Ann Friedman - Our collective 2024

Today's edition is culled from your answers to my annual year-end survey. Thanks to everyone who shared snippets of their 2024. There will be more collective wisdom and reflection in next week's newsletter.

Have a great transition to 2025, if celebrating the flip of the Gregorian calendar is your thing. (It's my thing. I'm wearing velvet!) See you next year.

How capitalism ruins everything good. The need to move away from a commodity market for green coffee pricing. How the quality of Playbills has seriously tanked. Our still unfinished double bathroom renovation. How high the price of forever stamps has gotten. How chatGPT is killing the planet. How our credit union still doesn't issue tap cards. This one restaurant in London which serves expensive soup and pretends to be Communist. How much work sucks.

How disappointed we are in the USA. The genocide in Gaza that we should all be doing everything in our power to resist. How the government is purposely clunky to create bullshit jobs! How every systemic problem (from recycling to COVID) is left up to "individual actions" and we are tired of it.

Borrowed nostalgia. Paul Mescal's thighs. Adam Brody's renaissance. How important Wicked is for millennials. The Substance. Mormoms on reality tv. The Book Club Review Podcast. The enneagram. How we would eat every creation in every episode of the Great British Baking Show. Moby Dick (until we abandoned ship halfway through). Historic arctic explorations gone wrong. How the Broadstreet Pump was a marvel of epidemiology. How Ursula Le Guin is the most relevant author for this moment. The wonders of MS365. The back half of "Cowboy Carter.” Taylor Swift probably being a little gay. The miracle of "is it cake" videos. How everything is a social construct—nothing is REAL!

That one ex who keeps popping back up. How much better our lives would be if we assumed the best about the annoying lady from admin. All the silly emotionally unavailable people we date. How much we love being single right now. Vasectomies. How dang cute he is (our cat).

How we left instagram for a month and it was amazing. How dangerous balconies are. Vitamin D deficiency. How peanut butter isn't really a good source of protein. How bad people are at parking. How we only have ourselves to blame for the shortcomings of pigeons. How getting rid of old junk feels good.

Doilies. Hallucinogens. Moving outside of the big city. Our hives. Our fucking endo. Our financial problems. How our bangs dried weird this morning. Everything our spouse is doing wrong. How long it is safe for food to sit out before it needs to go into the fridge. How we do not like remoulade. How exhausted we are.

You shouldn't put metal in the Nutribullet. When you change your smoke detector batteries: 1. clean it with canned air and 2. press the test button after putting in the new batteries. TRUST. You always need to put a nonporous saucer under houseplants. You should still mask on the subway. You shouldn't stop taking your meds cold turkey. You should take much more water and snacks than you think you'll need for a two-hour hike. Triple check that you are loosening the bolt for your oil and not your transmission fluid. If you forget to lock your car one night, someone may have sex in it. 

Sometimes travel doesn't fix things. Sometimes you really do fix everything just by moving to Europe. Pack extra underwear. Never trust an airline. Never talk to the police. Tiny credit charges you don't recognize are FRAUD!! No one will advocate for you if you can't advocate for yourself. It takes a long time to recover from some religious traditions. Some privacy can feel really luxurious and important. No amount of false optimism can lead one to finish an entire bag of baby spinach before it goes bad. It's better to throw away food that's gone bad rather than try to eat it to prevent food waste. Always listen to yourself, or your body will start violently suggesting you should. Really, hip mobility does matter.

People are almost always thinking about themselves and not you. Sometimes you have to cut a drug addict out of your life. Sparing someone’s feelings should outweigh the “virtue” of truth telling. You should apologize sooner rather than later. Catch up with that person you love, because there is no knowing if you'll be able to do it again. Regrets after a parent dies are inevitable, no matter how many hours you sit by their hospital bed. Don't wait a day. Gates do close. The good guys don’t always win. Men who say they are going to marry you are actually going to ghost you in four days. Plans are irrelevant.

You don't have to do all the homework. Hard work doesn’t always pay off. Taking time off sucks and is lonely and is sometimes the only way to keep being alive. A neighbor can bake the second half of a pumpkin pie when your stove breaks. Only those who have experienced it actually get it. Happiness is not a destination.

Ed. Note: This was actually a trick question. The hard way is the only way to learn anything.

You get to decide what qualifies as an achievement.

Adopted. Birthed. Planned a funeral. Went viral. Put a bumper sticker on our car. Put our bicycle on the bus rack. Did toe exercises. Went to pilates as a plus-size woman. Bought a home. Became homeless. Knitted a brioche stitch. Read a romantasy novel. Got a “shullet.” Dyed our eyebrows. Harvested green beans. Used the self-clean feature on our oven. Used a cane. Made a cyanotype. Conversed in Dutch. Habla’d en Español. Cold-plunged. Skydived (skydove?). Went to a (literally underground) poetry slam. Forgave our sister. Ran in the dessert [sic] under the milky way at 3 am. Depilated our butthole (it really does make your farts louder). Kissed a divorce person. Got divorced. Got married. 365 partygirled. Shook our hips—for real! Felt attracted to Kyle MacLachlan. Tried non-monogamy. Went off the deep end. Snorkeled with whale sharks. Took a sick day when we weren’t sick. Dug a hole for our own shit. Quit. Slept all night.