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Hello! If you don’t know me, I’m Ben aka @typeoneerror.
I’m a systems guy, software creator, volunteer firefighter, and a producer/DJ. I co-founded Oki Doki with my partner Marie Poulin, and over the last half a decade+ we’ve been co-creating the Notion Mastery program together (among other things).
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This was a rough year for me, but an enlightening one as usual.
Like many creative technologists, I spent much of the year diving into the utilities of AI and spent many cycles bummed with our obsession with progress and what it says about us as a culture. I think this caused (is causing) me much existential anxiety, both about my personal involvement in “tech” and about the future of a culture worshipping the Progress Egregore.
My future is unfolding as a desire to promote a more natural approach to productivity, one underpinned by betterment rather than pure advancement.
This is my review for 2025, showcasing how I am arriving in the year 2026. Hello!
Here’s the TL;DR if you don’t want to read all of my review. Each bullet links to the respective section in this review.
I burned out majorly and truly this year. There were weeks where I could not get a single thing done and I really beat myself for being exhausted. Doing these yearly reviews is incredibly helpful as I can see how much I actually accomplished while at this same time judging myself for never doing enough. I can’t say what it is officially that lead me down this path, but I suspect it has a lot to do with reorienting myself as a creative technologist in a post-truth, AI-riddled product environment. It’s gross, I hate it, and I’m still working on finding my voice in a space that feels antithetical to not only my nature, but human nature.
The biggest observation of the year was leaning into the strong possibility that I am autistic. A lot of my friends have said things like “well, yeah, I knew that” when I expressed this consideration. This year I finally got a family “doctor” again (who is actually a nurse practitioner; I’d say even better than a doctor!). She helped me understand my early childhood experiences (my mum describes me as an “anxious baby”) as more indicative of neurodivergence than anxiety. So I started discussing this with other counsellors, coaches, and psychologists.