On the 31st of December 2024 I find myself reflecting on the year that was, and I’m reminded of an episode of Queer Eye where the episode’s hero, a Texan rancher remarks to the Fab Five: “You guys are … a lot.”
2024 was … a lot.
Getting the most obvious ‘lot’ out of the way, 2024 certainly had a lot of meetings for me: I was in 1,120 meetings across the 12 months (out of 1,420 accepted); if anything, that’s a lower ‘lot’ than 2023, where I’d been in 1,315 meetings out of 1,581 accepted. At times when I’m being harsh with myself I try to remember that at least 20% or more of those meetings happen between the hours of midnight to 6am, which according to most people I chat to (in or out of a work context) seems to be a physical impossibility – a reminder to cut myself some slack occasionally. After all, Douglas Adams himself noted, “If you’ve done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?”
Every job has its ups and downs and I honestly think anyone who says otherwise is either lying or self-deluded. Yet overall and even in spite of all those early morning alarm clock settings on my phone, the ups continued to significantly outweigh the downs in my job in 2024. In fact, before I’m back from my annual leave I’ll have completed three years as a product manager and it’s a journey I’ve been loving, particularly with such an emphasis in my role on User Experience (UX). Sure, I could describe my role as being as “manageability product manager”, or a “control plane product manager”, and while these are both accurate, they’re inward-looking descriptions that may not properly focus on the why – or at least, my why, which is the user – hence why when I talk about my role I talk about it in terms of the UX. Because it’s all about the users. Years ago when I was an engineering manager I used to reflect on the importance of quality documentation, which might be the first introduction a customer gets to your company, and it’s the same reason that I enjoy UX – it’s not just a way of bringing out the best in products, it’s a way of creating the best (dare I say, “sparking joy”?) introduction to what your company does.
Comparatively to the rest of 2024, work was the stabilising factor for me.
The biggest event in 2024 was losing our remaining cat, Cino in February. We said goodbye to his older brother in 2020, during the height of the pandemic lockdowns at age 16, and Cino (think “cappucino” for his name) was such a little trooper lasting almost four years after Stitch. Cino didn’t make it to his 20th birthday, but he had a long, pampered and well-loved life, leaving us with a tonne of memories that over time will turn into treasured stories my husband and I tell each other. (Doctor Who, Hell Bent: “Every story ever told really happened. Stories … are where memories go when they’re forgotten.”)
The other events of the year at times seemed monochromatic compared to the starkness of that single event, but there were still some standout ups and downs. During the pandemic we finally put a deposit on land and started to build a house, which was completed and handed over to us in April this year, and we’ve happily settled in at our new digs outside of Melbourne in Ballarat. With landscaping and other internal finishing all complete and settled in, this house has become a home in the best possible way.
And perhaps as proof that we’ve ended up in a city that suits us, we were remarking to each other this morning that here it was, the 31st of December – the end of the first month of summer, and we were still having to put on track pants and coats to go for our morning walk (it was around 9º celsius at the time). Such a beautiful climate. (Even if sometimes we get wind gusts of up to 70km/h just because.)
Not long after we moved in though my father in law became sick and over the course of a few weeks was hospitalised, likely for advanced lung cancer, only to contract COVID in hospital and pass quickly thereafter. And amongst everything that goes in with such events, that brought to an end the not-caught-COVID-yet streak my husband and I had run with – both of us caught it as a result of those events – and endured it separately, since he’d been visiting his parents around that rapid decline. (I managed to even score a “rebound infection”, briefly going COVID-negative before then having it revert within a couple of days.)
With a house to call our own we went all-in on solar, getting a plethora of panels and a battery.
It’s honestly pretty impressive to see your home being mostly powered from the sun, and often well into the night thanks to the battery. Sure, it’s an investment to get there, but there is also a satisfaction in doing something for the environment, too. (Though perhaps not as much as would be achieved by just even a single billionaire giving up on their private jet.) And having for many years endured quarterly electricity bills in the order of $1100 or more, flipping to monthly bills less than $100 is … remarkable.
2024 was also a year of discovery – or rather, one significant discovery for me, when a whole bunch of different things clicked and I realised I have aphantasia. So many of my ways of (forgive the pun) “seeing” the world and my life suddenly made a heap more sense and I can’t actually describe all the subtle ways it’s benefitting my mental health.
And on the health front, I definitely had my first “I’m getting old(er)” scare in November when my Apple Watch woke me up to say I had a high heart rate and had entered atrial fibrillation. That resulted in a couple of days of hospital stay and since being released, a multitude of tests (including, most recently, 48 hours with a holter monitor attached) ahead of when I get to check in with a cardiologist in January. (As I noted at the time, I’ll cut Apple some slack for a while on my watchOS UX gripes thanks to that little save.)
So all this (and more) is why when I think back on 2024, the way I need to describe it is … “a lot”. Ups and downs like any other year – perhaps more downs than I’d like to have seen, but on the weight of it, still more ups.
As to what 2025 will bring – who knows? I’m sure at a global level it’s going to be the start of a wild roller-coaster that we’ll all be dragged onto January 21 2025 (for me – for the USA it’ll be January 20, 2025) and I’ve got to say I have almost unbridled pessimism about how that will go, perhaps comforted only by the fact that I can’t literally envisage it. (On that front I’ll give the same advice here as I gave elsewhere: “Do not let yourself become burnt out by letting yourself become outraged at every moment. It’s a marathon, not a race. Hourly outrage will quickly wear you out and make you ineffectual. Anger, slow-burning anger will last the course. Remember that the Orange Chaos Turkey literally thrives on outrage.”)
And yet, despite my pessimism about how 2025 will go, the part of me that loves science fiction because it presents a view of humans making it to the future will remain optimistic that there will be more ups than downs, and there’s nothing wrong with taking that victory.
I’ll see you all on the other side.