Posted by sarahZedig on Jan 01, 2026
2025 sucked.
Does that count as a headline when everyone's saying it? Even knowing that it was going to be bad, it still knocked me on my ass. I came into 2025 feeling optimistic, because I assumed that knowing how bad things were gonna be meant that I wouldn't be affected by them. Of course I was. We all were.
I won't bother recapping every particularly notable event of this year. Everyone knows what's up. We see it happening all around us, watch as the evidence stacks up day by day in broad daylight while those with the power to do something, don't. DOGE, AI, MAHA, ICE; Trump, RFK Jr, Musk, Hegseth, Weiss. A pinky toe barely submerged in the ocean of bigotry, corruption, greed, and avarice that we all swim in every day. There are no surprises anymore, no rubicons uncrossed, no impassable constitutional crises to shake action out of complicity. Do you remember when Trump almost got assassinated on the election trail last year? I love asking this question because the answer is always "Oh yeah, that did happen didn't it? How did I forget that?" When it happened, quite a lot of people doomsaid about how this would give immeasurable fuel to the aspiring fascists of America, that it would be their Reichstag Fire, their call to arms. I said at the time that it would have no impact whatsoever and be immediately forgotten, because everyone who hates Trump already wants him dead, and everyone who loves Trump already sees him as a martyr. That observation has proven to be apt in ways I couldn't possibly have predicted. Granted, Trump won his re-election-- but not because he dodged a bullet. He won because the Democrats threw in the towel on the most winnable election since 2016 by kowtowing to corporate interests, openly oppressing pro-Palestinian student activist groups, and in many cases feeding their minority constituents directly to the wolves. Sorry, I know it's gauche to Monday morning quarterback a presidental election, and I know plenty of Well Respected Liberal Thinkers would vehemently disagree with my assessment, but it's what I believe. 2025 was not a year of Republican victories but of Democratic complicity. One need only look at the preponderance of blue-leaning elections across the country, particularly in places that were once unquestionable bastions of conservatism, to intuit that the energy for a transformative FDR-style leftist project is just sitting there ripe for the taking, if only an organization clear-eyed and committed enough had the will to activate it. Instead they're letting what's happening happen, because as they've proved time and again the national Democrats are not fundamentally different from the Republicans in any meaningful way except in terms of optics, and even that's becoming less and less true (go fuck yourself, Gavin Newsom).
One thing I noticed in 2025, awash in all this corrosive decay, is that nobody wants to talk about it. The battle lines are drawn, we all know where we stand. Everyone who loves him loves him, everyone who hates him hates him. When I talk to my trans friends, or to my therapist, or to strangers at shops or on transit, we speak around the world, not of it. To the extent it does come up, we gesture broadly with a grimace on our faces and try our best to be as vague as possible.
"How are you doing?"
"Not too bad honestly. Besides, you know, the Everything."
It's the extension of a trend that didn't start with Covid but was certainly amplified by it, of people staring so long and so hard into the devil's eyes that it burned them up from the inside. To witness the suppression of BLM, the wanton abandonment of the working class inherent to Biden's Back to Brunch agenda, the invention of the "border crisis" and the "retail theft crisis" and the "trans people in sports crisis" by major journalism outlets, the deliberate decay of our healthcare system, the open hatred of "young people" (many of them almost in their 40s), the Everything... it's too much. You read about it and feel outraged, but your outrage accomplishes nothing, so you share your outrage with friends and all of you are outraged together, but still nothing changes, so you go to protests and get pepperballed or beaten or arrested shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of others like you, and STILL nothing changes, except now you've got PTSD and maybe a criminal record. Meanwhile, everyone with a microphone and a finger in the pocket of someone rich is lying about you and what you believe. The people in charge have all amply demonstrated their violent disinterest in changing literally anything, telling you without breaking kayfabe for even a second that the economy is great, inflation is overstated, unemployment is down, and the stock market is booming, so actually your inability to pay rent or buy groceries or go to college or move out of your abusive parents' house is really more of a you problem.
Now the horrors have only gotten worse, the lies have bred like rabbits, and everything that isn't a grift is bad for business. Integrity? Stability? Equity? How about "Fuck you, got mine"? Everyone knows it. Everyone feels it. In the 2010s, there was so much jubilation behind just saying the obvious: that the profit motive corrupts all it touches, that racism and sexism and homophobia are not relics of the past, that virtually everything we were taught about America was straightforwardly fiction. Now saying such things is considered blase, if not outright tasteless or hack. "Yes yes, we all know the problem is capitalism, thanks for the insight Karl." It's like no one wants to be reminded of the truth we all know in our bones, like they resent the reminder. So much of our mental effort is spent trying to avoid the firey gaze of the devil that just causing us to turn our head even slightly in its direction has become a social faux pas.
