Resolutions, Changes Coming, Friendship

Genius Loci readers:

A very happy New Year to you and yours!

I’m feeling optimistic and charged for what this year might bring. The New Year grants permission to hit reset. It is a natural transition point, an ideal time to reflect on who we were and who we might become. I know there’s pessimism surrounding New Year’s resolutions, but I’m a proponent of them. Sure, the new year is as a good time as any to make changes. But how can the collective energy around change and improvement possibly be a bad thing? The new year is a psychological break. Sure, most resolutions get abandoned within weeks, but the intention is important as it involves identifying that which needs to be changed. The collective momentum and energy at this time of year to renew, to reboot, to reset is palpable. Ride the wave.

In what’s below, you’ll find the theme of change oozing out of the holes of these very letters. First, you’ll find a personal update. It is followed by a note on some changes to this newsletter and a note on friendship in the digital age.

Personal Update

With the holidays and family in town, December was light on writing. I managed around 1,000 words on my book’s Introduction. Many of those words may end up in the boneyard (a section at the end my document where I bury all the darlings I kill), but that’s part of the writing and editing process. You write to figure out what you think, and then you refine your thoughts or remove what’s not relevant.

On my website, I published two On Mountains posts. One simply announced the arrival of a new mountain-related podcast hosted by Jason König, Jonathan Westaway, and Jonathan Pitches. The second post was prompted by the aforementioned podcast’s first guest, and relates to the idea of mountains a safe spaces or protectors.

I also posted my end-of-year review for 2025. It’s mostly behind-the-scenes thinking about my creative practice and platform. You might find it useful, or you might not. Either way, it’s there. One takeaway from my end-of-year review: I’m doubling down on my creative work and how I share it. This newsletter is part of that recalibration, and some changes are coming to it.

Newsletter Changes

This newsletter will undergo a slight shift. It will continue offering a round-up of what I’ve been up to and chronicling my creative progress and thinking, but in a mosaic-like way — so you’re not stunned by a 1k-2k word narrative in your inbox. The earliest iteration of this newsletter was a series of links from around the web related to travel, writing, and photography. It won’t return to that, exactly, but it will have a similar vibe — linking out and unpacking more as it relates to my own cultural consumption. Not documenting what I’ve been eating, but journaling what I’ve been metabolizing, creatively and culturally speaking. It’s not about performing expertise, making proclamations, or being polished.

The long-form essays and reflections won’t go away. They’ll just migrate from the body of the newsletter to my site’s Fieldnotes section, where I’ll link to them in these round-ups. I’m doing this to clearly delineate my writing and thinking, but also — honestly — to give space for the more important work (my proposal) instead of this self-imposed deadline and pressure to churn out something substantial every month. Sometimes the best way to write the thing that matters is to stop pretending everything else matters equally.

Friendship

An online friend and I started an accountability group for creative work. We designed it to bounce ideas, offer support, share encouragement, and give feedback when requested. It feels good to have this space for camaraderie and idea generation. But having it also forced me to come to terms with the fact that I don’t have many friends. Very few real, flesh-and-blood, spit-in-handshake friends, at least. Certainly few in my area I can talk to about creative work. Few writer friends. Few eager to form new friendships, to shoot the proverbial shit.

I suppose modern adulthood is like this. We’re too busy with our own lives to make space for genuine friendship. I have a handful of work “friends” (if you can call them that), and some real friends (one of whom graduated from the work-friend category to the friend-friend one). But none that are undergoing the same creative struggles I am. Friend’s don’t need to be facsimiles of ourselves, but the more aligned you are with a friend the better you two are able to relate to one another, to understand one another. The standard advice to make friends revolves around interests: if you’re into, say, crocheting, attend a crocheting meetup. But what if there’s no local meetup for “people trying to finish their non-fiction book proposals while holding down a day job and trying to build an online platform”?

Sometimes my wife asks me who I am texting with. And she seems perplexed when I tell her I am chatting with “So-and-so, an online friend.” And yet I feel saying the word “online” diminishes the friendship. Online friends are real friends. At least they can be. We have real conversations. We share pain and sorrows and small victories. We might not have suffered or endured physical rites of passage together like the kids in The Goonies. But if you form an online friendship, they are your people, even if geography separates you. This is one of the great gifts of the internet.

But if proximity doesn’t matter, why then has the communication with my highschool and college friends, who all now live far away, been reduced to sharing memes and videos on social media? That you have a shared past with someone is important in the definition of friendship, but that you have a shared present with someone is important in the formation and of new ones and in the maintenance of the ones you’ve already made.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

JB