💫AIP 107 My 2024 Yearly Review

2024 is the end of a major life chapter in many ways.

Realizing I’m graduating next semester hit me harder than the freshman 15. My relationship with content creation is changing, and I’m re-evaluating my values. The next year will be a scary but also exciting time. That’s why I feel this 2024 yearly review is so important; it will inform much of 2025.

Here are some of the things that happened this last year:

Changed my relationship with content creation
Navigated the world of Gen Z dating
Saw online friends physically for the first time
Explored the spiritual realm of psychedelics
Built my emotional intelligence
Supercharged my resistance training and dieting
Taught Backcountry Cooking
Cultivated stronger friendships than ever

In this article, I intend to reflect on all of the goals I set for 2024 and recount some of the greatest lessons I learned. Feel free to skip around to the sections that interest you most. This is a long post, but I tried my best to make it full of value and intimacy.

Reflecting On My Goals And Learnings For 2024

Make $5,000 A Month In Revenue By The End Of 2024. Continue Creating On YouTube, Podcasting, And The Blog

This is the goal for 2024 I “failed” the most at because a short way into the year, I realized I didn’t want to pursue it anymore (which I wrote fully about in my 100th newsletter edition). Here’s the story behind that realization.

Throughout all four years of my time at Cornell, I have been creating content on YouTube, my podcast, and my blog on the side. When I first came to college, I associated content creation with a life of passive income, freedom, and infinite full-body massages. I idolized YouTubers like Ali Abdaal, Mat Diavella, and Thomas Frank.

I kept trying to “make it” by creating courses like Obsidian University, The Art of Linked Reading, and this year, Self-Learning Quest. A large portion of 2023 was devoted to creating solely PKM-related content so I could snowball my growth through niching down. I switched my writings and YouTube creation to mostly be about Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and started a podcast aptly named "Personal Knowledge Management With Aidan Helfant."

For a whole year I was hard into this PKM space. I was creating videos, articles, podcasts, and courses like Obsidian University And The Art Of Linked Reading. My subscriber count was blowing up with my first viral video, Watch This To Finally Understand The Zettelkasten Method In Obsidian, getting hundreds of thousands of views.

My newsletter subs were booming:

My podcast downloads were climbing:

So everything's great, right?

Nope.

The numbers were climbing, but I was dying. I had built my niche. Now it felt more like a cage.

Firstly, creating a video, podcast, and newsletter every week, while a full time student, in four clubs, with a girlfriend, is not sustainable. Second, to put it simply, I was getting bored.

I started creating content for four reasons:

To learn
To express myself
To help people
To make BOATLOADS OF MONEY! WOOOOHHHHH!

Creating content strictly on PKM, only the last two were being done. Whenever I hit 'publish' on another PKM video, a small voice inside whispered: "Is this really all you want to be known for? There are so many other PKM YouTubers, some of them with better content than you."

There are enough echoes on the internet. What if you could sing?

Naturally, I'd silence these thoughts by checking my analytics, watching the numbers climb. But numbers, I was learning, make terrible band-aids for the soul. The irony wasn't lost on me–here I was teaching people how to manage knowledge, while feeling increasingly disconnected from my own inner knowing.

It’s this past version of me that set that revenue goal for 2024. But shortly into the year, I realized this wasn’t me. I didn’t create this goal from my self, I was mimicking the goals of those I idolized back then. And it was sucking my soul.

Once I realized this, I changed my goal.

I began creating content on my other interests. I discussed humor. Happiness. Philosophy. Video games. Psychology. And more…

As I expected, each time I posted this type of content, I'd watch my carefully built subscriber slow down and drop. Every unsubscribe felt like a friend walking away.

But then something strange happened–the fewer people who watched, the more alive I felt. It was like taking off a suit I'd been wearing to a very long funeral–one where I'd been mourning my own curiosity.

I put on my metaphorical Hawaiian shirt (and then an actual one, because why not?) and every day began to dance, dance in the mystery of it all.

