Year in Review: 2025

Photo: by Author © 2025

---

I’m not going to lie. 2025 is a year I’d rather not revisit.

• Yes, it was the Holy Year of Jubilee 2025 “Pilgrims of Hope”.
• Yes, we lost Pope Francis and gained Pope Leo XIV.
• Yes, Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati were canonised as Saints.
• Yes, there were heritage transport trips and watching movies with my father.
• And, yes, I got my (total) step count up an awful lot during the year.

​But, looking back, I cannot see any of the positives for the shear, personal weight of disappointments that have dogged me throughout 2025. (As well as bouts of F.O.M.O.)


At the start of the year, I thought I had a direction as to what I should do only for that smallest glimmer of something—anything—to be taken away. That seemed to be the running theme: think that you might finally get something, or somewhere, and then have it taken away from you. Again.

I expended an awful lot of my energy going basically nowhere, which resulted in my art being the most visible casualty of 2025. Not aided by personal events and the ‘Artificially Intelligent’ miasma afflicting all terminally-online-artists that is: why bother?
As well as treating any brief spark not as an invitation to creativity but as something that had to be put through the third degree of a capitalist cost-benefit analysis loop that buried both the spark, and myself, ever deeper into disembodiment. What point is there in creating if The World is just going to continue in its agenda to eradicate every last place on the face of the Earth that a creative might find to take shelter in and, maybe, even meaning.


2025 was, for me, exemplified by isolation and disconnection. Peer-to-peer faith gatherings that no longer pretend to be for anyone not already living within 10–15 kilometres of the events. Trying to gather interest for things by yourself to mark the Year of Jubilee only to be left by the end of it with a distinct impression that I was at the very bottom of everyone else’s social list or not even registering on their RADAR. Not to mention seemingly everyone else and their dog deciding to disconnect from all social media and not informing anyone whose only connection to those said same people is through social media of what they’re doing BEFORE they do it.

I hope everyone else enjoyed the 2025 Jubilee because my year was shit!


Vincent Cavanagh
8 January 2026

---

Previous Years in Review:
2024
2023