December Thoughts
Closing out 2025 before moving into 2026
I like using December to pause and think about the ending year before heading into the resolutions of the new one. Tomorrow is exactly six months since we moved into our place in Pennsylvania so I’ve been reflecting a lot on all the transitions we made this year.
For context: My husband and I moved to Austin, Texas in 2015, but I never really felt at home there and leaving was something I brought up with increasing frequency over the years. In December 2025, we finally made the call to head somewhere we want to be long term. After some exploration, that place ended up being the suburbs of Philadelphia. We sold our house and left Texas the day after our daughter finished kindergarten. At the same time, I was battling some long term work burnout and finally left my job in July to start my own coaching and data consulting business.
My thoughts on the year have started coalescing into four larger buckets.
Consumption
There were two major forces shaping my thoughts on consumption this year. Winnowing and then packing up our material belongings into a moving pod to be hauled across the country was the first of these. Most people with kids will recognize the sheer amount of crap that kids accumulate, but even the amount of adult stuff that we sold or gave away was disturbing and we knew we wanted to stay smaller once we moved. The second force was financial. Quitting your job to build a new business will clearly shrink your income, but even as we pulled back on our expenditures, we didn’t feel a huge source of loss. That’s a pretty privileged position to be in, since my husband still makes a good income, but part of that came from clarifying what we really wanted and what we really needed. I guess if I had a tagline for this one, it would be less stuff, thoughtfully accrued. This also fits well with impulses I have around being environmentally friendly which I’d like to clarify and lean into in the new year.
Social Media
Social media could probably also fall under the header of consumption, as in I want to consume less of it. Over the past couple years I’ve been the one traveling for work while my husband stayed home with our kiddo, but that flipped once we moved. And I spent way too much time on the nights when he was out of town and the kid was in bed scrolling my screens. I don’t know if I had ever felt scrolling’s negative effect as viscerally as I did during those two weeks. This has been coupled with the need to do a lot more creation than before (creation of business ideas and materials, Substack posts, and a new social life and community). I feel like social media consumption and creativity are forces playing a zero sum game - more of one necessarily crowds out space for the other.
Community
We had an amazing neighborhood community in Austin. We knew that would be the thing we missed the most and the thing that would be hardest to replace. After two months of wondering if we’d ever make friends, we happened to make friends with a couple of parents at our daughter’s karate class and things have organically grown from there. Deep friendship takes time to grow and evolve, but having people to call up on the weekend is a first step that we’ve been very excited to take. I also had an amazing group of running buddies in Austin, which has again been one of the slower things to find in our new town. This really made me think about the role of running in my life. I realized that one of the key reasons I loved training hard was getting to do it with other people, and that a huge part of my social life took place on the run (no kids, no phones - what a dream).
Seasons
Spoiler: Pennsylvania weather is not like Texas weather. The last few Decembers in Texas I found myself really missing the cozy feeling of cold weather leading up to the holiday season. I sometimes wished for more gray days because sunny days felt like they required too much energy. We’re only in mid-December, but I am really enjoying winter so far up here in PA. I grew up in Wisconsin, so cold weather is in my roots. We definitely don’t want to go back to that level of cold, but going back to the four seasons I grew up with has felt like a relief. It has also felt like certain parts of my personality that laid dormant in the heat of Austin came back to life. I’ve always been a big reader, but this fall I joined a book course on Anna Karenina led by a professor and became a little fanatical about finding local bookstores. It feels like the percentage of my personality that is “reader” has grown by several points, while “runner” has dropped a few (per the community thread).
I’ll continue marinating in 2025 for a couple more weeks before turning to 2026, but I feel like I can already see the threads of some directions to take in the new year based on these thoughts.
How are you closing out the year? What did 2025 bring or evolve for you? What transitions did you make and what did you continue throughout this year?
Keeping annual lists of books read and trips taken gives me a good look at each year, and it seems to slow down the disturbing flight of time. This year has interesting brackets that could fit into a movie. We traveled sown to Bogota in early January to meet our son's girlfriend, and have returned in December to meet their new baby. In between, as you might know, I took a wonderful car trip with another son, from Texas to the east coast.