“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard
2024 has had its share of really high highs, and really low lows, and I think the articles I’ve written this year reflect that.
There were many articles in which I intended to help myself through some really dark times, or to make sense of them afterwards. But there were also many articles in which I celebrated the beautiful moments that I did experience this year.
As we close out 2024, I’m revisiting a few of my favorite articles of this year, offering a glimpse into the thought processes, experiences, and inspirations that went into making them.
The Value of Mundanity
This is probably my most favorite article of this year, because it’s about my baby nephew, Jack Jack.
I wrote this at a very difficult time. There was a long mess of me quitting graduate school, because my supervisor, whom I lodged a report against for unethical behavior, refused to let me go. An investigation happened, and it even involved the President of the university. I was also unemployed for 5 months, which seemed endless at the time.
Amid all of the uncertainty and stress that was going on, I took inspiration from how Jack Jack was living his life — particularly in how he stuck to his favorite things. As I said in the article, in a life that can be frighteningly unpredictable, it’s comforting for to know that some things never change.
Jack Jack just turned two years old this month, with more hair, but with the same outlook towards life — when he finds something he loves and finds comfort in, he sticks with it.
Alternate Realities
A few years ago, I came across an advice column on The Guardian, about someone who was feeling left behind in their life. In it was a very interesting thought experiment — how would you act if you knew you were eventually going to get everything you wanted?
Of course, there are no such guarantees in life, but it made me really think about just how much of our life is wasted away by tethering our happiness to external outcomes.
I wanted to write about this thought, but I couldn’t find an honest place for it. So, it was shelved for years until I found myself in a Jackass rabbit hole during Ramadan. (Yes, I’m aware of how dumb it was of me to spend the holy month getting into Jackass.)
I remember hearing King Harvest’s version of Dancing in the Moonlight in a Bad Grandpa scene. And as I learned the tragic story behind the song, I was reminded of the column I had read years earlier — and the dots connected themselves after that.
I’m glad this little train of thought finally found its home. But more than anything, it stands as a concrete reminder, especially for myself, that we can decide to feel happy and whole in this moment, if we wanted to.
Arbitrary Deadlines
Every single one of us are going to be dead, despite our best efforts to stave this thought off from our heads. But the thought of death doesn’t have to be morbid per se — it can drive us to put things into perspective, and it can give us that sense of urgency to actually go after our most important goals.
In this article, I share another thought experiment — what would you do if you knew you wouldn’t live until 40 — or even next week, or tomorrow?
This thought experiment really did help me especially appreciate the value of companionship, and inspired me to seek out new experiences in my life.
As you already know, I’m the kind of person who likes to stick to routines — I like going to the same places every week, I like going to work and coming home at the same time every day, and I like spending a lot of time in my own room at home.
Routines are great — but I do admit it does have its downsides. For example, when something disrupts my usual routine — like when my friends ask me out, or when I travel to new places, it can feel overstimulating or even overwhelming at times.
But as I share in the article, practicing this thought experiment pushed me to spend more time with the people I love, even if it felt uncomfortable initially — because if I knew I had so little time to live, I surely wouldn’t remember living day to day in my own bubble.
Art and Propaganda
I’ve gotten incredibly obsessed with Dune lately, and this article was just an excuse for me to nerd out about it.
There are many layers in which you could watch the Dune films or read the original novel by Frank Herbert — you can see it as a study in power and politics, or a commentary on colonialism or environmentalism. I personally saw it mostly as a critique on organized religion — particularly how the idea of messianic figures, as well as dividing the world into good and evil, can be leveraged to manipulate the masses.
My idea for this article largely came about after I learned that J.R.R Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings, famously hated Dune. We don’t truly know why, because Tolkien did in fact hate many things in his lifetime. But as scholars have suggested, it likely had to do with his deeply Catholic worldview, and how it contrasted with Frank Herbert’s more skeptical take on religion, and also the moral ambiguity of the characters in Dune.
I’ve read about instances where Lord of the Rings was adopted as rhetorical symbols, especially in far-right movements, in that they were portrayed as being a just fight against evil. But as I was writing this article, I felt that it might be more compelling to show how Hitler used classical music to fuel his campaigns instead.
As I wrote in the article, we will likely never see Dune be misused in the same way, because it does what good art should do — it depicts the world as it is in all its shades of grey, and not in the simplistic black-and-white terms we might rather prefer.
Don’t Let Life Pass You By
This was by far the hardest article for me to write this year. I had worked on it for a few weeks, a little piece at a time, but time and again, I couldn’t get myself to finish it.
Even looking back at the complete article now, I still feel uncomfortable, remembering the misery that I had pulled myself out of. But it was a necessary process of making sense of what I had went through, and I hope that you could benefit from it, too, even if in the smallest way.
Maybe you’re in a similar place in your life that’s making you so unhappy. I hope this article gives you a little courage along the way, to decide and to do what you know is best for yourself. It’s terrifying, but there’s a lot of good waiting for you on the other side of what you’re afraid of — this, I promise.
Don’t let your life wait any longer.
Izzat Zailan 