2025 Year in Review

For many years, every December, during the lost week between Christmas and New Years, I would organize a holiday ritual of my own creation called the scapegoat festival. The ingredients were a.) regrets and b.) a piñata. Sometimes at a beach, sometimes in my backyard, once at a NYC skate park, me and friends would write out our regrets, stuff them into the piñata, and - with appropriate gravitas and/or The Prodigy’s Firestarter playing - set it on fire.

The paper mache donkey (llama?) would, just as the sacrificial lambs once did for ancient tribes, take our regrets on itself and into the fiery hereafter, letting us go into the New Year unburdened.

I started the tradition in 2016 because I had regrets to get rid of, and was ambitious in wanting to create a new religious festival. It’s been a great liminal event, creating a threshold to step through into something new.

But it didn’t feel right this year - I didn’t have the regrets to bring.

Looking back on 2025, I’m mostly feeling incredibly grateful. For all the new friendships made and old friendships deepened, for the continued good fortune to do work I find meaningful, for the opportunities to explore new intellectual and creative outlets, for family, for a supportive community, for the continued proximity and availability of affordable saunas - the list could go on for much longer.

Does this mean I have no regrets? Of course not - “regrets are the cost of the business”, as one of my favorite fictional characters says1; but the blunders and poor choices I made all feel like screwups that Ben makes, as opposed to actions I took in the service of trying to be someone else. And so the mistakes don’t ping as regrets and more feel like the cost of doing the business of being me.

Perhaps I am tempting fate - my bad fate - but one can be forgiven for being optimistic on New Years that their arc bends towards being more themselves and that is in service of connection and good work. I hope that for all of us.

And so, while there’s something lovely about keeping traditions going, sometimes you’ve got to know when to gratefully bid adieu, light it on fire, and trust that something new is waiting in the lighter fluid soaked, still slightly colorful ashes.

I’ll get started on that in the new year.

xoxo,

Ben