2025: Year Review

Another one bites the dust...

A tad late to the obnoxious and overly done year review party, but I figured I’d do one of these since this year has been a lot of ‘firsts’. First time quitting my six figure job. First attempt at writing a novel. First summer spent entirely reading & writing. And first blog with consistent output. Plus a few other personal firsts I’m sure I’ll get around to writing about eventually.

So it feels time to document the hard work and gloat a tad. Since that is what everyone else on this platform is doing. But I feel as though I did actually put in some decent literary efforts this year that I can look back on with fond memories and a sense of pride. Here goes…

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Books Read —>

• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness (2020) by Eric Jorgenson

  • Solid, useful for business & start up considerations.

• King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (1990) by Robert L. Moore & Douglas Gillette

  • Jungian archetypes analysis of manhood. Great read for such a short book, plus brilliant 90’s hard hitting style & rhetoric.

• American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005) by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

  • Slaps the movie out of the park, and it was a damn good movie. Perspectival shift on how big a deal the nuclear arms race was: serious people reckoning with serious world changing technology. Felt like reading about a different species to be honest.

• Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021) by Oliver Burkeman

  • A decent self-help book about how you haven’t got time to do all the things you want to do. So just get started and stop stressing.

• Why I Write: Inadvertent (2018) by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  • A book about writing from the legend himself. The third time I’ve read this perfect little meditative book. Writing ‘advice’ doesn’t get much better than this.

• Fuccboi (2022) by Sean Thor Conroe

  • Sometimes you have to read contemporary fiction to remind yourself of why you should be reading The Classics™️. Enough said.

• Bird by Bird: Sone Instructions on Writing and Life (1994) by Anne Lamott

  • One of the great writing books and it does live up to the hype. She’s a progressive hippy but that doesn’t matter: she is earnest and will make you a better writer.

• The Elements of Style (1959) by William Shrunk Jr. & E.B. White

  • If you want to well write in the English language, you must pass through the pearly gates of Shrunk & White.

• Think and Grow Rich (1937) by Napoleon Hill

  • Written by a nut-job with some whacky views, but worth trudging through.

• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (2016) by Cal Newport

  • A great manual for how to buckle down and get your ass into gear. Necessary reading in the productivity genre.

• The Anthology of Balaji: A Guide to Technology, Truth, and Building the Future (2023) by Eric Jorgenson

  • Snippets of insight, aphorisms of discernment, tweets of the prophetic. Take Balaji’s ideas with a large chunk of Himalayan salt though.

• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990) by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

  • The original ‘productivity guru’, but based on rigorous science and experimental methodologies. Flow is good, flow is God, you want flow, flow wants you. Also… what a name!

• The Sheltering Sky (1949) by Paul Bowles

  • Morocco’s most famous novel, written by an American expat though. The desert has its own laws, its own spells, its own abyss. A pivotal forgotten 20th century novel.

• Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (2019) by Cal Newport

  • The follow up to Deep Work, it explores how to disconnect from our digitally imbedded lives and why you should consider doing so.

• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) by Jonathan Haidt

  • Long story short: conservatives embody all 6 moral intuitions and liberals only have 2! And wow: 2012 feels like a previous century instead of only a previous decade. How times have changed…

• Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth (1919) by Hermann Hesse

  • Short, elegant, sweet to the taste. Hesse’s other bildungsroman book that seldom gets mentioned. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

• A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (2011) by Sam Gaddam & Ogi Ogas

  • Now highly dated by over a decade – pre dating apps and large scale social media. Essentially: men are from Mars ogling at naked alien chicks and women are reading erotica novels on Venus. End of story.

• The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus

  • Sometimes a novel’s first line can be more famous than the novel’s content itself. In this instance: The Stranger out competes them all. Having ‘read’ the novel in high school, I wanted to revisit it and was slightly disappointed. Meursault is a bit of a dolt.

