Not an article. Just a few thoughts I've been carrying around. Consider this a public diary entry, or one side of a conversation we're probably all having in our heads.

2025, You Heavy Thing. 📅💼

This entry will be different. Mainly wanted to get a few thoughts out

A Quick Note: This isn't a FriedReads article. There's no snarky premise, no absurd news hook, no takedown of Shakespeare. If you're here for the usual jokes, maybe skip this one. I will be getting into serious things in this entry, so you have been warned.

Part I: The Personal Paradox

Here’s my weird, guilty truth: my 2025 has been okay. Good, even.

I launched this website. I wrote things that made me laugh. My small, private world kept turning on its axis, steady and mostly kind.

And carrying that knowledge has felt, at times, like a secret crime. It’s like tending a neat little garden in your backyard while, just over the fence, a forest is burning. You can smell the smoke. You can feel the heat on your skin. The ash sometimes drifts over and settles on your tomatoes. But your flowers are still blooming. You’re safe, but you’re not untouched. You’re just… adjacent to the blaze.

That’s the 2025 I’ve lived. Stable inside, watching a world outside the window that feels like it’s vibrating on the edge of shattering.

Part II: The Tremors (Or, When the Tone Shifted)

It wasn’t any one policy or headline that did it first. It was the tone.

This year arrived wearing brass knuckles, looking for a fight. You could hear it in the rhetoric—the casual talk of tariffs as artillery, of neighbors as future annexed territories. Even from up here in Canada, where the noise is usually muffled, the shouting was crystal clear. The digital town square didn’t feel like a place for debate anymore; it felt like a stadium where two sides screamed past each other, each convinced the other wasn’t just wrong, but evil.

The cracks weren’t just political. They were social. They were in how we talked to each other, how we saw each other. The middle ground didn’t just shrink; it was declared a no-man’s-land, and anyone standing there was assumed to be a spy for the other side.

Part III: The Fracture (SENSITIVE)

And then, the tremor became a crack. A real one.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Before anything else—before the politics, the think-pieces, the screaming chyrons on cable news—it was this: an innocent man was killed in front of his family.

That’s the stone at the absolute center of this heavy pile.

Before I continue, let me mention, I didn’t write about this earlier or when it happened mainly because it felt as if it would cause this divide to grow further. This incident was a very devastating one, and I did not want to feed any more division that was clearly on the rise. I am talking about it now because it feels like this feeling of dread, especially this year, just does not feel like it’s going away, and it’s just getting worst, and I feel like I want to mention something about it.

I don’t have anything clever to say about it. How can you? What is the snappy take for a man being shot in his driveway? What is the hot take for a family having their world ended by a crack of noise in the evening air? You either sit with the horror of that, or you use it as a prop.

And God, did we see it used as a prop.

Within minutes, the man wasn’t a man anymore. He was a symbol. A hashtag. A political avatar. His death wasn't a silence to be absorbed; it was a void instantly filled with the loudest, most certain voices. Grief was not allowed to be a private, human thing. It was immediately public property, claimed and weaponized.

The narrative splintered instantly, perfectly, along the fault lines that had been widening all year. One side saw a martyr for a cause. The other saw a problematic figure removed. And in that frantic rush to assign meaning, to slot this raw human horror into a pre-existing political argument, we performed the real desecration.

We skipped the part where we just say: a person is gone. A family is shattered.

We mined the riverbanks of that tragedy with our convictions. We didn't just burn bridges of understanding; we salted the earth on both sides so nothing resembling empathy could ever grow there again. The "conversation" that followed wasn't a conversation. It was two monologues of absolute certainty, screamed across a canyon filled with a man's absence.

That’s what made this moment the fracture. It wasn't the violence itself, terrible as it was. It was our collective, reflexive, and utterly dehumanizing response to it. It turned "us and them" from a political disagreement into a chilling, emotional reality. It made neutrality feel like cowardice and empathy for "the other side" feel like treason.

The trust isn't just broken. It feels incinerated. And I don't know how, or if, you rebuild from that.

Part IV: The Avalanche (When "And Then..." Became a Punishment)

And then… well, and then the year just kept handing out stones.

And then the boats off Venezuela, and the ensuing carnival of cruelty in the comments—people not just accepting violence, but lusting for the extra suffering of strangers.

And then the shooting in Australia. And then the one at Brown University. And then the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife.

It felt less like separate tragedies and more like a relentless, sickening rhythm. A drumbeat of awful. Just as you’d try to get your footing from the last blow, the next one would land. 2025 wasn’t just a year; it was a bully, and its favorite phrase was “You think that was bad? Watch this.”

The events were brutal. But the glee—the gleeful dehumanization that erupted in certain corners after each one—that felt like the real contagion. The sickness wasn't just in the acts of violence, but in the celebration of them.

Part V: The Bunker Mentality (On Holidays and Guarded Hearts)

So now it’s December. The holidays are here.

The lights are going up. The music is playing. And part of me wants to reject it all. To keep my guard up, my shoulders tense. What’s the point of pretending to be merry when the world feels so profoundly un-merry?

What if we relax? What if we actually allow ourselves a moment of unguarded peace, singing a carol or wrapping a gift… and that’s precisely when the next notification hits, the next headline screams? It feels like setting yourself up for a sucker punch from the universe.

But I think that’s why the rituals matter now, more than ever. Not as a denial. Not as some cheesy, “joy is an act of defiance” slogan.

But as a bunker.

The holidays can be the designated, agreed-upon hour in the trench. It’s the moment where we put the war on pause, not because it’s over, but because we are human and we need a minute. We share a mug of something warm. We pass around the stale cookies. We make deliberately stupid small talk about the weather, because we have collectively decided not to talk about the war outside for just one night.

It’s not a solution. It’s a ceasefire. And maybe that’s all we can ask for right now.

Part VI: Carrying the Weight (No Easy Endings)

So, 2025. You heavy thing.

You’ve been a brutal teacher. Your lesson hasn’t been about hope, but about gravity. You’ve shown us exactly how much weight the world can bear before things start to buckle. You’ve made “optimism” feel like a childish fantasy and “normal” feel like a distant country.

I don’t know if 2026 will be lighter. Looking at the trajectory, feeling the tension in the air… it might be heavier. Something feels like it’s about to crack. Maybe it’s just the accumulated pressure. Maybe it’s me.

I don’t have a neat ending. I don’t have a call to action, or a mantra for us to all chant. The old platitudes—“It’ll get better,” “Look for the helpers,” “Choose love”—they ring hollow against the sheer tonnage of this year.

All I know is this: we’re the ones still here. We’re the ones who have to carry this weight into whatever comes next.

And the only thing I can figure is that we carry it by being stubbornly, quietly human. Not heroic. Not enlightened. Just human. By making the coffee in the morning even when the news is bad. By laughing at a truly dumb meme. By building a silly little website about parrots and dead playwrights. By being kind to one single person when the world rewards cruelty. These aren’t answers. They’re not going to stop the next tragedy.

They’re just the things that make the weight bearable enough to keep walking with it.

That’s all I’ve got. That’s the only warmth I can find—not a fire to melt the ice, but a small, personal ember to keep my own hands from going numb.

A final note: This isn’t my “2025 Year in Review.” I refuse to let that be this. I’ll write one of those at the very end, and I hope—foolishly, maybe—that it’s about something other than the weight. I hope nothing else happens between now and then to make that impossible.

I’ll see you in the bunker. I saved you the last cookie. It’s probably a bit stale.

Just sitting with the weight, Allen FriedReads.com | @Allen_Fried