Perhaps this is why so many people working in the video essay space are having an existential crisis right now (aside from the increasing hostility of YouTube as a platform, obviously). What's to say that hasn't already been said? What do we hope to accomplish by saying anything? Why put so much effort into one scripted video when the algorithm probably won't highlight it and popular plagiarists may well make bank passing our arguments off as their own? Why put so much effort into a video that most viewers won't remember and will disappear into eternal irrelevance within a month or two at best? Why tell the truth to an audience that already knows the truth and desperately wants to escape from it? Why subject ourselves to the possibility of harassment on a national scale if the wrong person takes issue with our message? Why commit to a career path with no benefits, no unions (it's illegal for independent contractors to unionize, hence why tech companies use them so much), no independent funding, no institutional/studio support, no path to retirement, and no guaranteed income in the short OR long term?
These are not new questions. YouTubers have been worried about the sustainability of doing YouTube as a career since the moment it became possible to do YouTube as a career. Nothing happening now is new, it has only been heightened, amplified, and accelerated. And it did not come from nowhere. We've been on the road to this moment our whole lives. It's always been around us, every day, in every breath we take, this so-called rot. Nostalgia insulates us from the burden of our past-self's ignorance, but a tree that falls in an empty forest DOES make a sound. If you think any part of the Everything is unprecedented, you just haven't been paying attention long enough. Or you think it's only real when it's happening in your backyard. Either way, you should broaden your horizons a bit. Maybe stop reading The Atlantic.
I had a very, very hard time doing my job in 2025. I wrote scripts, recorded a few, even edited some to the point of nearly-done. I recorded podcast episodes. I wrote blog posts. I wrote some short stories. And yet I barely published any of it. The year got to me. Brief moments of creative clarity were punctuated by monthslong stretches of paralyzing depression. A crisis of confidence I've been struggling with for years only got worse. On top of the Everything, there was sickness, injury, personal crisis, and so much else that ate time I could have spent working. But just as the trends I enumerated above exist on a historical continuum, my own inconsistencies are not new. I've hardly released anything on my channel over the last five years. This period overlaps quite nicely with when I moved to Seattle, one of the best decisions of my adult life that nevertheless involved more than a year of emotional and psychological agony. I watched every creative project I was involved with collapse under the weight of external harassment, financial mismanagement, backstabbing sabotage, or some combination of all three. I took sides in fights that burned bridges I'd naively assumed were a little more resilient than that. My partner and I were evicted and spent a month homeless before finally landing an apartment. We both got covid, and then developed exciting new debilities that linger to this day. My grandfather died, my cat died, and my psych clinic closed down all in the span of a week. And all the while, I was smoking a lot of weed. Doing so helped me survive, but it also dulled my senses, slowed my thoughts, gave me an excuse to disengage. Only in 2025 did I finally start trying to cut down on my smoking, but the Everything makes it really fucking hard to stay sober. My blood pressure shot up. I gained a lot of weight. I stopped taking notes. I felt too embarrassed of my failures to keep talking to my peers, whose conversations and encouragement always helped me stay on task. After finally landing a place in 2021, it quickly became apparent to us that we were going to spend the next few months doing nothing but recover from all the shit we'd been through. Turns out we underestimated the timeframe by a year or three.
If I'm being honest, I had precisely one era of being a consistent and reliable video creator: 2018 through most of 2019. Beyond that, both before and after, I've always been flighty, distractible, full of big ideas and short on executive function. When I look back at myself then and try to figure how I might recreate those results, all I can see is a million conditions I can't reproduce. Graduation, transition, having something to prove-- and being so god damned broke it was either make a video or miss rent. It doesn't help that 2019 saw me rediscover my love of writing fiction, a practice that comes to me far easier and more naturally than the many-stepped lone wolf production house pipeline of video essays. 2025 was actually a rather good year for me on that front. I wrote a short story that might become the first part of a collection. I came up with and broke ground on a new novel, my first truly substantial original fiction idea since before I transitioned. While Godfeels has fallen victim to much of the above, quite a lot of it IS written and ready to go if I can just push myself to get it over the finish line.
But that's not what folks on Comradery and Patreon are paying me for, is it? And that's certainly not what my campaigns promise. I know I should update those things, but the thought of doing so fills me with dread. What new promises can I make that I know for a fact I'll be able to keep? My audience has contracted significantly and I know I need to get my act together soon... but on this stage? Rickety, rotting, covered in spikes and pitfalls? While I'm not myself a creator of explicit adult art, I do write smut from time to time and am a vocal supporter of pornographers and sex workers. How do I maintain my confidence when I've seen firsthand how easy it is for someone to have their entire platform nuked with no justification and no recourse? Is it impossible to imagine that Patreon will crack down on any transgender creators? Is it impossible to imagine that YouTube will go the way of Elon's Twitter? Frankly, I find it far easier to imagine these worst case scenarios than their best-case alternatives. My entire digital presence, my career, is at the whims of tech companies with no object permanence and an unabashed admiration for fascist excess. I like to picture the perfect comeback story, where I scale my shit down and commit to shorter monthly videos, where I develop a production pipeline, build up good habits, refresh my atrophied capacities, and suddenly look like an actual fucking Professional again. That's what I want to do, what I think I should do, and what I know deep down I have the capacity to do because I've done it before. If my stupid closeted ass could figure this shit out in my 20s, surely world-weary Sarah who's been the fuck through it can too!
