This post is my 2,000th on this website.
It's also the first in a new direction.
I am so grateful to everyone reading this. I don't take your attention for granted.
So if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’d like to share a very brief recap and then tell you what I'll be bringing to your inbox in 2025.
Taking stock
I started blogging in 1999 but have been writing an email newsletter since 1997 or 1998.
There are about 850 original, long-form blog posts or newsletter issues here, along with almost 650 pieces published in various magazines and news sites, such as WIRED, VentureBeat, Business 2.0, Technology Review, and InfoWorld. I’ve also posted several hundred short-form notes.
This is hardly everything. Many of the articles I wrote for other publications didn’t seem worth saving here, and a lot of my work for clients has never appeared on this site.
I look back over this work and find there’s quite a lot I’m proud of: The long feature about the Clock of the Long Now. Columns I wrote at VentureBeat about the importance and business benefits of diversity. A piece I wrote for Popula in 2019 about how I stopped drinking. My father's obituary and a series of posts written shortly after that, during the height of the pandemic: Grief and gratitude, Either way, you get your pet back, Walking through a shitstorm, and I have heard the toadfish singing.
The beginning of a new year seems like the perfect time to look back at a career spanning 30 years and reflect on what I need to do with whatever time is left. Is that a decade or two? Who knows?
No one ever knows how much time they have, or what kind of time. No sunset comes with a guarantee that I’ll live to see the inevitable dawn; any breath could be my last – or my last as an able-bodied person. But it seems fairly certain that whatever I have left is less than the time I've already spent.
So I come to the question of “What’s next?” with a sense of quiet urgency. My choices matter, and how I spend my time over the next year (assuming I have even that much) will be significant.
The reset
With an awareness of this consequentiality, I entered the end of the year intending to give myself time for reflection. The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day feels like a liminal, floating week, disconnected from regular time. I was determined to make the most of it.
I didn’t realize quite how big of a reboot it would become.
While driving to Santa Barbara with my family on Christmas Eve, our 18-year-old son got sick. We were just past King City, almost exactly the halfway point in our five-hour drive, when we stopped for gas and coffee. He was stuck in the way-back of the minivan, trapped by a seat that wouldn’t fold forward, and he got sick all over the inside of the car.
I cleaned it up, and we did our best to quarantine him once we arrived in Santa Barbara. But the next evening, Christmas Day, after returning to our motel, I got sick too.
It turned into a complete overnight purge. While intense, it was thankfully brief. By midmorning on the 26th, I was emptied out. But the dude and I were steady enough to sit limply in the back seat of the car, so Karen drove the family home. I spent the next day lying in bed, eating almost nothing, just resting and reading Stephen and Ondrea Levine’s book, Who Dies?
By the 28th, I was more or less back to normal, so I attended a breathwork and reiki session hosted by Bryce Gubler of Eternal Breathwork and the marvelous somatic and spiritual worker Marion Pernoux, who is also my reiki teacher. It was a wild dive into an altered state of mind and body, driven by rapid, “circular” breathing that quickly induced a hyper-oxygenated condition, with pounding music filling the room and vibrating the floor. It was a combination of a rave and a revival, except we were all blindfolded and lying on the floor under our blankets. An hour of intense hyperventilation and occasional, even more intense breathholds left me drenched in sweat and seemingly floating in space. I saw lights. Marion’s gentle touch helped me calm down and open up. I looked closely at the fact of my own death. And I received a remarkable sense of liberation and creative freedom.
I joined a practice circle with Marion and three other reiki practitioners two days later. We took turns giving and receiving reiki from the others. The breathwork session was energizing and pulverizing, and this circle was calming and reintegrating. Eight hands at once brought me into a gentle, co-regulated space of recovery. I helped bring calm to each of the others in turn. A web of caring attention knit us together.
The breathwork had broken my heart into a hundred pieces; the reiki helped reassemble it into a new shape.
And so I came into the New Year filled with a sense of freedom, optimism, and potential.
What's next
My mission for the next while, however long it lasts, is clearer than ever: to share my work boldly.
I’m done segregating my “creative” work from my “work” work. I’d be a hypocrite if I stood here on my virtual soapbox telling you about how the best writing is truthful, full of life, and invites connection, and I didn’t demonstrate those qualities myself.
That means I will be braver about sharing more of my creative essays, haibun, and haiku here. I’m going to share more rough drafts and scribbly bits.
I’m determined to keep sharing with the kind of honesty and commitment that brought forth my “grief and gratitude” series.
The sense of creative freedom I received at the turning of the year demands expression. I hope that sharing that gift here will also help light some sparks of creative freedom in you.
That's because my mission is also to help you learn the power of writing for self-discovery, inquiry, and deep thinking.
This is consistent with what I've been doing here for the past year: helping people understand how to find and write better stories.
I want to pass along whatever useful things I’ve learned over my career. I will be very happy if I can inspire, edit, encourage, and help launch others’ writing careers.
If I've learned nothing else in 25+ years and more than 2,000 published posts and articles, it's this:
Writing is a tool for discovery, for figuring out what we really think, and for crafting better stories about who we are.
I will consider my mission accomplished if I can help others learn to use the written word that way.
This is especially urgent given the twin trends of a collapsing journalism market and the explosion of AI-generated content. There’s no longer a reliable pipeline for training young writers in how to write fast, well, and true. At the same time, GenAI language models are creating vast quantities of junk that looks impressive and seems “good enough” to many people but is actually soulless and empty.
If a new generation of people doesn't get excited about learning how to read and write with truth and beauty, we’ll drown in an unbroken sea of mediocre content.
So I will keep writing about how to write.
And I hope that this work is helpful to you.
Coming up in 2025
My book on how to write more effectively for and with other people is nearly finished, and I look forward to publishing it in 2025. Stay tuned for more!
I will continue offering Zoom-based writing circles in partnership with Foster. In these 90-minute sessions, a small group of writers gather to check in, set our intentions, write for an hour, and then check out with one another at the end.
As part of that, I'm hosting a private writing circle on Fridays twice a month. If you’re interested in joining that small community, please email me and let me know a bit about your writing work.
I’ll also offer occasional public writing get-togethers, starting with my next free writing circle on Monday, January 13, at 8am Pacific. (Click that link to register!)
And I’d like to start doing in-person writing circles in San Francisco. More to come on that soon.
May you be well, safe, and happy. And may you be free.
Thanks for being there,
Dylan
p.s. More inspiration:
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Finally, here's a great song for you from Meklit
