As another year flies by, it’s common for people to reflect on what they have done over the past 12 months and ponder what they plan to do in the coming year. These plans usually get derailed and abandoned pretty quickly but I think it’s still a good thing to do if only to see how you have progressed over that period of time.

In tribute to Vention MGTOW, who died this year, I’m going to do what he once did and look back on what I’ve done this year with this blog and my plans for the future.

Overall, I’m pleased with what I’ve done with the blog in 2021 as I’ve got to grips with some of the features on the site to make it more accessible and presentable. Hopefully I can improve on this next year. In the first year of this blog, I struggled to write posts but this year I’ve gradually found ways to produce content on a semi-regular basis.

Although this year seems to have gone by fairly quickly, it does seem a long time since I wrote about the George Floyd incident and the rise of Black Lives Matter back in January. Since then I have made a video, written a book review and began writing shorter posts so I can update my blog at least twice a month.

My hope next year is to build on what I’ve done during 2021. While you should never make promises you can’t keep, here are some of the things I’m hoping to achieve by the end of 2022. If I can remember, I may write a post in 12 months’ time analysing how well I did:

Regular posts

Since I started this blog in 2019, I’ve had several periods where months have passed and I haven’t posted anything. My target next year is to post at least twice every month. Some months may be more productive than others but hopefully whatever content I post will be of interest to whoever stumbles upon it.

More book reviews

I’m quite pleased with how my review of The Ape That Understood the Universe turned out even though it was a lot longer than I planned. I split it into three parts to avoid giving the reader a large dump of text to slog through assuming they stuck with it.

I have a few books I want to read and write about and I’ve nearly finished writing a review of one of them. My target next year is to read and review at least five books. I’ve finished one book and I’m currently reading another so I may be able to achieve this. At most these should be in three parts but I’m trying to limit the length of them. I know I don’t have to outline in detail the entire book!

More videos (eventually)

I spent a lot of the early part of this year making a video which I posted onto YouTube where I read out my post about Laura Bates’ book Men Who Hate Women. For my efforts, I’ve received two dislikes (before YouTube took away that option)! I’m not too bothered about that because it was just an experiment in video making.

Like this blog, I don’t have a clear plan what I want to do with video content but it’s something I’m interested in doing. My target next year is to make at least two videos although I’m not sure what the content of those videos will be. It may be into the latter part of 2022 before I can achieve this given how long it took me to make the first one.

And other things

As well as writing about men’s issues and politics, I want to write about other things that interest me like TV and film. Some of this will be related to men and politics, but may be more general as well. I still want what I’ve done so far to be the main focus of this blog though.

A bigger audience?

Blogs aren’t exactly the most popular medium to spread ideas or information on the internet so I never expected to have an audience. At the moment, I know one person who reads my blog (a big thanks to femgoggles whose blog can be viewed here) but I’m interested in increasing that next year. If I can get another person reading I’ll have doubled my audience! I’m not too concerned as I enjoy what I’m been doing but it would be nice to get some more people interested. I could have made more of an effort by using social media but I’m trying to limit how often I go on sites like Twitter.

Overview

Book of the year: it’s the only book I wrote about this year so it’s Steve Stewart-Williams’ The Ape That Understood the Universe. I disagreed with some of the author’s viewpoints but I think he wants to be objective and open-minded. Overall I liked it and found it informative.

Post of the year: Thoughts on ‘Toxic Femininity’– one of the reasons I started this blog was to express my thoughts about certain topics that I didn’t think were commonly expressed elsewhere. I don’t claim to be a brilliant or original thinker but I figured that some of the things that I’ve written may chime with what other people have thought about.

In this particular post, I wrote about my disagreements with Freya India Ager’s Aero article ‘Social Justice Culture and Toxic Femininity’ which was widely circulated and discussed. I found the article because of femgoggles and he later linked to my post which I appreciated.

Reader of the year: despite some stiff competition it’s femgoggles!

Links

I’ll end this post and this year by reposting some of the video links that appeared on my blog. Have a happy new year.

• My YouTube video – a little basic but it is what it is.

• Vention MGTOW’s summary of 2018: from ‘RIP Vention MGTOW’ – this video was my favourite of Vention’s and inspired this post in a way. From the beginning of 2019 and shortly before his cancer diagnosis, Vention talks about keeping a journal and doing summary of 2018 along with other aspects of his life.

• Mitchell and Webb sketch about Jesus telling his followers the story of the Good Samaritan – from ‘Thoughts on ‘Toxic Femininity”. Jesus’ emphasis on the goodness of the Samaritan as a ‘weird curiosity’ makes me think of the way people talk about ‘healthy masculinity’

• Two videos by ‘The Glass Blind Spot’ – the first is his video about the gobby feminist MP Jess Phillips in my post about anonymity and the tragic death of David Amess and the second is about how Doctor Who was infiltrated by SJWs from ‘Who’d be a male role model?’

• Song from South Park about safe spaces – it’s a few years old now but is still relevant today – from ‘To be anonymous or not to be anonymous?’

Looking back on this year, one event that happened to me in the summer sticks out more than any other: I was almost made redundant as I was told that the department I had been working in for a few years was closing down and me and my co-workers would have to compete for other jobs in the building. I managed to get a role in another department as did most of my colleagues but some other people I had worked with and known for a while decided to leave. The news completely shocked us at the time and for a little while I was having to consider finding another job. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, I was fortunate that I could still go in to work and not have
to wear a facemask all day so I had a false sense of security about my job and could not imagine this bombshell hitting me.

It got me thinking about how we are often complacent about the stability and constancy of our lives and also how we assume we are in complete control of our circumstances. I was briefly stripped of that complacency when I discovered that a decision made by people I’ve never met completely upended my life for a couple of months and I didn’t realise that I was so vulnerable.

Of course, a risk of redundancy is nothing compared to other sudden and unexpected news that people are forced to deal with. Unless you’ve experienced it, it’s difficult to imagine how you would react if you were told you had a terminal illness or if a friend or family member died without any warning beforehand.

Of the job vacancies that were available, I ended up getting the one nobody really wanted and so effectively drew the short straw. At the time, I was understandably a little annoyed that I ended up where I had but it was wisely pointed out to me by others that it didn’t have to be forever and I could eventually find somewhere else to go.

I thought about these lines from Bob Dylan’s famous song The Times They Are A-Changin’:

The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast
The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past

In other words, fortunes and circumstances change and my unhappiness would not last forever if I just got on with it and was proactive. Fortunately, it turned out my new job was nowhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be and at the moment I’m satisfied with where I am so my initial grumblings were completely unnecessary. This shows that we can experience unexpected good outcomes as well as bad ones. It would still surprise me though if I knew at the beginning of this year where I’d be at the end of it.

Similar to the idea I put forward in another post about comfort being a false god, we should be wary about being too complacent and assume our contentment will last forever. Another mantra of sorts I came up with during this period is ‘the day shall come’. This basically means that there will be a day at some point in the future that will completely change your life in some way, maybe only temporary, maybe permanently, and likely in such a way that you didn’t expect. This can sound ominous and unnerving as it suggests that there will always be bad news around the corner but it could be that things suddenly improve when you are suffering and in a dark place. Thinking about this can help you prepare for possible bad times to come but may also reassure you that the bad times won’t last forever.

Overall, what happened to me was only a minor occurrence even though I didn’t expect it but there will be tougher times that I’ll have to deal with some day. In some ways, I’ve returned to the complacency I had before all of this happened but at least I had the experience to remind me to expect the unexpected.

The day shall come. Watch out for it.