Draft Four: My word of intention for 2025
Entering year 3, plus promises and recs.
I have a friend from school who is now a dogged and hardworking entrepreneur. A few years ago I was staying with him, and he told me he was happy to not be traveling for a while because he needed desk time. I found that curious, for two reasons.
He lived in a different country than most of his staff – there, he didn’t have an office to go to, so by desk time he meant his literal desk, at home, in his bedroom. (This was before “remote work” became a thing). Second, I always envied his capacity to work from anywhere: planes, trains, coffee shops, hotels etc. It was less about the volume of work he could handle, and more about the ease with which he would get into the task at hand, wherever he was.
I found myself thinking about desk time recently, because I understand its metaphorical value better. Sure, partly we enjoy the comfort of doing the work in a familiar place. But desk time for my friend was also about attending to the grand plans, bringing to life new ideas, moving forward complex projects, sketching new strategies, playing around with different models.
Regular work time could be had wherever. But desk time was special: it was about creating and bringing to life things that didn’t yet exist.
Desk time was a way of embodiment.
Embodiment – it’s the word I landed on for 2025 after thinking through a few options after the new year and also conversing with ChatGPT about them. This was my initial conversation prompt: “I'm looking for something that is about making decisions, moving forward. Some options are explore, prototype, move, change – something in that vein, where you are starting to take chances, you are committing your creativity and energy to something, you are trying out new things, you are venturing out, you are not just stuck with your ideas.”
We went through dozens of options: from catalyze, to ignite, to manifest, to enact. It’s the last one that caught my attention. My intention for 2025 wasn’t simply to work – readers of these letters know I do plenty of working – it was about doing the work of transforming some of my own ideas into prototypes and experiments. It’s enact that led me to embody, which had both a physical and spiritual feel to it.
After some back and forth with ChatGPT, I made my decision. I like using large language models as thinking partners, so I found it fair to let it know. “So, I’ve landed on this word, embodiment, which describes how ideas, values, and experimentation come together to transform something into reality – essentially, living through things to make them real. It feels like a better word than crystalize, which is about clarifying ideas. It’s better than prototyping, which is about testing and refining. And it seems more fitting than emergence, which is more about what arises spontaneously. In a way, emergence reflects the humility needed during this process of embodiment.”
As far as enact goes, that one seemed to describe the external act of bringing something into reality, while embody also touched on the internal transformation that integrates an idea into your being. I wanted a word that best described both the living, the integration and the bringing of ideas and values into reality, so embody was the better fit.
Serendipitously, I also read this piece on why it’s difficult for us humans to do the things we want to do – sure, keeping up with our New Year’s resolutions is part of this, but we’re talking grander things as well. The author brought up two Greek concepts (of course the Greeks had this figured out). One was akrasia – the state of acting against your better judgment. It’s sometimes translated as “weakness of will”, but it more simply describes the internal conflict when you know the right thing to do, but fail to do it due to distractions, temptations, or procrastination. It’s that nagging gap between intention and action—the struggle to align what you know you should do with what you actually do. Eating less chocolate is the daily part of it, but what else do we do – or not do – against our better judgement?
The opposite concept is enkrateia, which can be translated as “self-mastery” – the power of holding oneself together. It embodies what it takes to act according to reason and your values, even in the face of challenges or temptations. So, if akrasia is a struggle to embody and act on intentions and ideas, enkrateia is the embodied control needed to make them come alive.
The obvious caveats here: this is just my own brain telling itself the story it needs, using concepts that, for you, might trigger different associations. Also, this is not a recipe for success – that’s why emergence, and prototyping are close cousins of my chosen intention. I’m simply cheerleading myself for action, dressed in the lovely uniform of uncertainty and imperfection.
What does this mean for me, for you, for these letters?
To answer this, let’s go back to the beginning of Draft Four, exactly two years ago. (Yay, anniversary time! 🪩) I was 41 and dealing with a lot of recent loss I didn’t yet understand or process. I didn’t have a roadmap out of the grief of so many simultaneous endings – a life-defining professional project, a life-defining relationship, and, soon after, moving out of a life-defining apartment. The most important chapter of my life to that point was closing, and I had done enough living to understand that one would not begin the very next day. A “neutral zone” would follow: searching, trying, pondering, exploring, enjoying, sometimes just surviving.
This is why the name felt apt. As I wrote in January 2023: “[I’m in my 40s], and it’s also the name of a book very dear to me (Draft No. 4), because it talks about nonfiction writing as a craft of building, rebuilding, trying, discarding. It’s about writing as intentional labor. That's not how it is for everybody, but it’s how it’s always been for me.”
