The Year Between: 2024 in Review
We’re barely two weeks into the new year, and I’m already playing catch-up. I like to get this review out soon after the calendar turns, but here I am — late. Let’s consider it a one-time slip, not the birth of a bad habit. After all, better late than never — especially when it gives me another opportunity to poke fun at New Year’s resolutions.
Speaking of which, “Quit Day” — that infamous moment when most resolutions meet their untimely end — has already come and gone.
As I’ve said in previous reviews, I’m not one for setting grand resolutions when the ball drops. Instead, I prefer to look back, combing through the past year’s highlights (and its occasional lows) to create a kind of mental scrapbook. It’s my way of marking time and reflecting on the experiences that shaped the last twelve months — a year spent largely in between: between homes, between certainties, between different ways of experiencing time itself.
Houseless
The past two years have been an extended meditation on displacement. Few things challenge our sense of stability quite like being unmoored, whether by choice or necessity. In 2023, we wandered across Europe with nothing but suitcases and a sense of adventure. In 2024, we were nomads again. With our house transformed into a construction site, we joined the ranks of millennials boomeranging back to the nest, moving in with my in-laws.
Living with family meant adapting to the rhythms of another household — a humbling adjustment for someone accustomed to their own space. My in-laws welcomed us without hesitation, making room in their lives as much as their home. I’ll always be grateful for their patience, especially as we turned their spaces into a preschool-meets-storage-unit.
What I didn’t expect to learn from these two years of rootlessness was how profoundly displacement alters our relationship with time. In Europe, each day expanded into its own small infinity, filled with the constant voltage of new sites, sounds, and experiences. In 2024, time moved differently but no less strangely. Without the familiar architecture of our own space, hours seemed to thicken, each day weighted with the awareness of our transcience.
But that slowness, in its own way, is a gift. When the renovations are finally complete and we return to the house we’ve missed, I’ll walk through its doors with a renewed understanding: home isn’t just where we live — it’s where we’re most alive.
Reading
The library of a year tells its own story. Last year, I read 35 books (the full list is below). Fiction barely made an appearance — just two titles — but I’m more than satisfied with the range of topics I explored: philosophy, science, religion, history, psychology, and finance. It was a year of diving into ideas that challenged me, broadened my perspective, and occasionally unsettled me in the best way.
Lately, I’ve come to think of reading as a kind of mental chewing — a process that forces you to break down ideas, taste their complexities, and decide what’s worth swallowing. In a world of quick takes, soundbites, and fleeting opinions, the act of sustained reading becomes almost countercultural. It demands something radical: slowness, attention, the willingness to sit with difficulty.
Books connect us to thoughts we’d never have on our own. They inform, inspire, provoke, and sometimes even disorient — but they always leave us changed. Few pursuits are as rewarding or as enduringly meaningful.
Three of my favorites were:
The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
The Dao of Capital by Mark Spitznagel
JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglass
Each of these books left a lasting impression, whether by deepening my understanding of faith, reframing how I think about economics, or challenging me to look at history through a sharper lens.
Writing
I’m not sure when it happens — when something shifts from being a deliberate effort to an ingrained habit — but it’s clear that writing has crossed that threshold for me. It’s no longer just something I do; it’s a part of who I am.
Published 36 posts (25 personal, 11 business)
Most read: Setting Things Right: Why I Endorse Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for President
Favorite to Write: A Week of Silence at the Abbey of Gethsemani
Yet statistics paint only the surface of things. What matters more is how writing has evolved into my primary instrument for understanding — a way of thinking made visible on the page. Some pieces arrived like gifts, fully formed and asking only to be transcribed. Others required a longer courtship, weeks of turning ideas over before their shape emerged.
The RFK endorsement piece taught me something about courage in writing — about standing firmly in the crosswinds of public discourse while remaining true to one’s convictions. It was an exercise in vulnerability, in finding the words to articulate a position I knew would challenge many readers, including some in my own circles.
Writing about Gethsemani presented a different kind of challenge: how to translate silence into words, how to share something as intimate as spiritual seeking without diminishing its mystery. It required finding language for experiences that exist at the edges of language itself.
