See you in 2025
"Wishing you a Happy New Year!"
This year I'm saying it with more sincerity than ever, because 2025 is going to be a year of uncertainty and change, and the world feels so unpredictable.
Politics
I've seen governments come and go in my lifetime, and I don't remember political affiliations ever being as divisive and polarising as they are today. Not even the Bush administration was quite as authoritarian, either. Donald Trump, and his cadre of 'Christian' Nationalists, tech billionaires and sexual reprobates, are going to be occupying the White House in a couple of weeks, and it's already looking a bit chaotic. It's questionable whether they could deliver half of what's been promised, and to what extent they're going to use the moral panic against transgender people as a distraction from their own shortcomings. What the economy would look like in a year's time is anyone's guess.
All that's certain to affect us here in Britain. It sort of already does, with networks of lobby groups being sponsored by the American religious right. Farage is besties with Trump, and there's talk of Elon Musk 'donating' £80 million to Reform UK, to which the Conservatives have been haemorraging members and potential voters. Recent polling suggests it's entirely possible Reform UK would get more votes than Welsh Labour in 2026, and would gain a lot more seats in Westminster in 2029.
We have a challenging few years ahead, but I'm still optimistic that all this will pass, and we'll eventually come out of it stronger.
Personal Life
There will be a few changes in my personal life also. My social transition is almost complete, and I 'pass' on a good day. All my friends, colleagues and relatives know I'm transgender. Coming out wasn't as hard as I'd imagined.
My plan for the next six month is to have my name and gender changed on all official documents, have things sorted with an endocrinologist, and have started on the HRT.
Career
In terms of career, that's also going to be tricky to predict. My team is rather short-handed, and we support a large variety of systems. I could be spending months on Azure-based services, administrating database servers, getting my hands dirty again with .NET or just becoming the resident expert on Java-based systems integration. Obviously I wouldn't call myself an expert in the latter until I'm comfortable developing Java applications using the latest UI and ORM libraries. I could also put myself down as a 'SQL Server administrator', given all the work I've done in that area lately, but I need to brush up on the finer points of SQL itself.
What's certain is the industry will continue, at least for the next five years, to go in the direction of migrating everything to vendor-specific services and platforms.
Social Media
Should I register an account on BlueSky? Progressives have been talking about it as the Next Big Thing, a less enshittified alternative to Twitter, but I've never found such a platform conducive to meaningful discussion.
I quit FaceBook, when an 'influencer' openly maligned me because I refused to get involved in a serious offline vendetta against another person, for the sake of 'likes', engagement and whatever else 'influencers' crave. And I was getting tired of seeing a timeline flooded with ads and transphobic 'sponsored content'.
The moral of that story - a tale as old as 'social' media itself - is that we need boundaries between our offline and online lives. That's a good enough argument for online anonymity.
As it turned out, my life is fine without 'social' media. In truth, I've spent far more time browsing the BearBlog platform, and I'm really hoping it becomes mainstream.