2024: The Year of Aspirational Stupidity

Coffee is a sign of our collective aspiration. Good coffee is a sign of taste.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

In 2024 people finally were fed up and voted out everybody for other everybodys who, still, promised to make your life worse by making theirs better, because though we’ve lost hope we are still aspirational. 

Aspiration is why we still get out of bed in the morning and stumble to the kitchen and make coffee and then face the day.

Aspiration is what makes a somewhat decent person vote for someone who says horrible things but feels your pain.

Aspiration is a year that laid bare the idea that power corrupts and it doesn’t need to be absolute but power absolutely corrupts stupidly. Or lazily. Though any power that appears lazy comes with a lot of enablers. The cult of the stupid mixed with aspiration is the most dangerous reality we have right now. 

We aspired despite the Ukraine and Gaza/Lebanon and Sudan and Haiti and everywhere else blood spills because the stupid believe what they want to believe even if that means coloring the sky red with the blood of those whose reality makes yours inconvenient. 

The world’s wealthiest man has proven that he is simply needy and spends time either alone (he is the father of 11!) or in the company of the world’s most successful grifter and he seems like a deeply pathetic soul who can’t believe that people don’t respect him even though he’s the world’s wealthiest man. So he has decided to try and buy the truth.

And truth abhors our aspiration (no matter how wealthy you may be). And then everything becomes television. We watch events unfold even as we take part in them. Korea. France. The US. Germany. India. China. Syria. Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.

We are still in the twilight of the pandemic that shut the world down for 2 years and accelerated the stupid and our need for aspirational models. Our children suffered. Adults suffered. Only the world itself did not suffer though that was temporary and we are stupid enough to ensure that we will continue to accelerate the world’s suffering. And I’m not even talking about the environment. Not specifically. Because everything is about the environment in the end.

When the truth abhors our aspiration, what does the media do? The legacy, big money media? I cancelled a few subscriptions this year, let’s put it that way. (I also added new ones, but none of them could be considered “legacy” or “big money” and that is also a problem, if not the major one).

I mean, did the Olympics really happen? Something about actual athletes having to swim in a dirty river full of shitty bacteria felt very on point. And then a Tesla filled with explosives blew up in front of a Trump property in Las Vegas (yes, it happened in 2025 but most people had yet to return to work so….2024). 

In 2024 I did the following:

  1. Not much. At least this is what the year feels like and though I know this is not true I still think this will be an enduring memory, most probably as a form of self-preservation.
  2. Continued my brand/content strategic consultancy which was slow for a time until it wasn’t.
  3. I started my search for an agent in earnest, which is taking longer than I’d like. (I want to resolve this one in the first few months of 2025.)
  4. I published a novel in October. Not much happened. Which is what happens to most novels. (But the cover is great and the reviews have been mostly positive so what do I know?)
  5. I completed season 2 of my podcast, The Full Bleed, about the future of magazines and it helped me rekindle my complete love and devotion for not just magazines but for the people who make them, especially these days.
  6. I started writing another book. It is set on a cruise ship of sorts. I have never been on a cruise ship.
  7. My mother visited from India and stayed in Montreal (where, of course, she used to live) for over a month and at our house for 3 weeks and it went better than I thought it would.
  8. I grew tired of the digital world. Not because it doesn’t produce great products or present fabulous opportunity but because of the quick and built-in obsolescence of its potential goodness.
  9. I used the word “enshittification” with increasing frequency, mostly because of #8. It was the best addition to my vocabulary. The year in equation form might be thus: Enshittification = (Stupid + Aspiration)/Tech x People
  10. I have stopped using social media as a home of any kind or as a source of any kind of information but found in Bluesky a kind of pre-enshittified reality that if I’m being honest can’t last. 

I have been saying “Everything is stupid” with alarming regularity online and I believe it. Because that is what we are and describes what we’ve created. Yes, the world is complex and we have created things of remarkable audacity. Sure. But…. how much smarter are we really?  

And yet I still get out of bed and stumble to the kitchen and make coffee and get on with the day. Because there are still some things that are beautiful, we do and can create amazing things, and love can defeat the stench of the stupid and the ugly, and, well, we are, in the end, an aspirational sort. And yet despite all our aspiration, whether we are poor or wealthy, and whatever truth we want to believe, even the truths that are obviously not true,  we all realize eventually that the end is the same for everyone, which might be shitty but at least it’s a constant, and in that sense is eternal.

 

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