Tedium - Divisible By 5 🫠

Today in Tedium: If you let me get my Zager and Evans on for a moment: In the year 2025, it feels stressful and annoying to just get by. (And that’s not accounting for the existential dread that a significant part of the population is feeling about the political climate, which is the only thing we’re going to mention about it in this piece.) I don’t necessarily think I’m going to solve it with this post, but it is worth dwelling on. For the past 10 years I’ve done these lookahead posts, and often, they’re pretty silly. (We talk about wall calendars every year like Apple talks about California locations in different versions of MacOS.) But it’s a new year, and there has to be something to look forward to, right? Even in a year when Microsoft plans to take Windows 10 from millions of people with working computers, there has to be something optimistic about this climate that we can take away from this new year. Look ahead, we shall. Today’s Tedium tries making lemonade out of the lemons of 2025. — Ernie @ Tedium

So, anyway, about those 2025 wall calendars … not looking so hot

Doing my traditional lookup/review of the new 2025 wall calendars did not do much to help me mitigate my existential feelings of dread.

In case you’re wondering how the wall calendar game is going, I did a search on Etsy for “AI calendar” and I was presented with a number of borderline-NSFW items that are so gross that I will not be sharing AI calendars from Etsy this year. They make Chicken Daddies look downright modest in comparison.

This is what we spend our energy creating.

Amazon did have slightly better probably AI-generated wall calendars, that said. The company PIXILUV had a number of unusual options of the kind I expected to find at Etsy. The one that stood out to me was Gangster Cats At Bars, which I guess could be seen as an upgrade to the cat cafe of yore.

Admit it, you want to collect teapots now.

On the real-picture front, I have to call out this wall calendar based around collectible teapots. The concept raises the obvious question: Why buy the calendar? Why not just collect the teapots? Is this the calendar people buy when they are afraid they will destroy their teapots?

Admit it, you want to collect abandoned mattresses now.

I don’t necessarily know what the opposite of a calendar of collectible teapots is, but I think a calendar of abandoned mattresses is probably as close as you might get. This is absolutely my wavelength and I believe this may be the perfect 2025 calendar to share with friends and loved ones.

The lyrics to “Danger Zone” never felt quite so apt.

I don’t think anyone was asking for a sequel to last year’s Kim Jong-Un novelty calendar, but we got one, complete with a seemingly random Top Gun theme. The same company makes a Trumpinator II calendar, in case you want a variation on a theme. Might I suggest just using your phone instead?

Look down at your desk instead of up at your wall.

Maybe the best way to experience 2025 is not through wall calendars, but through notepad calendars. This is a legit thing that Amazon seems to have a number of—notepads that as the year goes on, expose an interesting visual design made out of paper. (This one was my favorite, but there are others.) If you ask me, it sure beats whatever the hell is happening on Etsy. (Seriously, someone check on our hand-crafted creators.)

These calendars are so bad that I feel like I might be motivated to make a calendar of my own sometime in the next decade. I know I’ve said this before, but someone email me in September so I can consider maybe doing something about it.

The mountain is right behind you, ready to move, but you’re too scattered to see it. (twentyonekoalas/Unsplash)

The state of our Tedium in 2025 is going to be defined by focus, or lack thereof

It’s been five years since COVID-19 broke everything, and one of the things it broke is people’s brains. Not necessarily through the disease or anything, but because of the melding of work and home that loosely helped us keep it all together.

That’s right, we are as a society, struggling to focus. Maybe we always had it, but now we just notice it more because the structural norms that helped us focus are a lot harder to grab. Recently, a study came out that found, in Finland alone, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnoses doubled in the two primary years of the pandemic, with most age and gender groups seeing a sharp increase.

“Changes in social, occupational, and learning environments, such as loss of routines, lack of face-to-face contacts outside of home, increased demand for online activity, excessive screen time and digital media use, and reduced physical exercise, have appeared to contribute to the increase in ADHD symptoms in other populations,” the report, conducted by officials at the University of Helsinki and the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare stated.

The phrase “brain fog” comes to mind, but I think it’s more than that. I think it’s also a reflection that a change in settings and norms created serious executive function challenges for people which were easier to mitigate when our routines were somewhat more normalized. The result is a sudden need for executive function coaching where there wasn’t one before and a tendency for so many things to get scatterbrained.

I feel it, and I’m sure a lot of you feel it, too. It has almost become a joke at this point for someone to say they struggle with ADHD since COVID-19 hit. Creators focused on ADHD have flourished; there is talk of the “ADHD tax,” to describe the challenges some people face in getting things done, to their financial peril. And yet, despite this sharp rise in ADHD diagnoses, there is a shortage of medication designed to help them with their executive function.

I don’t think ADHD is the whole enchilada here, to be clear, but I do think it points at something more generally. We struggle to put the pieces together in ways where it once was easy, for reasons related to technology and convenience. There were many things, good and bad, about what happened five years ago, but I think one of the biggest is that it threw a lot of us head-first into highly addictive machines that work against our best interests.

I won’t lie; I was feeling it in the midst of this redesign I put way too much energy into. Some people can switch gears like flipping a light switch; I can’t. Distraction is just a big challenge right now.

And I think that, for a lot of people, this high level of distraction is harming their ability to move mountains or collectively organize. It is easy to get caught in a do-nothing loop, even when you want more than anything else to do something, anything.

I don’t think the solution to this has to be, “Well, we need to put everyone back in an office again.” The gains in remote work are real and tangible and we should not lose them. However, I think that we need to get back to the place where social interaction is a driving factor behind the things that we do.

I get knee-deep in work sometimes, and I think that it can be to my peril. But when my mind is dedicated to something very important, I very much put the work in. I have more than 1,000 posts and a crazy visual rethink to show it.

But I know that, right now, it’s essential to get out of neutral if we’re going to move forward. We can move mountains if we put our minds to it, but when it feels like the spark plug of our brains isn’t exactly sparking the spark, there’s nothing wrong with asking a friend or two to help give you a push.

You will be better for it. And your friends will appreciate you for asking, if you are willing to offer the same to them.