I have a natural tendency to operate on the extremes. My year started off with a traumatically dislocated shoulder from a snowboarding incident, followed by a repeat dislocation just a month later – surgery took place a few weeks after that. That meant no skydiving the remainder of the year. A compounding consequence of this was that my brain needed something to fixate on. That something happened to be my lifelong love of technology and innovation.

Earlier this year, I told the story of AI progression through the lens of my own experience as a teenager growing up in rural Missouri, pondering a future of possibilities while skating through my town’s back roads with my equally nerdy and optimistic friend. As teenagers, we were all gas, no brakes. Our vision for the future was uninhibited by life experiences.

Today, sitting on the other side of this year, I find myself reflecting on themes that I think we can all benefit from learning more about. By living life so rambunctiously, I learn interesting lessons. It’s not a path for everyone, but I believe by operating without abandon, I find the boundaries of reality in a way that not everyone is able to experience. Here, I will share these lessons and themes in hopes of being more well understood by my peers and finding connectedness.

Risk

One of the more unfortunate realities of 2024 has been a peaking of techno-pessimism. As though technology has not afforded us every comfort we enjoy today, many believe that we should explore no further—we are in, or have just passed, the Goldilocks zone for technological harmony. Visionary sci-fi writer Neal Sepehneson warned that, “believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects.”

In fairness toward this perspective, innovation has, to a large degree, been relegated to technologies of simulation in recent years. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard called this category of technology “simulacra,” illusions that overshadow reality until we lose sight of what’s actually real. As Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber explain in BOOM: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, “Instead of building the future, we are becoming better at developing increasingly realistic simulations of it.”

Simultaneously, we have become a society obsessed with risk, and as consequence, forfeited progress. Futurists used to imagine a future with infinite renewable energy, the onboarding of automated humanoid robots, and extending our lifespans by centuries. Today, by contrast, we allocate more resources than ever toward questions of catastrophic societal collapse, ever-expanding legal definitions and other safetyisms.

This isn’t just a cultural phenomenon, but a spiritual one. John Burn-Murdoch covers in a Financial Times piece titled, “Is the West Talking Itself into Decline?,” analysis of the Google Books Ngram corpus which found that terms related to progress and the future declined 25% in the last 50 years. At best, we have become cautious and complacent; at worst, nihilistic.

I believe (and hope) that 2024 will mark the peak of technological doomerism and that 2025 will usher in a new era of optimistic risk-taking. We should all desire to break through this persistent cultural exhaustion that characterizes our current era. At an individual level, my hope is that more people find themselves asking what could be as opposed to simply conserving what is. I believe we are seeing some positive signs of this, but it will require our resilience.

Resilience

Even while recognizing the purpose hardship served our past generations in their pursuit to provide us a future, we seek to avoid such a fate ourselves. Rather than embracing uncertainty, we have become masters at quantifying it in an effort to eliminate risk entirely. In doing so, we prevent exposing ourselves to the rewards of risk, which include the lessons of failure. Napoleon is credited with saying, “The torment of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be avoided. It is sometimes better to abandon one’s self to destiny.”

But true innovation won’t come automatically—we aren’t guaranteed a binary future of either progress or implosion. Stagnation is far more likely. Like self-fulfilling prophecies, we have the power to affect change through our predictions and attitudes. And if we seek to build a better world, we’ll have to be consistent, steadfast, passionate and motivated. As Gary Shapiro writes in Pivot or Die, “The future isn’t just about what we can imagine, or what it takes to bring those ideas to life. It’s about how we can adapt and adjust along the way.”

Again, intuitively we know this: to achieve great things, one must go through immense transformation—pain, even. I believe this to be a generation-defining moment of cognitive dissonance. We must take our medicine each day and learn to love it if we have any hope of building a world we can be proud of. We should welcome the difficulties that build resiliency just as much as we do the benefits that follow.

One thing extreme sports has taught me is that regularly embracing discomfort can build psychological resilience. By facing controlled stress, I’ve learned coping strategies that make normal life hassles shrink in comparison. An article in Brain Communications and published here on ResearchGate talks about the neuroplasticity of your anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC), “critical for tenacity (persistence in the face of challenge).” By repeatedly exposing yourself to risk, you are literally rewiring your brain to accept and deal with adversity.

In my creative field of advertising, outcomes are typically less serious. All the same, we often choose to ignore a truth we know in our gut: data isn’t the way to people’s hearts. Researchers Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman, in their book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, argue that when we reduce success to rigid targets and mechanical metrics, we suffocate creativity and kill innovation before it has a chance to breathe.

Spiritedness

I’ve found these truths to be tough to swallow at times, but the more I lean into these ideas—risk and resilience—the more rewards I seem to reap personally and professionally. I write this not solely as social or cultural commentary, or about individual growth, but about their interconnectedness. This is about not going gentle into that good night. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” wrote Dylan Thomas.

The Ancient Greeks had a word for this drive toward ambition and righteous indignation: thymos, often translated as spiritedness. The Greeks saw thymos not just as a human trait, but a divine gift, a spark of the gods within mortals that elevated them beyond mere survival.

2025 is a fight for the soul. This is the year you seek dignity for yourself and your work.