2022 Year Review.
Once a year I like to make a review of the previous year. I think everyone should do this and make resolutions, if only just to re-affirm you’re on the right course. Measure something. Set goals. Can you do better at anything at all?
Now what about my 2022 resolutions? What did I learn/accomplish in 2022? What is there to work on? Am I too perfect? Should I tone it down to give the rest of the world a chance?
1- Cross Country Bike Adventure.
Well I’m going to say I nailed the shit out of this one. I did not one, but two car camping trips:
178 total days of car camping, about 120 spent actually sleeping in the car.
Part of my 2022 resolution was to meet new people to ride with, if possible, on this trip. Sadly that really didn’t pan out. It was on me to contact new people and set me schedule around that and it just would have been too much of a hassle given the grueling schedule I set for myself during my summer vacation.
I did manage to see and ride with tons of friends both from Montreal and the USA, probably a solid 20 people, including some I hadn’t seen for many years. Hey I’ll take that as a 50% win right there.
The other sub-step was to document the trip. Well I wrote like 20 blog posts about it and took hundreds of pictures, so I think that’s covered. Only caveat is I should have bought a better phone…
Bonus credit: I award myself bonus points for discovering the hobby of “Big Roadside Attractions” and visiting a crapton of them. I also award myself bonus points for sending like 100 postcards to all sorts of people during the year.
FINAL GRADE: A+
2- Infernal Fitness Ladder.
“+1 Pushup, +1 Pullup, +1 Hanging Ab Raise for two days, then rest, then repeat. For one year.”
That was the goal, which at the end, on December 31st, would be 244 reps of each of these. That would have been a grand total of 29 890 reps for the year.
How did I stack up? Well I made it to 125.
That’s 7875 total reps for each exercise. 26% of the total goal volume… but a bit over 50% of the days.
Going to be lenient on myself because doing this on top of the cycling was pretty unreasonable but I got back on it the second my trip was done.
FINAL GRADE: B
3-Promote This Blog
Gotta say I dropped the ball on that one:
I hilariously peaked with this article on education. It sparked a lively debate on reddit and other places where people predictably assured me that I was very dumb for not understanding the obvious value of spending a small fortune on K-12. As per usual people just defend the status quo and live knowing that finally, in 2022, the political class of specifically their own country has achieved mostly the true and correct policies, now and for all time and that without those policies we’d regress back to the stone age ( lol ).
The second peak of the year: Investing in collectibles, is it dumb? I repost this article constantly when talking about buying magic cards. It made me realize that I was literally the only person in the world who did this research. I plan to write many more such things in the future as I gather more data, so who knows!
I couldn’t promote this while on the road, it was just too much mind drain at that point. I told myself I’d get back to it once the trip was over but the errands / tasks / trips / projects just kept pilling on. For 2022 this website primarily just served as a photo album, so I could really remember and document what I did because… huh.. what was I typing… Oh yeah because my memory is terrible!
FINAL GRADE: E
4- Finish the “Discover 50 new Songs” from last year
Well this was a low bar but I cleared it. I found 47 new songs this year. Here’s 3 of my favs:
- The Primitives: Crash (1988) -Roberta Flack - Killing Me Softly With His Song (1973) -Juice Newton - Love’s Been A Little Hard On Me (1982)
FINAL GRADE: A
5- No Single Player Video Games
I wrote early next year about the boredom that set in from not playing games. Retiring at 35 with no kids/spouse means you still have to find something to do all day. I looked into what the folks over at MisterMoneyMustache were doing with their early retired lives and one answer seems to be “writing journals about my mundane life”. Some of these are over 100 pages long and go into painful detail about the pickling of vegetables and each tiny step in some home reno project.
This year really made me realize I have some pathological aversion to the mundane and boring and inoffensive. Why are you sharing your god damned lasagna that you baked when you could have made this:
Anyway, it was easy not to play any video games while I was on the road and once I came back my to-do pile was large enough to make sure all my days could be completely full. There’s just an ever-expanding list of things I want to have done and so little time… However willpower is definitely a barrier, so Youtube was watched a lot… But better to watch 3 hours of Youtube then play 12 hours of video games.
FINAL GRADE: A+
6- Mystery Project.
Good luck guessing what this was supposed to be. Really didn’t do it anyway. Results inconclusive.
FINAL GRADE: F+
WHAT ELSE DID I LEARN / ACCOMPLISH THIS YEAR?
Beyond my resolutions, here’s some random stuff I did/learned that I’m happy about:
1- Fired my accountants and am well underway to learning how to do corporate taxes. That’s 4k/year in my pocket. This has been a huge source of stress/ annoyance in my life so far and it’ll be a 2023 resolution to have this behind me.
2- Learned how to make and use spreadsheets. Yeah never did that before.
3- Started work on a new pixel video game and put 100 hours into it already:
4- Biked a virtual Everest on my birthday. ( 216km / 8872m elevation )
5- Casually Biked the Cabot Trail Loop at a pretty good clip:
6- Biked over 23 500km this year, when my target was “just” 20 000km. Biggest bike year ever and 6500km more then last year. I spent 1/12th of the year on my bike. Crazy.
7- Mastered Car Camping. Feel I got much more overall resilience and flexibility from managing this and dealing with problems and planning on the fly day-to-day.
8- Backed up my precious old website: http://oldpoxbox.com/
9- Sent out 100+ postcards and hung out with a good dozen friends old and new, even some I hadn’t seen for 10+ years.
You know when you condense an entire year of stuff down to a page, it looks decent! This year has really taught me that I cannot stop creating things and writing about those things even if nobody cares. Also this is definitely not my way to avoid socializing. Nope.
Thanks for reading, see you at the 2023 resolutions post! How did your year go? Drop me an email or something.