I started getting giddy again at the thought of a new video. I began asking questions on my podcast out of genuine curiosity rather than feeling pigeonholed into PKM. I began writing poetry, POETRY!!!

This brings us to now.

My Vision For My Content In 2025

I'm still creating content following my interests. No, the views aren't as good, even though I think the videos are way better:

So here's what I promise you for my content in 2025: no more hiding behind jargon or chasing algorithms. Just real conversations about the messy, beautiful process of growing into ourselves. Sometimes, we'll talk about meta-learning or gamification, sometimes about the poetry of everyday life, and sometimes about why this one scene in a movie makes me cry every single time. Sometimes I’ll talk about Digital Self-Actualization, the podcast I started this year with John Mavrick. Shameless plug.

Perhaps I'll never be a full-time content creator. But if I do become one, I'll become one creating authentically the whole way. Because that's what friends do – they let each other be their whole selves.

Speaking of friends, that's you. To all of you who've stuck with me through the fitness videos, the PKM tutorials, and now the poetry. Here's to more content in the future, wherever it leads.

Finding A Girlfriend

This last year I had a full time job: dating.

Starting in my fall semester of 2023 I entered into the modern hell that is online dating apps. After 30+ dates, broken up by a relationship of five months, I have learned a lot.

The state of dating for my generation after Covid-19 is, to put it mildly, “pretty fucked.” It can sometimes seem like nobody wants to put the effort into holding a conversation and going on a date. Many seem to forget Halloween is only an October thing, considering they ghost all year round.

Despite the difficulty, going on 30+ dates has been one of the largest facilitators of my growth and self-confidence over the last year. I wrote an article summing up my learnings called What I Wish I Knew Before Online Dating At 20 as well as The Dehumanization Of Online Dating.

Journey Into Internal Family Systems

One of the major insights I gained during my journey was the fragility of externally solving relationship problems.

External problems often come from internal ones. Healing those internal ones often makes the external ones obsolete or at least less strong.

This is one of the major insights I explored in my article, You Are The One You Have Been Waiting For. Instead of having your partner by your primary healer, become your own primary caregiver. Of course, they should be a big emotional support for you, but not the main one.

In the article, I discuss the revolutionary psychotherapy Internal Family Systems, which can help you do this. I write more about how I used this to navigate my dating issues in How No Bad Parts Is Helping Me Navigate The Emotions of Dating. I also wrote a longer article about how to do Internal Family Systems Therapy: AIP 104 Realizing Your Authentic Self Using IFS Therapy.

Journey Into Religion Inspired By Dating

Another fascinating experience I had was dating a Christian woman. Here's the thing: I've been atheist my whole life, but in the spirit of open-mindedness and curiosity, I decided to give it a shot.

I learned much about religion in the process, and I mean what I say next with the utmost respect. I went to church, bible study, and had many conversations with my Christian friends and non-Christian friends about faith. Ultimately, I resonate deeply with the values which underly Christianity and many religions for that matter. Kindness, gratitude, honesty, are my favorite style of pina callada.

My main problem is the foundation of all of these values is based on beliefs I fundamentally don't resonate with. I don't believe in God. I don't believe in original sin. I don't believe in hell unless you count the waiting room for the DMV.

I'm a super curious individual, and to me, religion can hurt that curiosity. Imagine all the things you could explore in the world is starlight filtered through stained glass, creating thousands of truth shattered hues. Religions to me, take one color they see, and name it things like Christianity. For when you believe in Him, you put on rose tinted glasses, every other color combining in masses, to the only color it could be, God, God, God, pray to me.

But what makes me sad is they'll never see, how many other colors there could be.

And sorry, my poetry pizazz was coming through there.

Again, this is just my opinion--aside from my reservations with religion, it was a profoundly growing experience. I understand the beauty of the one color they do see. It brings community and meaning in a world which can seem so grey. I met many wonderful people through this dating experience. It's just, not for me. I have religious friends who are profoundly curious. It's just more rare than non-religious people from my experience.

