Goodbye 2025 and Hello 2026
In which I let you know that you will receive an email from me every Wednesday this year
Hi friends! Considering the timing of my last post, It’s starting to look like this is an annual blog. But, we have plans to turn that around. Big plans!
Ok, but first, I will see if I can fill you in on my last year, in a desperate attempt at continuity and closure. This year was a tough one, but meaningful nonetheless.
My 2025
Last you heard from me, I was in New York, about to go back to Recurse Center, and had plans to focus on some exciting personal research projects related to AI self-reflection. And I was going to blog about it! But then I didn’t... what happened?
First of all, thank you to all of my wonderful blog readers who checked in on me... your kind words mean the world to me. Here’s the full story:
Winter: Health Happened
Right after my last post, I was struck with illness! Specifically - mono and strep (at least). And then, when things started looking up again, the flu. Some have since wondered whether it was a poor choice for me to live in a Brooklyn co-living house that doubled as an underground daycare operation for some of the most well-networked babies in the Tri-State Area. Still, the credit-assignment problem remains a challenge (as will be a theme of this year for me).
Anyhow, I was quite sick, and then I didn’t get better.
I think most people have an intuitive sense of what trajectory an illness is supposed to take - you rapidly feel worse, until you reach some minimum, and then you slowly get better. And it is very disconcerting when something different happens, like the following that happened to me:
The above chart illustrates how things felt at the beginning of my time in New York. In full scope of the mono and the flu and so on, things actually looked more complicated, though no less disconcerting:
The three-month period depicted above was very challenging, and it’s daunting to try and do it justice in writing. But I have planned a post about this, “The Phenomenology of Mononucleosis”, since one of my goals for this year is to write more about my health journey.
…And, Life Happened Too
The crazy thing is, in the cracks between the periods of illness described above, I was having an amazing time. I found an awesome community of “friendly, ambitious nerds” via Fractal NYC, hosted dinners at my house, did yoga at the climbing gym and walked to Recurse Center every day, where I was learning a ton from my peers and working on projects ranging from installing a new server in their compute cluster to collecting activations from an LLM for mechanistic interpretability research.
... which really only made things more difficult when my health stopped cooperating. Having lived a largely nomadic life ever since I’d graduated from college, I was looking forward to putting some roots down, and Brooklyn seemed like a great place, but my health was stagnating at levels that did not allow me to make use of my new environment, and it was looking like a long, cold New York winter and spring, so I packed up and made my way back to the Bay Area to live with my parents until I got better1.
Spring to Summer: Complicated Illnesses are Complicated
I am very grateful to have such a supportive family and such a comfortable place to land as Oakland, California. During my Oakland period I was largely focused on my health - reading everything I could on related illnesses and trying to build the right routines. I also continued my part-time software consulting work and dove into my second piano album.
And, overall, things slowly got better. But recovery was very non-linear, and the question of when and how I might fully recover continued to loom large.
Wondering Whether Work Would Work
At some point, after a particularly positive period of physical prosperity, I decided that it was time to “move forward” and attempt to do hard things once more, and that perhaps doing so was a necessary step in my recovery (you’ll have all sorts of ideas when your health gets weird). And so I kicked off a job search, which quickly gained a lot of traction. Maybe too much traction, thanks to the excellent career services at Recurse Center...
I interviewed for a dozen roles and ended up with a few offers from companies I was truly excited about, each in different ways. I even worked with one company for two months in a trial period that went quite well by all accounts. And yet, the whole time I had a persistent doubt about whether I was making the right move.
Everything rode on the question of “am I getting healthier”, and I was extremely sensitive to the slightest fluctuations in the dial that swung between “yes I’m improving” and “no I’m not”. Extrapolated forward, that dial pointed between one future in which I regained my health, my physical activities and my social life, all while building a career at an interesting company… and a second future where all aspects of my life slowly deteriorated until even my job was too much to handle, setting back my recovery by months at best, and at worst, indefinitely.
With such a steep downside, in hindsight it’s surprising to me that I didn’t cut my losses earlier. But it was also demoralizing for me to consider sitting around indefinitely - there is always a part of me that wants to push the boundaries, in case I find them to yield.
But this time around, fate made the choice for me. The same week that I intended to sign a full-time offer, my body failed again in a full on “crash”. Everything was weak, I couldn’t even do my five minutes of light morning yoga, and trying to write code felt like grinding my brain against a wall. (It’s wild how, in these states, the body is so fiercely opinionated about what to spend energy on - but that’s a topic for another time.)
After conversations with my counsel of friends, I called my employer-to-be and postponed my joining indefinitely. And once again was floating into the unknown.
Fall: Getting my Mojo Back?
Not quite knowing what to do with myself, I put all my energy into recording my piano album. And as that went on, I started to piece together a different vision for my recovery - one in which I went straight for the things that brought me the most joy and excitement… though I hadn’t understood things exactly in those terms yet.
But I had some vague notions of completing the album, and traveling and visiting friends, and learning about math and AI, and writing publicly, and reconnecting to my personal systems and the other creative projects in my life, including the very projects I told you I was going to focus on last year!
And as a first stop, I packed my car and set off for Seattle for a trip of unknown duration. Originally I just meant to visit friends, and yet, ~2.5 months later, I’m still here. And, though my health continued to be rocky...
... overall things have been very good! Indeed I’ve enjoyed hanging with my friends here, and I’ve gone on a couple adventures, and worked on projects that are meaningful to me, including my board game Sneaky Town (you can read the latest Sneaky Town update here, and there’s more progress updates to come).
My life has a lot of richness right now. I have engineered, and/or been blessed with, many projects, activities and relationships to look forward to, and these help me tolerate the troughs. Though my full health trajectory remains unknown, I no longer worry that a meaningful life is out of reach.
To be clear, I am not claiming any sort of victory. I am still quite in the midst of things, and am well aware that my circumstances could change on a dime. “We’ll see”, replied the farmer. But, I wished to bring you up to date, and here’s where things are right now. Not bad.
Hello 2026
I have a feeling that 2026 will be a good year. And I do not wish for you to hear about it in 12 months. I wish to write to you more often.
“But you said that last year”
... yes, but this year I have a specific commitment - I will send out a new blog post every Wednesday. That’s 52 Wednesdays, 53 if you count today. In fact I’m finishing this here draft on New Year’s Eve. How’s that for commitment?
This blog is now called “Daniel Sosebee” and has moved to blog.danielsosebee.com.
I already have many posts and ideas queued up, on topics such as: health, personal systems, and AI. I’ll use the blog to get my thoughts out, to share progress on my projects, and to inspire me to learn more on the topics that interest me.
And I hope you have a wonderful 2026!
…Lastly, if you got this far, you get to hear a single from the upcoming album. It’s called Eternal, because, to me, the song seems to emerge from an endless and beginningless place (dang - that would be a good album name 🤔 …). Listen here.
Until next week and Happy New Years to all,
Daniel
a run-on sentence for a run-on period of life
an endless and beginningless place ft. tame impala 👀
sounds like a whirlwind but way to ubermensch your way through it ✊
I loved this update. It is real, positive, and inspiring. I hope Brooklyn still has a place on your trajectory map!