Then I imagine, against my will by way of sheer trauma-induced muscle memory, what would happen if literally anything went wrong. I don't mean me missing deadlines or falling back into bad habits, I fully expect that to be a war I fight for the rest of my life. I mean what if I put the work in, improve myself, overcome my crisis of confidence, and build a process I can realistically maintain... only to have it all summarily taken away for reasons out of my control? If that happened, could I survive it? Do I really have it in me to weather yet another one of these colossal, mundane disappointments that seem to follow me around like hungry bottom feeders? It's like planning the foundation for a house in a pit of quicksand. I'm watching all the construction equipment slowly go under, asking myself if this is really such a good idea. Then I look elsewhere and realize it's just as bad but in entirely different ways everywhere else. At least this is a kind of bad that I'm used to. But is that enough? Does knowing bad things are gonna happen mean you won't be affected by them? Is it wise to build a house on sinking ground if you accept at the outset that you'll be swallowed up eventually so you might as well make the most of it while you can?
I have to build something, but where? Some say Nebula, but they only invite creators who've already got it built. Others say PeerTube, but good luck convincing even the most fractional fraction of a fraction of your audience to adopt it. Maybe MeansTV, but they're a small operation with distinct tastes and a fairly small userbase. Don't even get me started on Vimeo. What else is there? I become a Substack blogger? A full time politics streamer? I join another fucking podcast network? [cue laugh track]
It's pretty god damned bleak that "write and publish a novel" feels like a more realistic long-term career choice in 2026 than "continue making videos on the platform where I already have an established audience." Except I have to do both and more. We all do. That's what makes me want to turn away: the omnipresence of our collective certainty that everything is broken, our future is being killed in front of us, and all we can do is make the most of it while we can. I have no confidence in the future. Oh, don't get me wrong, I have hope for the future all the way up to my eyeballs. I don't think this moment will last forever. If we feel otherwise, it's because those who produce this miasma of bad news willfully ignore or lie about whatever doesn't fit their narrative. But no matter what they say or how much money they put into saying it, reality exists. People are pissed. The material conditions suck. This is not a center that can hold for long.
But how long, exactly? I want to believe it's a year or two, soon enough that I don't spend my entire thirties waiting. I want to imagine a riotous alteration in the course of all our expectations, that blows through the end of history like a pulse of radiant light that at last opens our eyes to that new world which has struggled so long to be born. I choose to believe such a day will come, whether or not I'm alive to see it, because it keeps me afloat. But how long, damn it? How many downtrodden leftists before me have pronounced that here now at last comes the downfall of the empire by its own hand, here is the collapse of late-stage capitalism, the ultimate height of the contradictions from which there can be no recovery? And yet the blasted beast just keeps limping along, porcupine-esque from all the weapons sunk in its back from those who tried to kill the devil and lost. And I'm supposed to sit here tapping my watch going, it'll keel over any day now folks, I promise! THIS time the uprising will take. THIS time the blue wave will actually mean something. THIS time... will be different!
And you know what? Someday it will be. But "someday" doesn't pay the bills. You can't set your clock by "someday."
I wish I had a tidy and hopeful way to wrap this up, some eye-opening bit of advice, but I don't. Join a union. Join the DSA, even if your local chapter sucks (I can't believe I'm advocating entryism). Read theory. Read literally anything that isn't theory. Stay alive. Volunteer in your area. Make the calls, write the letters, do the protests, help your friends, your neighbors, your peers, your sisters in whatever way you can. Stay alive. Learn new things. Gain a new skill. Get out of your comfort zone. Talk to people. Experience new sensations. Have an unconscionable quantity of gay sex and brag about it online. Make art with your own two hands. Lift up and share the art others make that affects you. Stay the fuck alive.
As for me, I've got plans. I've got schemes. I've got people cracking the whip behind me. I've got new peers with whom I'm rediscovering my love of close media analysis and film production. There are innumerable ways in which my life today is better than it has ever been, a fact I'm thankful for every day. I just can't promise that these truths will prove sharp enough to slay any devil, even one so tame as my own personal inhibitions.
All I can promise is that I will try. It's not enough, but it's the best I can do. It's all any of us can do, really. And don't come at me with your "do or do not, there is no try" shirt. Yoda was so off the mark with that one. You can't do anything without trying to do something first! Not every endeavor is "jump in the deep end and learn to swim while you're drowning," sometimes you gotta dip your toes in first! Man, fuck that guy. I'm glad he's dead.
(Watch Patreon ban for saying "I'm glad he's dead" about a fictional character. Wouldn't that just be the perfect cherry on top?)
Well anyway, thank you all for your continued patience and support, and for reading this pointed (pointless?) little missive. Everyone's going through it and everyone's asking for money, so it means a lot that you've chosen to give some of yours to me. Let us all link hands and wishcast together that finally, just this once, Next Year Will Be Better.
Take care of yourselves.