For those who’ve followed me on this journey – thank you! – you know the rest: I sent about 90 Sunday letters since, most of which dealt with two major themes: storytelling and sense-making.
To me, these letters are tools to understand the changes in my chosen profession – journalism –, explorations of changes in identity, and the stories we spin to give meaning to both. These include the stories journalism tells about the world and the industry, but also the ones we tell ourselves about who we are at a certain point in time, how we change, how our communities change, and where we go from here, ideally alongside others.
More practically, for the last couple of years I’ve written about what journalism (in Romania and beyond) could do better, but also about the struggles of figuring out my role in this changing landscape – as an introverted recovering perfectionist, as a 40-something insecure overachieving man in Eastern Europe, as an initiator of projects who’s also worried about his capacity for maintaining and leading them.
And it’s (still) in English for the same reason I spelled out on day one: “I often feel I’m freer thinking/writing in English. It’s a second language, and a second self to some degree.”
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Now, back to embody as my intention word for 2025.
It’s not like I haven’t been doing things for the past couple of years. I have done plenty and had the luck to be involved in some great projects, all of which were chronicled here. And because of them, and because of the reading and exploration I did, I kept hoarding ideas, and a desire to try some new things, to get desk time with them.
I’m not saying: a new chapter has officially begun. But I am saying: I know my values, I have some ideas, I have people around me that believe and support both me and some of these ideas, so it’s time to bring to life things that don’t exist.
The world has gotten worse in the past two years – another record-breaking year of rising temperatures, more war and suffering, tragic cost-of-living realities, nihilism and anger around our political and social circumstances in Romania (and not only). I don’t have the hubris to believe for one second that I can change any of these circumstances, but I also don’t want to sit idly, doomscrolling the news to increase my sense of powerlessness or self-righteous anger.
My plans are nothing groundbreaking – you’ve read them before, and their specifics matter less today (unless you want to help our fundraiser, which closes this month?). What you should know is that Draft Four will continue to chronicle them, so here are my plans and promises for 2025 (which I will work to embody, but you got that by now):
I’ll send a letter every two weeks in the usual format – an essay and some side dishes of books, podcasts, articles, and whatever I consumed and meant something to me. I figured out that two letters a month is best for all – you’re already swamped (newsletters are everywhere!), and I’ll have more worthwhile things to say if I take more time;
Each letter will focus on one of a few possible themes: ways in which journalism (or nonfiction storytelling) can better mirror people’s lived experience and be more of a guide on a journey, concerned with enhancing agency, hope, connection, dignity, and capacity for action. Ways in which storytelling helps or harms. Ways in which I respond to immediate events around me;
More specifically, I will keep chronicling “building, rebuilding, trying, discarding”, in work and life, which I hope will allow you to reflect on your experiences, too;
I’ve been terrible at replying to your notes, but just know that I read them all;
By the next letter I will also turn on payments. Those of you that pledged already will have money taken from your account at that point, so I hope you haven’t changed your mind. I’m not paywalling the letters, and I have no perks to offer paying readers yet (maybe down the line). If you support the writing, it’s either because it’s meaningful to you, or you want to help me free up more time for the projects I want to do vs. the projects I take on because there are bills to be paid. Those that want to pledge now, can do so though the button below.
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My wish is that we all follow through on our intentions for 2025, and if we don’t make it, hey, at least we gave it a serious go. There is still a card on my desk that says: “Plan the hell out of it. Hold it lightly.” So, be gentle. On a spectrum from becoming obsessed with doing or making a difference or upgrading yourself and not giving a damn or floating along aimlessly, there is an entire world. Find your place in it.
SIDE DISHES:
On the internet as the justification machine is the best piece of writing I’ve read in a while on what the modern online discourse is doing to us. It’s short, to the point, and it encapsulates a truth that is hard to face: no matter what you believe, no matter how false or wrongheaded it is, the internet will serve you the necessary reinforcement for your beliefs.
Kix is a mind-bending documentary on Max, shot in Budapest over the course of more than a decade. It follows a boy all the way into his twenties, shedding a light on what being on the margins of society costs.
Orbital is a gem of a short book. It’s the 2024 Booker Prize winner, and it tells the stories of 24 hours on a space station. If you need a little zooming out filled with wonder and humility, you can’t do better.
Industry is another Max production, set in the financial sector of London – so yes, plenty of rich people involved. I’ve loved this series since the beginning, but its third season makes it a worthwhile Succession follow-up.
The Good Whale is a narrative podcast from Serial Productions that tackles a story which took me back to childhood: what happened to Willy (actually named Keiko), the orca from the Free Willy movie, and what does the story tell us about the lengths we go to for redemption.