Perhaps the most valuable lesson this year has taught me is that the most meaningful writing often begins not with answers, but with questions. It emerges from those liminal spaces where certainty gives way to curiosity, where “I know” yields to “I wonder.” The real work of writing, I’ve come to understand, lies not in proclamation but in exploration — in inviting readers to join me in the delicate work of making sense of our shared world.
Music
Apple Music said I spent 38,278 minutes immersed in music this year. These were the albums I found myself returning to again and again:
Beethoven Blues — Jon Batiste
Philip Glass Solo — Philip Glass
Morricone 60 — Ennio Morricone
Letter — Sofiane Pamart
Johann Sebastian Bach — Vikingur Ólafsson
Yet the real highlight of my musical year wasn’t in the listening — it was in the creating. I’ve been curating what I call my Final Playlist, an idea I borrowed from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto.
What would I want to hear one last time? What songs contain the essence of what I’ve lived and loved? The playlist evolves as I do. Tracks are added, shuffled, and occasionally removed as my tastes and experiences deepen.
In a world where music often becomes a passive experience — streamed in the background or served up by algorithms — this project has been something different. It’s deliberate, reflective, even intimate. Curating the Final Playlist requires me to pause and ask myself questions I don’t often stop to consider: Why does this piece resonate? What part of my life does it reflect? It’s less about arriving at a perfect list and more about the act of shaping it.
Cool Stuff I Discovered
ZWI Book: A fascinating project by Larry Sanger that compiles all of Project Gutenberg’s books onto a single flash drive, paired with a bespoke reader. Over 60,000 books, all in a device the size of my thumb.
Stellarium App: A virtual planetarium that has become an essential companion for my telescope. Stellarium helps me locate constellations, planets, and deep-sky objects.
Both tools remind me that technology, at its best, doesn’t just make things easier — it expands our capacity for wonder. Whether it’s centuries of literature condensed into digital form or the ancient movements of celestial bodies mapped onto a modern interface, these discoveries help us see the old in new ways.
Something I’ve Been Thinking About
Risk lies at the heart of my work as a financial advisor and wealth manager, but lately, I’ve been contemplating its broader dimensions. Here’s an excerpt from my recent letter to Vermillion Private Wealth clients that captures these thoughts:
Risk has been on my mind lately — not just in my role as a money manager, but as a force that shapes every aspect of life. It’s not simply about numbers or models; risk is the tension between what we think we know and what remains unknowable. It’s the gap between our desire for certainty and the world’s ability to surprise us. In many ways, risk defines not just our decisions, but the futures those decisions create.
Recently, though, risk has felt heavier — more immediate. Maybe it’s a product of age, as the invincibility of youth gives way to an appreciation for life’s fragility. Or maybe it’s the accumulation of experience — watching the improbable unfold time and again. It could also be the data I’ve been analyzing: recession indicators stacking up one after another. Whatever the reason, I find myself reflecting more often on how quickly assumptions unravel when reality takes an unexpected turn.
The past and future are divided by uncertainty, with probability as our bridge. But even the best data only captures fragments of a vast, unknowable reality. History, while instructive, offers just glimpses — valuable but incomplete. As the mathematician Gottfried von Leibniz once observed, “Nature has established patterns originating in the return of events, but only for the most part.” That qualifier — “for the most part” — is where risk lives.
Time’s Next Chapter
This year taught me something about displacement and discovery, about finding rhythm in rootlessness. Soon, we’ll return to our renovated home, carrying with us lessons learned from temporary spaces. But perhaps the most valuable insight from 2024 is this: whether wandering Europe or living in borrowed rooms, whether reading in silence or writing into uncertainty, whether crafting final playlists or contemplating risk — life’s richest moments often emerge not from our plans but from our willingness to remain open to what each day might reveal.
God willing, I’ll be granted more time to follow fresh curiosities, to strengthen old friendships while remaining open to new ones, and to share what I learn along the way. After all, isn’t that the real gift of time — not its measurement, but its possibility?
