Another year is in the books. It only feels like yesterday I was writing the same words about 2024. Time is marching on, tomorrow I’ll be able to say that next year (2027) I’ll be 40.
So often I wonder when it was that I became a responsible adult. Back in the summer I spoke on a panel for a You Are The Media event, which was broken to into two groups, the young and the old. I was part of the latter.
Rather than be defeated by these overwhelming realisations, it feels like a fire’s been lit under me in the past few years, and it’s not just a burning sensation in my aging knees.
When I compare 2023-2025 to 2020-2022, I’m so much more satisfied with my creative focus. The pandemic was a strange time, that goes without saying, and I should give that period credit for allowing me to ‘sandbox’ ideas, but I definitely wasted a fair amount of the seemingly unlimited time on projects that soon fell short.
Being a “responsible adult” stifles my creativity and the 20s as a whole are doing their best to repress us all with waves of fascism chic. At the same time, I feel more determined to fight back, to protect creativity by committing to it. Then there’s the slightly surreal cases where being that responsible adult affords me new opportunities to engage with creative expression.
A decade of content being king has brought us to a point of crystallising the difference between content and art, and the importance of the latter in the balance. The algorithm influence on this dichotomy has forced us to create (aided) in ways that satisfy recipients no longer thinking for themselves. Content has drifted far from being art and firmly into code.
The need to reset the dial has informed a lot of my decision making in 2025 and even more so as I make plans for a new year.
Thank you for continuing to take an interest in my creative endeavours and extra-curricular activities. All being well, there’ll be more to follow in 2026 and I look forward to being inspired by the projects that many of you pour your heart into. Creativity should be symbiotic and it can be without the need for middle men or machines.
All the best for everything that lay ahead of us next year. 🤘
Liam Toms 