My Year in Review: 2025

2025 was quite a strange year—one that was difficult to make sense of as it was happening and which remains so in retrospect. Nothing especially bad happened to me, but it felt like quite a bad year on the whole. And part of me wonders how much of that was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Throughout 2025, I kept feeling that things weren’t going well, and so I had this ongoing narrative in my head that I was having a bad year.

As I said—there was no particular event or external phenomenon that made it bad; I didn’t suffer any kind of trauma, loss, or misfortune. My life was actually very consistent and stable. I had my job, my house, and my friends, just like the year before. What made it a bad year, I think, was something internal. A feeling. I had this sense that I wasn’t making the most of my life and that what I did have—my job, my house, my friends, et cetera—was held only tenuously. That I could be, without realizing it, on a gradual trajectory toward losing those things because I wasn’t actively and intelligently making the right decisions.

However, that’s not to say that I felt this way all the time. Sometimes these feelings were interrupted with little happy moments that made me stop and think that the life I wanted was within grasp—that it was something I could get a taste of now and then but not experience all or most of the time. I love having plans. I love being out and about—especially in central London. I love being with people. In November, I went to the theatre with a friend of mine from work. We met early to grab some drinks, watched the play (Arthur Miller’s All My Sons starring Bryan Cranston), and then went to grab some more drinks afterward. As we walked leisurely through Trafalgar Square that night amidst a multitude of couples, families, tourists, and partygoers likewise high on life, my friend said, “We’re so lucky that we get to do this. To be living here, in this city, and having access to these incredible experiences. I mean…Bryan freaking Cranston!”

Her comment struck me quite deeply, because it encapsulated not just why I’m committed to the life I’ve built in London long term, but also the awkward emotional juxtaposition I’d been feeling throughout 2025. Because while I’ve been depressed, I’ve also loved my life. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but what I mean by that is that I love the setup that I have—I just feel like I’m not making the most of that setup.

In the summer, I met my brother and his wife for dinner at a Turkish restaurant in Holborn. They were in London to see the new Hercules musical. It felt so good having somewhere to go after work, and fitting this dinner into my schedule so easily. We chatted about our teenage and college years, and how things had changed since then. The food was amazing and the restaurant had this really eccentric interior design. Afterward, when my brother and his wife went to see their show, I walked through Covent Garden and realized I wasn’t ready to go home yet. It was 7pm and a warm, light Friday evening. The city was bustling with activity and everyone had that look of being on their way to something exciting. People were dressed up in their nice clothes. I looked at all the many groups of friends and wondered where they were going and what they were up to. For them, the night was just beginning. Part of me wanted to stroll into a bar and grab a drink, just to prolong my evening. But I knew that if I did, I’d just end up feeling out of place and sorry for myself.

I was feeling a rush of happiness from being out and about, but I wanted more. I wanted to know how to squeeze more juice out of the setup I had. And while I’ve always wanted to do more with my life, I think being in my thirties has afflicted me with a kind of panicked urgency. How can I be over thirty and not in control of my life? When I was in my twenties, I still had that feeling that I had my whole life ahead of me, with plenty of time to figure things out and do everything I wanted. Now time feels like it’s passing me by. Every good moment—like doing something fun with my friends or finishing a piece of writing—takes on a greater significance. And conversely, the days where I don’t do anything carry with them a greater ache.

I kept thinking to myself: I wish I had the exact life I have now, except I’m 25. That would be perfect. Everything the same except for that one thing. Then I’d have more time to figure out what the pieces are and put them into place.

I turned 33 in 2025, and to celebrate my birthday I went to this curling bar in Southwark with my friends. Afterward, we got dinner together at a nearby Thai-Malay fusion restaurant and were seated in a private room downstairs. Somehow, in an uncanny reflection of my subconscious neuroses, the conversation got onto the subject of ageing. One of my friends mentioned with amusement that she’d noticed she had a gray hair. To my surprise, everyone else admitted to having one too. No one seemed bothered by it. If anything, my friends acted like it was cute. I was the only one who hadn’t said anything, and the eyes around the table turned toward me.

“What about you, Michael? Do you have any gray hairs?”

I realized that I am, perhaps, a deeply superficial person. None of my friends were embarrassed or alarmed at the idea of gray hairs. And none, as far as I could tell, seemed troubled at the idea of getting older. In fact, most people I’ve spoken to—across different friendship groups—don’t seem particularly nostalgic for their twenties. Obviously, this is a purely anecdotal observation, so I’m not saying that there’s something broader going on, but it just struck me as interesting that most people in my life don’t seem to share my discomfort with the gradual and inexorable loss of youth.

Most people on the cusp of thirty tell me that they’re looking forward to being more settled and having a slower pace of life. And most people over thirty tell me that they’re happier than they were in their twenties. Your thirties, it’s often said, are the decade where you start really living life on your own terms. You have more resources to pursue what you want and you care less about fitting in. And while you’re older, you’re still not old. Sure, hangovers are more acute and you can’t indulge in sweet treats without weighing up the possibility of sharting yourself, but you’re still—in relative terms—young.