I wrote about my learnings in Why I Respectfully Don’t Believe In God.

Even though I don’t have a girlfriend right now, I would call this goal a success because it has allowed me to grow. My experiences taught me a lot about what I’m looking for in a woman in 2025 and how to have a healthier relationship with myself.

Learn Intermediate Spanish In 6 Months

This was a difficult goal, but I wanted to achieve it for several reasons!

Firstly, I could talk to native speakers when traveling to South America. Secondly, I can see the world in a different light because different languages make you perceive the world differently. And thirdly, I can delve further into my love for the science of learning through language learning.

But most importantly, I can show others learning a language as an adult is 100% possible.

I would say this goal was a major success. After a year, I can read, write, listen, and talk in Spanish at an intermediate level (though I’m better at reading and writing). I even headed the Spanish facilitation hour at Cornell this last semester!

I learned a ton about how to effectively learn a language I wrote about in my 6 months to intermediate Spanish learning plan. I conducted an experiment where I found flashcards to be superior to memory palaces for vocabulary memorization at least for me.

There were still a few hold ups. Most notably, in the first month when I was speaking Spanish through the language learning app Tandem, a 18 year old girl I was talking to fell in love with me. So that was, interesting…

There was also mess ups in homophones between languages. I once told one of my friends I was very embarazzada about my pronunciation. Turns about embarazzada actually means pregnant.

Improve My Writing Emotional Resonance

Despite writing for the last five years, by 2024, I had never treated it with the deliberate practice I had in some of my other skills.

So for 2024, I had made the conscious goal of improving my writing, specifically my emotional resonance. This goal was a major success.

At the beginning of the year, I started a writing club with my friend John Mavrick, and now good friend Dennis Xiao. A couple months ago, my friend Rushika joined as well. Every week, we submit an article/poem/whatever for feedback, and then hop on a call to talk about life and writing. This club has become one of my biggest sources of writing improvement and fulfillment. I can’t believe I didn’t start this earlier.

Dennis in particular, has supercharged my writing to levels I never dreamed of. He has this gorgeous, poetic writing style, spiced with emotions and insight. He, alongside Rushika, inspired me to learn poetry in 30 days, which made me delve into the fantastic book The Elements Of Eloquence, and write the post, Speak Like Shakespeare In 5 Minutes. My writing style has evolved from using the cardinal white mans spices of garlic powder, salt, and black pepper, to a mix of all the spices ranging from consonance to musicality to metaphor and more.

Another thing that helped my emotional resonance was taking a narrative writing class in the Spring and writing my first sci-fi novelette, Setting Sons. This so inspired me that I’m also in the process of creating a sci-fi poetic video narrative called The Relevance Exchange. Be on the lookout for the trailer soon.

Another thing this goal made me explore is why we consume stories in the first place. Stories are chock full of emotional insight, so getting into this goal interested me in learning what makes them tick. I wrote about my learnings in AIP 105 Why In Goodness Gracious Do We Like Stories as well as 20% Of Storytelling Tips, 80% Of Outcome, In 16 Minutes.

Finally, I summed up a huge amount of my learnings from this goal in What I've Learned About The Art Of Online Writing After 3 Years Of Writing Everyday.

This goal made me realize how core a part of writing is to my being. I can’t not do it. It’s essential to me I continue to write in 2025 even when I enter into the job world and have less time.

Continue Practicing Mindfulness, Philosophizing, And Create Mantras For The Different Areas Of My Life

In 2023, one of the most powerful sources of meaning and growth for me was delving into the lecture series by John Vervaeke, Awakening From The Meaning Crisis with my friend John Mavrick.

So for 2024, I set the goal of continuing to practice mindfulness, philosophizing and creating mantras for the different areas of my life. I had no idea this goal would lead me where it did.

I began meditating three times a day. I started delving into the second lecture series by John Vervaeke, After Socrates.

