Closing the Curtain on 2024

A year of The Noösphere in review, some personal updates, and what's ahead

Well, it looks like we’ve almost made it.

And as we’re staring down the season finale of yet another chaos and horror-filled year, I can’t help but find myself - like many of us, I imagine - empathising with that character from The Three-Body Problem who decided to invite aliens to invade Earth. At least then we’d all be on the same side. For once.

In the spirit of wrapping things up, I thought I’d also take a moment to look back at my work at the Noösphere over the past year and reflect on what lies ahead in the coming one.

I promise I’ll keep it brief and sweet, though.

And there will be a picture of my feline assistant along the way.

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Over the past year, I’ve written a total of 65 newsletters covering topics ranging from gender and economic inequality to public health, political polarisation, social media, consumerism, and climate change.

Some of my most popular posts include the following:

• An exploration of how the invention of the printing press fueled Europe’s witch hunts and why this serves as a cautionary tale for the digital age.

• The consequences of women shouldering most of the emotional and hermeneutic labour in romantic relationships.

• The impact of information overload on our mental and emotional well-being, as well as its implications for the future of democracy.

• A deconstruction of the polarising idea that gender equality is a zero-sum game and that women’s empowerment is the root cause of young men’s struggles.

• The seeming luxury of slowing down and taking it easy in a world that relentlessly pushes us to do more, be more, and consume more.

• An imagining of a world led by women and ‘feminine’ social norms based on under-explored examples of female leadership in the past and present.

• The history of the ultra-rich serving as public ‘barns of money’ and why this crucial social function has been largely—and regrettably—forgotten.

Of course, numbers aren’t everything. The work I’m most proud of doesn’t always reach as many people as I’d hoped. And that’s fine. What truly matters is the impact it has on the people it does reach. Some of my personal favourites from this year that fall into that category include the essay on the Matilda Effect, which explores why so many brilliant women have been erased from history books; the piece on what the food we eat - and can afford to eat - reveals about the society we live in; and a debunking of the idea that men are inherently less empathetic than women.

All in all, I can’t complain. I’ve reached and impacted far more people than I expected this year, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone who shared, liked, or otherwise engaged with my work in a positive way, helping it reach a wider audience. I’m also incredibly thankful to everyone who supported it through paid subscriptions or occasional digital ‘coffees.’ Your support means the world.

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This has also been a year of some pretty big personal changes for me.

At the start of 2024, I had two dreams. The first was to actually have a dedicated space to write, rather than working from the dining table crammed into our kitchen and living room area, as I’ve done for the past several years. The second was for my cat to have more room to roam than the confines of our one-bedroom flat in London.

Several months and countless discussions and planning sessions later, my partner and I decided it was time to move out. Both out of our rented flat but also out of London.

There are many things I love about this city—like the fact that you could walk out dressed like a zombie rat holding a giant rubber chicken, take the tube, and hardly get any odd stares - but, over the years, it’s also become quite unliveable. The cost of everything from housing to groceries and transportation has gone through the roof, making you wonder what kidneys might fetch on the black market every time you dare to step outside your door.

But I’m happy to say we’ve just moved to a place where that’s not the case.

This is also why I haven’t been as active here over the past few months as I’d like to be - planning and packing and organising and then, finally, moving and unpacking and setting up has consumed most of my time and energy.

We’re still in the process of getting settled, but I think (and hope) most of it is behind us now. More on that new chapter later on.

And for now, please enjoy this picture of the void diligently supervising the boxes.

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Going forward, I don’t expect much to change.

Well, I’ll finally have a proper workspace with an actual office desk and chair. So if you were to ask my back, I’m sure it would say that everything has changed.

But my mission for the Noösphere remains the same: to provide a research-based perspective on how humanity has become what it is today - and how we can do better. I persist in my optimism that despite the succession of all the ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ crises we’ve witnessed in recent years and the onslaught of hatred and prejudice and greed that’s poisoning our world and ourselves, we can do much, much better.

Achieving this, however, requires an honest reckoning with the injustices of the past and present — those rooted in the intersections of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and other factors —and the systems that uphold them. Because it doesn’t matter how much technology and innovation and money we throw at our modern-day problems if we fail to address their underlying root causes and understand how they’re all interconnected.

Any ‘progress’ made on the wrong path is meaningless.

It’s not progress at all.

It’s merely a step further from where we ought to be.

But I digress. I’ll leave the rest of these thoughts for future editions of this newsletter. For now, I’ll go back to setting up my new life and then get some rest with a cat on my lap and a book in my hand. I hope you can carve out some time to do the same (with whatever else brings you joy).

Thank you once again to everyone who has supported my work this year. I feel incredibly lucky to have such an engaged audience and to be able to write about issues that often don’t get the attention I believe they deserve.

I’ll keep all new editions of the Noösphere free and accessible here, but if you want to and can support my work, you’re welcome to upgrade to a paid subscription or buy me a coffee.

Wishing you all a relaxing end to 2024 and a wonderful start to 2025. See you in the new year!