But what’s all this got to do with 2025? Well, while it wasn’t the year that I entered my thirties, it did end up being a year in which a heightened awareness of being in my thirties informed a lot of my emotions. I might not have been consciously thinking about it all the time, but looking back on things, it feels like that awareness was always there. Because it’s true—since turning thirty I have been happier and more independent. I’ve done more. I’ve lived more. So why, then, was 2025 the worst year for my mental health since 2016? I typically think of 2016 as the worst year of my life. In terms of my “setup”, it couldn’t be more different to the life I have now. In 2016, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t write or read anything. I didn’t work and I didn’t study. I felt like I had no options and no future. I hated myself and I didn’t care what happened to me. I felt like I was doomed. And I was conscious of the fact that I was giving up on myself. I thought “I’m a complete failure” and had no motivation to do anything about it. I just let time pass by, sleeping until noon and consciously trying to delay adulthood by losing myself in mindless digital distractions.

2025 was the complete opposite. I cared about myself and my future. Maybe too much so. I feel like the reason 2025 was so difficult, despite being so different from 2016, was down to both a frustration with the speed of my progress and a fear of losing what I’d already built. Ever since I moved to London in 2021, I’ve had a borderline psychotic fixation with making up for all the time I wasted during my twenties. With making my life as vivid and interesting and active as possible. And, admittedly, I get quite angry at myself when I feel like I’m not doing that. Perhaps the reason 2025 went the way it did was down to a buildup of pressure that had been increasing since I started this new life almost five years ago. In my mind, London had to feel as far away from 2016 as possible, and so the sense that I was stagnating—or worse, that things could go back to the way they were in 2016—drove a lot of my anxiety. At the start of the year, I made a vague pledge to do more with my free time, but it wasn’t really planned out and so I found it difficult to execute. It also, I think, had a lot to do with the fact that I really struggle with multitasking. I find it difficult to be in more than one headspace at a time, and it always takes me a while to change gears. And that brings me to the second big theme of the year.

Work ended up dominating my life in 2025. In March, our company got acquired by a large American firm. This naturally brought about a lot of anxiety and excitement, and by December people often joked that it felt like two years packed into one. It was undoubtedly the most significant year of my professional life. I experienced some of my highest highs and my lowest lows. My confidence was all over the place. Sometimes it was in the gutter, and a particular meeting or conversation would ruin my entire week. Other times I felt like the dog’s bollocks, and it was all I could do upon finishing a presentation to stop myself from ripping off my shirt, fully tensing out, and yelling “Fucking come on then!”. My role changed in May, and I went from being a pure copywriter to a “Brand Specialist”, which led to greater challenges but also greater recognition. Rather than playing a support role in other people’s projects and campaigns, I became a project manager that was expected to set deadlines, lead meetings, and keep the whole thing moving.

During this time I enjoyed writing client testimonials, award submissions, and social media posts most of all. It was strange because I was simultaneously more stressed but more excited. I felt really engaged but I was also never relaxed. I had this constant fear of screwing up. It made me extremely alert, which I guess is a good thing, because I was always trying to plan ahead and preempt any potential pitfalls. But on the other hand, it was mentally exhausting, and whenever something happened that I didn’t account for, I felt terrible. I ended up having a really good Q4, and finished the year feeling quite positive about things. I’d also say that I felt a lot closer to my work friends in 2025. I realized that I didn’t have to be funny or interesting in order to be appreciated. In general, I just felt more comfortable with myself.

So when I think about the story of 2025, it’s really the intersection of these two big themes: an increasing pressure to succeed at building the life I want and the difficulty I had juggling that with a job that took up a lot of my mental energy. After all, you can’t put the job on the backburner, because the job is the foundation that facilitates creative, social, romantic, financial, and fitness goals. That’s the way I’ve always seen it. To do all the things I want to do, I need my job to be going well. When I was younger, I used to have this idea that once you had a job, then you didn’t have anything to worry about so long as you kept your head down and did what was asked of you. I wonder if that was due in some way to the portrayal of the working world in popular media, the way the occupations of all the characters in The Simpsons were inextricably tied to their respective identities. Maybe I got it into my head somehow that it was a passive thing, a kind of professional version of school, where you had your mates, your routines, and you just blended in with the furniture. The reality, I’ve learned, is that you never truly belong. That a job is something that has to be actively and meticulously maintained, and your worth constantly proven. And so the feeling I had that I was never on secure ground made it quite difficult for me to balance my professional life with my personal one.

It’s not the most fun thing to write about, but I’m committed in this annual series to honing in on what made each year distinct. And there’s no two ways about it—it was the interplay between these two stressors that defined 2025 for me. That’s how I’ll remember it. But it’s nonetheless important to point out that 2025 wasn’t wholly bad. There were some great moments that made me forget about everything—and which I’d like to record here for my future self to look back on.