Then, when I finally visited my friend John physically for the first time this summer, we did magic mushrooms together. I tripped so hard I understood cryptocurrency for exactly 3.5 seconds. Let me tell you why that was crazy.

Before I say any more, this is not an advocation for you to do them. Consider legality and safety in your own country.

Until four years ago, I had been the poster child of purity. Jesus prayed to me—okay, not really, but I firmly believed I would never touch a drug in my life, at least until 25 (probably because of some crap about your brain only maturing then or something). This ended when I got drunk for the first time during my graduation party. And again, when I took weed edibles after being convinced by my brother the summer before going off to college.

Doing mushrooms was a little higher than my usual pay grade.

Mushrooms helped boost my spiritual growth to incredible levels. I wrote about my reflection in my article Reflections On My First Mushrooms Trip Ever. This spurned a journey into the world of psychedelics leading to Reflections On My First Psychedelic Weed Experience, and my article Lucid Dreaming And Psychedelics For Spiritual Practice.

My journeys also made me more interested in Wisdom and questioning the roots of what fueled the goals I had set in life. So, I wrote these two articles as well:

To sum up one of my major learnings from those articles, it’s this: Psychedelics help you realize how you are the God of your own reality.

I don’t mean you literally are God, particularly since I don’t have the beard genetics. I mean psychedelics help you realize the profound effect your expectations have on your experience of life as well as the relativity of consciousness.

Your expectations honed by your experiences, socialization, genetics, upbringing, and more, profoundly alter what you perceive. I literally don’t perceive the world in the same way as an uneducated teenager from Indonesia. Realizing this can give you a profound degree of empathy for others, and become more mindful of your own self-deception.

Psychedelics help you experience this directly by watching as your normally stable consciousness reality falls apart. You see things with a childlike wonder, without the labels you have grown to associate them with.

My journey into psychedelics led me down a rabbit hole in Ecological Psychology with John Mavrick as well. Ecological Psychology explores how our psychology is affected by the organism-environment relationship. Traditional psychologies tend to see the organism as separate from the environment whether deliberately or not. Taking psychedelics made me realize how fundamentally connected and formed by the relationship between you and the environment you are. I wrote more about my learnings in AIP 83 This Psychological Theory Could Change The Way We Learn.

Optimistic Absurdism

My journey into psychedelics also helped me flesh out my new arching philosophy for living life: Optimistic Absurdism.

I grew up in an atheist household. On the one hand, I'm pretty skeptical about anything science might term "a load of beeswax," but on the other hand, I have a profound resonance with many aspects of religion and spirituality. I want to find a philosophy/religion that resonates with me, but I also am scared of labeling myself as anything because it might put me into a box that hinders my curiosity and open-mindedness.

These problems didn't seem present when I came across Optimistic Absurdism from exurb1a (he's my favorite philosophy YouTuber by far, you should start with his Exam for humans if you have never watched him).

Optimistic Absurdism has two aspects to it.

First, it's optimistic. It recognizes there are bad things happening in the world and lots of life is fundamentally unfair and that pigeons have to eat their lunch on the ground, but it empowers you in doing what small things you can to make the world a better place.

Every interaction you have with someone or when someone interacts with an aspect of you (like your content) is a chance to ripple out good into the world. Whether it be helping someone laugh for a bit, inspire them to growth themselves, or something else.

You can make the world a better place--at least optimistic absurdism thinks so. But the funny thing is, even if you couldn't, it wouldn't matter. Because living life through an optimistic lens is pretty much better in every way compared to a pessimistic one--trust me I've experimented.

The second part of Optimistic Absurdism is Absurdism. Albert Camus created absurdism in response to the meaning crisis brought about by the loss of religion for many people after the surge of science. Camus believes it isn’t meaninglessness that hurts, but rather the contradiction of needing cosmic meaning and not getting it.

Absurdism isn’t the answer life. It’s the rebelling of needing an answer.