• The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure (2018) by Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff

  • To be coddled is to view oneself without agency, as a perpetual victim. But once one does that, then the race to the bottom is endless. Do not give in to The Three Great Untruths: 1) what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, 2) always trust your feelings, and 3) life is a battle between good people and evil people.

• The Shadow of the Sun (1991) by Ryszard Kapuściński

  • Now this is how to do journalism. Biting, intense, rapturing. An absolute must in travel literature. Kapuściński’s Africa is immense.

• Let It Come Down (1952) by Paul Bowles

  • His second follow up novel set in Tangier where it is always raining. More blatantly nihilistic and edgy but also perhaps lacking in depth & substance. Great read nevertheless. Premium prose and diction.

Total: 21

Didn’t finish:

* Americana (1971) by Don Delillo —Started off strong then got boring midway through. Sorry Don. Gotta keep me interested.

**The Secret Life of Plants: A Fascinating Account of the Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Relations Between Plants and Man (1973) by Peter Tompkins & Christopher Bird — Fascinating read. Annoyed that I didn’t finish it at the time. Will try return back to it eventually (book is in another continent right now unfortunately!).

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Articles Read —>

This is not an extensive list since articles are harder to keep track of and I read too many in any given week to record them all down. But here are the major ones that got my noggin in a twist and are worth reading, organized by publication:

Compact Magazine

• The Rise and Fall of Urbit by Adina Glickstein (June 18 2025)

• Money by Vile Means by Peter Ryan (July 25 2025)

• Goodbye Britain, Hello ‘Yookay’ by Peter Hitchens (August 26 2025)

• The Faith of Nick Land by Geoff Shullenberger (October 15 2025)

• The Great Feminization by Helen Andrews (October 16 2025)

• Regime Change in Venezuela Is Bad for America by Juan David Rojas (October 17 2025)

• The Lost Generation by Jacob Savage (December 15 2025)

Harper’s Magazine

• The Goon Squad by Daniel Kolitz (November 2025 Issue)

The American Mind

• What Is Total Boomer Luxury Communism? by Russ Greene (December 10 2025)

• Everything is NOT Fine by Michael Anton (December 15 2025)

Quillette

• Sexual Perversity in Ontario by Marilyn Simon (July 30 2025)

• The Murder of Iryna Zarutska by Jukka Savolainen (September 13 2025)

• The Fugitive Mind by Joan Maltese (March 27 2025)

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Follow Substackers —>

Derek Thompson by Derek Thompson

• The Death of Partying in the U.S.A.—and Why It Matters (July 9 2025)

• Why Are Liberals More Depressed? (September 30 2025)

• The Monks in the Casino (November 11 2025)

• The 26 Most Important Ideas for 2026 (December 10 2025)

Crypto Trader Digest by Arthur Hayes

• Sasa (January 7 2025)

• The Ugly (January 28 2025)

• The Genie (February 6 2025)

• Zero Knowledge Proof (February 13 2025)

• KISS of Death (March 3 2025)

• The BBC (March 31 2025)

• Ski Cut (April 23 2025)

• Fatty Boom Boom (May 15 2025)

• Assume The Position (June 17 2025)

• Quid Pro Stablecoin (July 3 2025)

• Time Signature (July 23 2025)

• Buffalo Bill (August 27 2025)

• Four, Seven (September 23 2025)

• Bastille Day (October 2 2025)

• Long Live The King! (October 9 2025)

• Hallelujah (November 4 2025)

• Snow Forecast (November 17 2025)

• Adapt or Die (November 28 2025)

• Love Language (December 19 2025)

Billionaire Psycho by Billionaire Psycho

• Crocodile Tears and the Conservative Movement (February 10 2025)

• Soviet America (July 10 2025)

• Young Radicals (September 10 2025)

• Frontier to Money Printer (November 20 2025)

Postcards From Barroom by John Carter

• Ukrainada (March 21 2025)

• Post-Mortem for the Canadian Election (April 30 2025)

• Stripping the Word of its Power (May 2 2025)

