The answer must be in the attempt.

so long, 2025...

Stranger Things logo.

December 31, 2025.

I just finished watching the Stranger Things finale, and while this is not a post about the show, I do want to take a minute to appreciate the Duffer Brothers and the ten years of great storytelling they have given us. Now, maybe the show hasn’t been for you, or maybe you liked some parts of it more than others. Maybe you have some critiques or whatever. Still, anyone who has ever told or tried to tell a story knows how difficult it is. So, kudos to them and everyone involved with the show for giving us a decade-long life in the upside-down.

When the show ended, and I wiped away the tears as David Bowie’s Heroes blasted through the speakers in my dark room, I realized the beginning and ending of Stranger Things also bookend the ten years of my twenties. Ten years is a long time if you think about it, and yet, on the other side of the decade, it feels so short, as if I blinked and it was over.

But anyway, I am sure we all feel this way. And I’m sure I’ll blink again, and I’ll be forty. Did a new show start this year that will bookend my thirties?

Stranger Things is a show about friendship and sacrifice and love and growing up and acceptance and monsters and goodness and choices and storytelling and on and on and on. It is a show about grief, about loss, about the passage of time. It is a show about the boon and the bane of being human and everything that it entails.

Life is hard, in general, as we all can agree. Some have it much worse, and some have it much better. But no matter who it is, every single one of us goes through some sort of pain, either physical or emotional or both, that is the cost of life. And it feels like the last few years have made life more painful and more uncertain. There are days when it all feels quite hopeless, not just because of the world around but also because of everything that the touch of time takes away from us: flowers that dry and die, greying hair and wrinkling skin, friends we don’t talk to anymore and lovers we lost as the music faded away. Maybe that’s why the nostalgia of a show like Stranger Things has a pull on us, at least on me, a feeling of loss for a world that never quite existed yet had a sense of comfort and certainty in it.

But I hope as we enter into a new year, as futile as that may sound, between all the resolutions and anti-resolutions and goals and whatnot, we could all live with more acceptance. Acceptance of our humanity, our limitations. More importantly, acceptance of each other. I do hope the next year is one of hope and positivity and joy and community, that it is a year where, if nothing else, we are able to understand each other a little more, or at least make an attempt to do so. As Celine says in Before Sunrise, “The answer must be in the attempt.”

Writing all this feels quite pointless, in the grand scheme of things. But I am reminded of Markus Zusak’s novel The Book Thief and one particular sentence in it: “I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”

Words have power, and so does their absence. And so here is an attempt, a few words into the digital ether. If nothing else, maybe it’ll become another data point to influence the Algorithms and LLMs that seem to control so much of our attention now.

I remember thinking and saying, “This will be my year” at the beginning of 2020, and we all know how that went. Maybe I had jinxed it? Do with that information what you will. But anyway, here’s to another year. And I hope the next one is better.

Not sure how to end this, so I’ll just let David Bowie play you out…

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