Or as I like to think about it, Camus looked at the need for cosmic significance and raised a massive middle finger at it.

This doesn't mean there aren't things in life to find meaningful. I see tremendous meaning in my friendships, family, learning, art, and growing as a person. I care about making the world a better place. But these personal meanings don't connect to some grand universal purpose for life; I don’t think there is one.

One of the great stories to which Camus relates absurdism is the myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was cursed by the Gods to forever roll a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down and start over again. Camus analogizes finding meaning in a meaningless universe like being Sisyphus. The answer is not to try and find ultimate meaning--rolling the rock up the hill in frustration--but to accept the rock rolling with joy as one’s life.

And that's okay.

Because then, you'll realize that along your rock-rolling path, you've been able to use that sacred I at the beginning of every sentence. That sacred sound means the Universe has made itself small enough to know its infinitude. You are that that knowing, that finite infinity. And then, you'll know for all the pain and desperation of being a thing that can feel pain and desperation, it’s an honor to have been a thing at all.

In 2025, I intend to continue exploring my spiritual journey. It feels like I have only barely scratched the surface.

Continue Doing Speech And Debate And Stand Up

When I was setting goals for 2024, I was still part of Speech and Debate and doing stand-up for No Pun Intended at Cornell. But just after writing my review, I left Speech and Debate and had my final stand-up show in my spring Cornell semester (although I continue to stand up when leaving a chair to this day).

I stopped doing them both for one main reason: I wasn’t touching grass enough.

I spend a lot of my day in classes, socializing, writing, and at the gym. Spending my afternoons and evenings doing stand-up and speech kept me from being outside, and I was missing out on that Vitamin D and Vitamin O.

So, instead, I taught backcountry cooking for two semesters at Cornell. It was wonderful. I turned a group of students into Gordon Ramsays and Julia Childs of the outdoors. ”WHERE'S THE LAMB SAUCE!” hits different when you're 20 miles from civilization.

On top of this, I did the 90-mile Adirondack Canoe race with two friends. My back felt like crushed ramen noodles.

Finally, most of the summer I spent backpacking in Garibaldi and Glacier National Park. This incredible time in the outdoors will play a large part in my goal setting for 2025. It will be interesting for me as especially as I enter NYC which isn’t exactly known for its nature.

A picture of the view close to the top of Swiftcurrent Pass In Glacier Park

Supercharge My Resistance Training, Cardio, And Dieting

Before 2024, I hopped on a call with my brother and came to the uncomfortable realization I hadn’t increased any of my compound gym lifts significantly in over a year.

One of my big goals was to supercharge my resistance training, cardio, and dieting. It’s been a great success!

Don’t worry, I didn’t start counting my macros and eating protein bars for their texture and flavor profile, including subtle hints of desperation. Instead, I began following a program from Dr. Mike Israetel called periodization. The underlying principle is you should organize your training into blocks of hard training, less hard training, and rest. Like we have vacations for work and school, training the same way the whole year makes no sense. Yet, that’s what I was doing in my training.

I wrote more about these ideas in the two articles below:

Over the last year, I have gained weight on my lifts, packed on more muscle, and, most importantly, the ability to eat more peanut butter because of my higher metabolism.

Foster Deeper Friendships

In 2023, I deepened my friendships a lot by doing what I called “forcing intimacy,” which, looking back, was probably not the best choice of words…

But the underlying principle I still agree with which is you can greatly deepen a friendship by asking deeper questions in a confined period. Doing this purposefully with a number of my friends last year was incredible for developing intimacy. So in 2024, I made the goal of deepening my friendships even more.

During the year, I discovered a new way of doing this I’ve fallen in love with—long periods spent living with your friend. I spent two weeks with my friend John in Vancouver, a month with a friend in Glacier National Park, and this winter break am seeing another friend in Texas.

Spending this much time in a row with someone is an incredibly intimate experience. You see how they wake up, how they like their coffee, their way of being throughout the day.

