15 and see how that feels. The other stuff: why not. goals are great when accompanied by fun numbers.
3 - Family: Mastery of Life Ops
My wife bought her house before she met me. It's a fixer upper house, and we have done about 40% of the fixing up in the last 18 months of living there together. We can get to 100% this year (to the extent that you ever get to 100% on this sort of thing). I'd like to lead that family of projects, especially if there's a good chance we'll be selling it this year. We do a good amount already, but I don't want to be the husband who's been "planning on fixing up the garage" for 3 years and never does it. This extends to other aspect of our "life ops" - which we are overall very on top of, but I'd like to step it up even higher. After all, this is the peacetime. The more systems we can hammer out now when it's just my wife and I, the better. This includes:
- disaster planning for... disasters? family paperwork managed, shared password managing, digital backups of everything important
- elimination of all "junk drawer" spaces in the house (we have many), decluttering
- "full stack" understanding / observability into our various house system internals
- landscaping (our house is extremely lush / overgrown)
- some other home repair projects
So there we have it. We'll see how this looks at the end of the year! In my EOY 2026 post, I should be posting pictures of a tidy house, a collection of stories, and some thirst traps. See ya then.