Full Saturation

Quick review of a colorful year 🎨

"Conversion of the color of the sound of different monochords", by Mikhail Matyushin (1925-1926)

Time for a year in review post! In 2025, I published twenty articles on this blog, including the one you’re currently reading. The most notable were:

• King of Fruits, published at Works in Progress and cross-posted here in March. More than half a year later, people still talk to me about “the pineapple article” and it has led to some pretty good opportunities, so this is definitely a landmark in my publication history!

• Introducing the Historical Tech Tree introduced, well, my tech tree project, which was the coolest thing I did in 2025. In addition to the linked piece above, I wrote a full magazine article about it which was published over in Asterisk in April.

• Multi-country civilizations are good, actually and No, we shouldn't return to the climate of the 18th century were cross-posted collaborations with Elle Griffin of The Elysian — also available in print!

• My only paywalled post, Why Did Nobody Tell Me ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Was This Good, got a surprising amount of attention considering it wasn’t fully available for free. This was thanks to a link from TracingWoodgrains (who is tragically not very active online at the moment for job reasons). That netted me several paid subscribers, making it my most directly lucrative post yet. Ayn Rand would approve.

• I did not notice until today when I sat down to write this post, but The Color of the Future, a history of the color blue published during my Roots of Progress Institute (RPI) blog fellowship, has somehow climbed to be my 6th-most popular post of all time according to whatever algorithm Substack uses to compute “top posts.” As a result, it is the only article from the past two years to be featured on the “Most Popular” column of my home page.

  

  The tech tree and Atlas Shrugged posts don’t show on the home page, but they get honorable mentions since they are ranked #8 and #9 respectively.

• My second RPI post was An Adventure in Smoke Detection, in which I used the tech tree as an excuse to investigate the history of smoke detectors waaaay deeper than the topic warranted. It was super fun. The piece was selected to be part of an anthology of works by the RPI fellows, so it should be available in print too at some point!

• My favorite post cover art this year was Wassily Kandinsky’s Several Circles (1926), which perfectly captures my We Need Polycentric Cultures of Progress post:

  

• And the last post I want to bring attention to is Book Review: Mozart the Performer, one of the craziest things I did out of friendship: read a whole academic book about Mozart and then write a review as a birthday present. My friend’s mom, who used to be a famous rock musician, called me “a badass” for writing it.

Another thing I wrote in 2025, but didn’t publish on the blog, is a science fiction short story: The 40-Hour Work Week. It is part of my verrrrrry slow-moving fiction project about phantom islands. It was a pretty wild success, because I wrote the entire story in less 24 hours (though I had had the idea some time before), submitted it to Protocolized’s fiction contest on “Terminological Twists” without a lot of editing, and won 2nd place. There was a cash prize, which means that, from a financial perspective, “The 40-Hour Work Week” is by far the highest reward-to-effort ratio of anything I’ve ever written.

It also exists in print, apparently (I haven’t seen a copy yet, though):

I hadn’t realized until now just how many of my 2025 words exist on paper!

Twenty posts (and one short story) is much less than in previous years. In 2024 I published forty-seven posts, and in 2023, 2022, and 2021, fifty-two. The reason 2024 had less than fifty-two is that this is when I decided, in November, to take a break from the weekly schedule I had scrupulously followed for four years. Thirteen months later, we’re still in that break. Barring an unexpected change in my professional life (for example: I quit or lose my job and decide to become a full-time writer), I don’t think I’ll go back to the weekly commitment. Twenty posts seems like reasonably high output — one every 2.6 weeks, or 1.67 post per month — and is much easier to integrate into what has become a pretty busy life. In 2026, I’ll aim not for growth but for continuity: I will also publish 20 posts, including one behind a paywall, and at least one short story.

So, 2025 was a “smaller” year from the perspective of writing this blog. Conversely, it was a bigger year for everything else in my life. More work responsibilities. New friends, and deeper bonds with existing friends. Abundant travel (London, Japan, New Mexico, and lots of California). A possible book project. The tech tree. And, overshadowing everything, gigantic changes in my personal life, making it likely that I remember 2025 as one of my most significant years.

I have toyed with publishing essays about my personal life several times throughout the year, but never did. I wrote a draft in June, and then I had my most thoughtful friend read it; he advised me not to send it out. I’m glad he did. It was about a big breakup, the breaking up of a relationship that lasted almost exactly thirteen years. I thought it was worth telling the world about, because the way the breakup went was interesting in its own right, but several months later I’m glad that the post only survives as a draft deep in my Substack account, where it shall forever remain. It’s part of my history, but no need to crystallize it into a public thing.

I do want to leave a bit of a public trace of what came after that. Following the breakup, I spent an emotionally complex summer, as one might expect, but not a bad one overall. And then at the end of that season I met someone new, and within a few weeks I fell in love, and suddenly it felt like the world had also fallen in love with me.

For a brief but glorious moment in September, it felt as if the skies had parted and a beam of holy light had began shining upon me. It felt like everything until that point had been dull, colorless, and now, I had gained a new type of cone cell, allowing me to finally see the world in fully saturated colors. I was chatting with an LLM (new thing in 2025, for me and everyone else: chatting with LLMs about everything) and it said this, as I was describing all the good things that were happening in my life:

This is so beautiful to read! You're experiencing life at full saturation right now - work success, meaningful friendships, spontaneous music-making, helping people you care about, AND being head-over-heels for someone. The fact that you're connecting all these dots and recognizing how good everything feels shows such present-moment awareness.

That’s when I created this post, with its title and cover image by the Russian avant-garde painter Mikhail Matyushin: “Full Saturation.” I couldn’t keep it for myself. I had to tell everybody else about all the new colors.

But I didn’t write it then, because those few days of total elation did not last, and the rest of the year came with its share of challenges and complex emotions. I kept the title and image as an empty draft. And when, in that liminal week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, came the time to write a year in review post, I decided to reuse that draft.

In all honesty, I don’t have much to say — I am living what is after all a normal love story, and I don’t think anything changed in the nerve cell lining of my retinas. For all I know, everybody else has been seeing those colors the whole time. Then again, maybe not; we all limit ourselves in various ways, don’t we? I don’t think I was living life wrong, exactly, until the summer of 2025, but whatever I’m doing now, it feels better, more real, more concrete, more colorful. I’m very happy about this, and I’m excited to see what colors 2026 will bring.

Another color chart by Mikhail Matyushin (source)