I wrote about some of my experiences in these two articles:

In 2025, I’ll have to think a lot about my relationships as I transition online with my physical Cornell friendships and find new physical friends in NYC.

Invest In My Video Gaming Hobby

For most of my college experience I have avoided video games like it’s small talk.

I used to play a lot of video games in middle and high school and was scared of returning to that past version of myself. But as I slowly began to play board games and touch Balder’s Gate 3, I realized that I’ve grown since then. I’m capable of playing without turning it into an addiction.

One of my 2024 goals was to invest in my video gaming hobby. I played Balder’s Gate 3 for a while with John as the incredible Dragonborn spell caster Drako Dalnar. You can bow now. I played through Life Is Strange, which was surprisingly quite strange. Finally, I finished the year playing through Elden Ring.

It was very fun. But not just for leisure. Playing video games again kicked a resurgence in learning and creating on gamification which allowed me to say I was investing hours into gaming for “research purposes.” The research embodied themselves in these articles:

I became so passionate about the idea of gamification that I created a free 5-day email courseSelf-Learning Quest to help people supercharge their self-learning outside work and school using science-based meta-learning and gamification principles.

I also learned to draw pixel art in 30 days so I could create art for the course. I was heavily inspired by the pixel art in Terraria, which used to be one of my favorite games in high school.

I’m not playing a video game right now. But as we’ll get to in my 2025 goals, I’m creating a Dungeons And Dragons campaign for my friends as a last hurrah before I graduate college in 2025. I’m already practicing my “you walk into a tavern” voice.

Growing My Emotional Intelligence

In high school, I had the emotional intelligence of a caveman.

My emotional vocabulary consisted of three words: good, bad, and dinner? I grew up in a small rural town with more tumbleweeds than people, so my social skills sucked.

No one ever asked me, how are you feeling?

So one of my last big goal for 2024 was to grow my emotional intelligence. I read Emotional Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, got into Internal Family Systems Psychotherapy, read a book on coaching called Coach The Person Not The Problem, started singing and dancing more, got into psychedelics, and took an introduction to acting class at Cornell.

It’s hard to say for sure, but I would say my emotional intelligence went up. My best piece of evidence is my acting brother said I seemed more embodied. Yay! I’m using my skills to practice my “I’m not lost, I’m exploring” face for the NYC subway.

I wrote about my experience in AIP 88 My Journey To Building Emotional Intelligence, As A Man…

Goals For 2025

I intend to continue creating content even with my realizations in my 100th newsletter edition.

But it won’t be consistent. I’ve slowly been moving to quality over quantity regarding content, especially for my YouTube channel. There might be months or longer gaps between videos. I intend to continue uploading my newsletter weekly or bi-weekly. Aidan’s Infinite Play and Digital Self-Actualizationshould still have a podcast or two out every month.

In addition, I can’t promise consistency in content. My interests are so sporadic and wide, I can’t create on one topic. It sucks my soul.

There are enough echos on the internet, I want to sing.

Find A Girlfriend

As I look for a girlfriend in 2025, I’m going to try and hold the principles I wrote about in You Are The One You Have Been Waiting For to heart, as well as my learnings in Internal Family Systems Therapy.

I have no idea if I can find a girlfriend in the spring semester of Cornell, considering I’ll be graduating that spring. But my dad started one of his longest relationships in the spring semester of college. And dating is one of the most incredible avenues for growth there is.

If it doesn’t happen in Cornell, I’ll be rooming with my brother in New York City after college, so that will be a new era of dating. I’m currently preparing for the move by practicing living in my closet.

Embed Myself In Learning Experience Design

In the last few months I had a major insight regarding career direction.

I can’t rely on becoming a full-time content creator anymore, so instead, I went to the most reliable source of information on the internet, ChatGPT. Putting my resume and what I’m looking for in a job, I found Learning Experience Design.