• The Class of 2026 (June 10 2025)

• Homo Umbrans (September 25 2025)

• Poastocracy (October 11 2025)

• The Canadian Political Class Is Ideologically Incapable of Rebuilding The Military (November 13 2025)

• The Simp-Rapist Complex (November 29 2025)

• The Sweden Syndrome (December 6 2025)

• DEI, the Dispossessed Generation, and the Digital Koryos (December 19 2025)

The Intrinsic Perspective by Erik Hoel

• Stop speed running to a dystopia (January 10 2025)

• Our Overfitted Century (December 8 2025)

Letter’s from Fiddler’s Greene by Dave Greene

• An Age of Illiteracy - The Blessings of Babel Part I (February 21 2025)

• Lost in the Infinite Library - The Blessings of Babel Part II (March 9 2025)

• The Cantos of Criticism - The Blessings of Babel Part III (April 23 2025)

• How Progressivism Died (August 1 2025)

• “How Conservatism Died”, An Open Letter to Rod Dreher (November 18 2025)

Numb at the Lodge by Sam Kriss

• Numb at Burning Man (November 2 2025)

• What’s the point of words? (November 28 2025)

Cultural Capital by James Marriott

• The dawn of the post-literate society (September 19 2025)

Cassandra Unchained by Michael Burry — The only Substack I pay for = well worth it. How he writes this fast must be pure autism. Or he has had these posts written up and saved for a while, ready to unleash to the platform that will garner him the most subscriber revenue…

• The Cardinal Sign of a Bubble: Supply-Side Gluttony (November 24 2025)

• Foundations: My 1999 (and part of 2000) (November 24 2025)

• Unicorns and Cockroaches: Blessed Fraud (November 26 2025)

• Foundations: The Tragic Algebra of Stock-Based Compensation (December 1 2025)

• Fannie & Freddie, Toxic Twins No More No More? (December 8 2025)

• The Supply-Side Gluttony Recurrence (December 11 2025)

• Foundations: The Big Short Squeeze (December 16 2025)

• Foundations: The Psychology of Investing in the Information Age (December 19 2025)

Plus a bunch of names that I intermittently read when they come up on my feed: Curtis Yarvin, Ed West, Dominic Cummings, Christopher F. Rufo, Rob Henderson, Dmitry etc.

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My Own Writing! —>

Last but not least… I wrote the most this year than all other years in my life combined. Continuing to post here on Kill The Switch, alongside moving to a different continent and deciding to document my travels & thoughts via The Morocco Diaries – all in all it’s been a splendid output and majorly rewarding!

Kill The Switch

• The Ultimate Guide to: Accelerationism (June 3 2025)

• The Case For Self-Help Books (July 22 2025)

• The Kids Will Be Alright… (July 28 2025)

• Why You Should Buy & Own A Printer 🖨️ (December 7 2025)

The Morocco Diaries

• 1) September 6 2025 (September 20 2025)

• 2) September 7 2025 (September 22 2025)

• 3) The Bad Eye 👁️ (October 5 2025)

• 4) ‘Farm in Africa’ (October 10 2025)

• 5) 9/11 & The French New Wave (October 12 2025)

• 6) The Minzah & Lamb Chops (October 14 2025)

• 7) The Fahim Quintet (October 16 2025)

• 8) Battery on 2% (October 18 2025)

• 9) Barcelona Surgery (October 30 2025)

• 10) Google Translate & The Dogs (November 12 2025)

• 11) The Doctor & Groceries (November 13 2025)

• 12) Whiplash & 200 MAD Bills (December 2 2025)

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Writing Goals for 2026:

• Finish first draft of novel

• Finish non-fiction book of philosophy

• Write 1 post a month for Kill The Switch

• Get over 50 posts for The Morocco Diaries (currently at 12)

Reading Goals for 2026:

• Read more total books than 2025 (emphasis on novels)

• Read a wider range of articles from different publications & historical dates

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