• Firstly, 2025 was undoubtedly a great year for theatre. I kicked things off by going to The Old Vic with Robin to see a production of Oedipus starring Rami Malek and Indira Varma. In May my parents came to town and we saw Ewan McGregor in My Master Builder. I finally got to experience seeing a Shakespeare play at The Globe Theatre with a production of Troilus and Cressida and I went to the Donmar Theatre for the first time to see The Maids. And finally, I went to see Arthur Miller’s All My Sons starring Bryan Cranston—which was genuinely one of the best plays I’ve ever seen.

• 2025 was also an incredible year for getting to see some of my personal heroes. In May, I went to see Bernie Sanders give a talk at the beautiful Methodist Central Hall in Westminster. The talk was moderated by James O’Brien, a journalist that I also quite like, so it felt even more special. And then in September, I was able to get tickets to see Barack Obama at the O2. Both experiences were amazing, but noticeably different. The Sanders talk was more like a campaign rally, and he spoke about specific people, policies, organizations, and events in relation to the theme of oligarchy. By the end, we were all fired up. Whereas Obama was more philosophical—he didn’t name anyone or go into specifics, but instead spoke about broader trends in political and social history to try and contextualize the moment we’re living in. It was all about ideas. He also spoke a lot about technological changes and his thoughts on AI, which was quite interesting. The two talks complemented each other quite well, with one being grounded in the political battlegrounds of the present and the other being a reflection on the broader, overarching factors that inform them.

• Another hero I got to see live was the classicist Mary Beard, who gave a talk on Ancient Rome—covering the everyday lives of emperors and ordinary people alike. She has a particular talent for making ancient history relatable for modern audiences and bridging the gap between the past and the present. It’s quite a humanist approach that encourages us to understand Ancient Romans the way we understand the people of today. It was great to see her, and her way of speaking is just as engaging as her style of writing.

• It was a good year for immersive experiences and adventurous activities. In July, I took Robin to Phantom Peak for her birthday and in November she took me to Prison Island for mine. The former is a kind of steampunk cowboy town with live actors where you have to solve mysteries. We dressed up in Western outfits and introduced ourselves as Sadie and Butch to the townsfolk. Prison Island, on the other hand, is a collection of adventure challenge rooms—some of which are physical, some logical, and some based on things like technique or skill. My favorite was one that looked like an actual prison cell, and we had to figure out how to escape. Both Phantom Peak and Prison Island were super fun and I’d definitely do them again.

• I wrote a short story for a competition that ended up being published as one of the winning entries. It was actually a story I was quite proud of, so I’d say this was my best moment of 2025. Sometimes when I look back at something I’ve written after a long period of time, I end up finding fault with it, cringing at it, or else just wishing I’d done things differently. But when I reread this one once it was published on The Writer’s Playground website, I actually enjoyed reading it and felt satisfied with how it turned out. In short, it’s about a military veteran estranged from his family, who returns to his hometown for a celebration of life event. If you’re interested, you can read it here.
• When it came to physical activity, I did more of a range of things in 2025. I tried padel and really liked it, but just like my brief stint with shuffledancing in 2024, found it difficult to stick to due to financial and logistical reasons. I started playing basketball for the first time since my old summers in the USA, which was a nice alternative to going to the gym. The great thing about basketball is that once you have a ball, a pump, and a hoop, then all you need is motivation to do it. You’re not reliant on other people or money. So that was nice. I also bought a FitBit and got more walking done. If the weather was nice and I had no other plans, I’d go exploring and take some photos. I did one last climb at our local bouldering gym before it closed down and in August I went to the Ninja Warrior indoor adventure park in Guildford, which was amazing.

• It was also a good year to be a Chelsea fan—I’d say the best year since the Abramovich era came to an end in 2022. Winning the Club World Cup felt like a great accomplishment—not just because our young players beat an excellent PSG team, but because they played so well while doing it. And the moment where Donald Trump joined the Chelsea players on the stage for the trophy celebration, and a bemused Cole Palmer can be seen remarking “What’s he doing?” was hilarious. It’s probably my favorite image from 2025; a surreal crossover between my favorite person in the whole world and my least favorite. Palmer seems completely unfazed that he’s standing right next to the most powerful person on Earth, someone whose whims and flights of fancy often have highly destructive consequences for people all over the planet. In October, just before my birthday, I went to Stamford Bridge for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, which was amazing. I stayed at the office an extra hour, which was fine because I had plenty to get done anyway, and then got the District Line straight from there to the game. It was the 5-1 victory over Ajax in the Champions League, and every time Estevao got on the ball, you could feel the whole crowd get excited.

That’s 2025 in an existential nutshell. At the time of writing, it’s already 2026, but I hope the new year proves better than the last.