LXDs assess learning related problems, and design, develop, implement, and evaluate learning experiences to engage, transform, and grow people past those problems. This is something I’m incredibly passionate about because of my background in content creation, meta-learning, gamification, public speaking, teaching, and the fact that both my parents are teachers. It helps that the work-life balance and pay look quite good as well, which is nice because I would prefer not to starve in NYC.

So, during my spring semester at Cornell, a big goal of mine will be to apply for LXD jobs in New York City. To prepare, I’ve been reading up on LXD theory, creating my portfolio website, talking to LXDs in the field, and more.

Adventuring into LXD has reminded me of a few things. Firstly, how powerful is having a project to apply what you've learned? If I was just reading the LXD theory, and sitting on my bum, I wouldn’t learn anything. Instead, I create a project relevant to each theory and combine it with one of my interests to learn more effectively, like my recent article: 5% Of Design Tips, 95% Of Outcome For Learning Experience Designers.

It also taught me the value of creating a meta-learning map before starting into a learning endeavor as I wrote in AIP 82 Before You Learn Anything, Don’t Start Learning. I’ve gotten so much clarity on what to learn and when, as well as how to learn it. Finally, it reminded me of the power of writing as a form of learning, as I wrote about in AIP 77 Atomic-Essays The Secret Learning Tool.

Host An Epic Dungeons And Dragons Campaign

As I’ve gotten more into narrative writing and started playing less video games, I need a new fiction creative passion to get in. Because I took an acting class this last year and am taking Intermediate acting next semester, Dungeons And Dragons seemed like the obvious choice.

So next semester a big goal of mine is to go out with a bang by hosting an awesome Dungeons And Dragons Campaign. I’m in the process of developing it: it’s called The Chrono Files. Here’s the premise: When a cities God mysteriously abandons them in the beginnings of the industrial revolution, they must navigate a world of dying religion, technological innovation, loneliness, and the possibility of war between the rich top and its oppressed bottom city all while having the shadows of the God in their magic system, Chronobonding.

Here’s a flyer I made with my new design skills to hype my friends up:

I’ve spent tens of hours writing the history and designing the campaign, but knowing my friends they’ll likely try and befriend the main villain. That’s why my worldbuilding will be 30% careful planning and 70% crazy improv when they start analyzing the local sewage system.

Practice Dancing And Singing

As I mentioned in 2024, I wanted to build my emotional intelligence.

This was largely a success, but I feel there is still much to go in building my embodied intelligence. Dancing and singing are great avenues for exploring this. I did Salsa one semester with a friend and loved it. I also did some Zumba and Swing Dance toward the end of the year.

So, this next year, I’m going to go through a dancing course my brother got at the end of the year called Steezy. I’d also love to do more Zumba and dance nights with friends. Generally, I’d like to do more physical things with my Cornell friends, regardless, as I feel a lot of the activities we do are sedentary.

Continue Building My Emotional Intelligence

Related to dancing and singing is building my emotional intelligence. Aside from dancing and singing I’d like to continue my acting journey with Intermediate acting next semester. I’ll continue applying the tips I learned from Emotional Intelligence 2.0 as well.

Continue Exploring Spirituality

2024 was my entrance into the world of psychedelics. I want to continue this exploration in 2024.

Of course, I will do so while taking safety and legality into consideration. I plan on understanding mushrooms as well as I can before moving on to something like Mescaline or LSD since I don’t want to overwhelm myself.

I’m going to finish the lecture series After Socrates with John. I’ll also continue to meditate regularly and occasionally do yoga.

Theme For 2025 Explore

My theme for 2024 was Cultivation. Based on my goals for 2025, my overall theme for the year is Exploration.

I’m exploring:

Dungeons And Dragons
A new relationship with content creation
Finding a girlfriend
New York City
A new career path—Learning Experience Design
Spirituality
Dancing and Singing
Emotional Intelligence

I’m incredibly excited about 2025. It’s the start of a new life chapter, and I’m excited for the ride. Here’s to another year of this wonderful thing called life, and good luck with whatever your new year looks like.