2 house keeping notes: if you need a refresher on yearly themes, go here. If you’d rather listen to this, check out episode 248 of How I Built It.

In college, I had a friend named Marc. Whenever I asked Marc how he was doing, he’d say, “I’ve never had a bad day in my life.” He said even if there were bad moments in the day, he wouldn’t let it ruin the entire day.

I know this was back in the before time¹, and a lot has changed. But that point of view has stuck with me ever since: don’t let one point in a 24 hour period ruin all 24 hours. I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how terrible 2021 was for them. I generally don’t look at full years as terrible, even if there were several terrible moments.

Looking back at my journal, it’s easy to think my whole year was terrible. At the end of each day, I’d write how I was feeling, and the word “stressed” came up more than any other². And several times, positive feelings were preceded by the word, “actually.” As if I were surprised to be happy for a moment.

That isn’t true. But it was easier for me to capture the negative feel s for some reason.

As I considered my yearly theme for 2022, I did a bit of an exercise. I wrote down what I felt worst about in 2021. Here’s the list:

Too much stress, work, phone time, spending, sadness, wasted time.

Seems like a year of less would do me good. But not really less of everything. I need to do less of some something specific — over commitment. So I’ve come up with The Year of Retreat.

As is customary with these posts, before getting to that let’s see how I did with my 2021 theme: The Year of Opportunity.