Read my piece ‘If not now, then when?’ that I wrote the other day but forgot to share!
Here’s to not beating around the bush. Because I couldn’t think of anything profound to start with, these are some things (out of everything in the world) that I’ve liked this year…
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Birkenstock Arizonas x Converse All-Star Hi-Tops: The only shoe pair I’ve really needed for travelling. They’ve covered all situations, from climbing the Great Wall to rooftop bars, the gym and everywhere in between. The only times they’ve fallen short are the three times I’ve been on a run (I’ve got runners for this), and walking through a flood in Vietnam (Crocs were necessary).
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Patagonia Black Hole luggage: My backpack and duffle bag have been what I’ve lived out of for coming up to four months now. It’s always a squeeze when packing, but they’re tough as anything, waterproof and portable. I’m always waiting for a zip to pop, but they never do.
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Flighty: This app has been great. You put in your flight codes, and the app spits out all the relevant details, like your gate, whether you’re delayed, and a host of other insights. If you pay for pro, which is £5/week and so I do it whenever I’ve got a week with a flight or two, you get all kinds of useful information, like how delayed (or not) your aircraft’s inbound flight is, what the weather’s like and also some end-of-year roundup stats.
Here’s mine…
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Onwardticket.com: Again, travel-related (sorry). This came in clutch when I was standing at the check-in desk a couple of hours before my first flight to Vietnam.
The lady asked me if I had onward travel (I didn’t), and after uncertainly booking a £100+ flight to Macau to see my friend later down the line, I realised that the airline booking code wouldn’t be delivered until much later (this was the bit that check-in lady needed).
Luckily, a matter of days earlier, a friend I’d travelled with for my first three weeks told me how her sister had been using this website, onwardticket.com.
The way it works, as I understand, is that you pay them 15 bucks and they purchase your flight of choice off an airline and provide you with booking details, such as an airline booking reference, which is what you need to get through this preliminary immigration check.
After 48 hours, Onwardticket sells your booking back to the airline, and (I’m assuming) pockets a healthy margin of the $15 you paid for the right thing, at the right time.
And so there ended up being no problems on my way into Vietnam, as I stood at the checking desk and abused this legal loophole.
I used it once again on my way into Australia, and the check-in lady didn’t even blink this time when I described my readied onward ticket to Kuala Lumpur some vague date around three months in the future. I did actually have said flight’s ticket ready, but next time I might try having my onwardticket.com payment details ready to roll, but just fibbing my way to my boarding pass. Wise? Perhaps, perhaps not.
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WHOOP: I’ve had a WHOOP band since May, after finally shelling out beyond the free trial I did back in Winter 2024. It’s faded into the background better than I thought it would. For a while I was quite neurotic about the numbers, now I just let them happen. I know I’m not going to be perfect.
Another thing - I’m positive that in the next year or so there will be someone who makes a humanised data analytics tool. This is why I continue to track my workouts, my runs, my health through WHOOP - it’s because I know that very soon down the line there will be a tool I can feed it all into that then tells me ‘don’t run in the evenings on Wednesday’ or ‘you respond badly to alcohol when it’s cold’ and other similar insights.
You know, rather than wondering how the fuck my resting heart rate was so high last night when all I did was chill indoors - but for now, this last part will be what I get.
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Mobile-browser versions of social media apps - native apps are too addictive. Especially Instagram. For the last three months or so I’ve overwhelmingly just used them in Safari, and because the experience is less polished and awkward, I find myself spending much less time on them.
Reels don’t scroll, or at least they stop playing when you’re about 15-deep (and that’s more than enough), and I’ve been using alternative apps for DMs and posting. Meta Business Suite is the only real mobile option for the latter (and it does DMs as well), but I’ve been using Beeper on my laptop to converge all my messaging into one desktop app and it’s saved me a ton of time and stress.
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ConvertKit (now just Kit) - the other day I was contemplating my business, the tools it uses and how I could justifiably cut things back a bit. I realised that ConvertKit was such a non-negotiable that I can’t really put it into words.
Back when I was writing on Medium every day in 2023, I started gathering emails because various gurus had dictated it was the right thing to do. So I checked out which platforms all my favourite creators (i.e. Ali Abdaal and Tim Ferriss, the ones with email lists) were using, and I came across Kit.
Over my lifetime on the platform, my emails must have hit an inbox over a million times by now. That’s my voice a collective one million times in the general public’s most private and official spaces.
The vast majority of revenue (albeit not much in the overall scheme of things) has come from using this software, and there’s no way I’d be sitting where I am right now (whether good or bad), without it.
But enough of the material worship, here are some other more existential recurring themes…
Being a closet people-person!?
I like being around people more than I care to admit sometimes - for ages I liked to think that I was the lone wolf type, very comfortable in my own presence (I lived in isolation for the summer of ‘23 when I first made my business profitable, after all), but I don’t think this is true in the majority of seasons.
Being with others keeps me grounded. Especially with the right ones. We talk, share experiences, keep things in the real world, and I love it. It’s a perfect antidote to spending a lot of time working online, where the sky’s literally the limit in terms of potential and complexity of what can be built.
Thinking is something I find myself doing too much of as well, and so I need to find ways to stop it. Being with other people is one of the most reliable that I’ve found, alongside watching wildlife (going to have to stick with this one whilst isolated in Northern Queensland).
Either way, I’m grateful 100 times over for all the people I’ve spent 2025 with, whether I spoke to you for three minutes, travelled with you for three weeks or lived with you for three months. You all hold me down and make this life worth living more than anything 🫶.
Mise-en-place
A big one. I’ve been travelling for four months, as you’re no doubt sick of hearing, and even with my best intentions, I’ve been losing things.
One strategy that has helped though, has been mise-en-place. It’s an idea originally coined by chefs, who were meticulous about where every utensil was placed in their kitchen.
And it’s no wonder, really. If you’re a Michelin star chef, you don’t want to be looking for the garlic crusher for 15 minutes before realising it’s behind the butter dish you meant to put away after searing the steak a while earlier.
I’ve transferred this to travelling - all of my essentials, I can put my hands on them in seconds, with ~95% certainty that they’re actually present where I expect them to be. I’m heavily tempting fate here but the passport has remained unmoved, the wallet in the right trouser pocket (I’ll leave you to figure out whether this means ‘correct’ or ‘right-hand side’), and the phone never in a bizarre place.
This being said, I’ve lost a £50 hat that can only be purchased in one specific store in London, a film camera with half a roll of shots inside of it, and a t-shirt that was one of my all-time favourites.
Mise-en-place is a little bit more built in when you have a fixed location, but that doesn’t mean you can’t prioritise a few objects you care about when you’re travelling and apply it there too. So far, it’s been working.
It’s been a diverse year, starting with time with the family, briefly, then an exam period, then a jaunt to freezing Poland, then more writing and studying, getting addicted to nicotine lozenges to finish my field report, hitting the library for the last time, then the exam hall, graduating, 5 am get-up-and-gos, 12 pm easings-out-of-bed, morning runs, evening swims, boxing, sauna, ice baths, dry cold and sticky heat, mosquitoes and cockroaches alongside wallabies, monkeys, pandas and parrots, too many beers and too few coconuts (or was it the other way around?), food poisoning, some of the best meals I’ve ever eaten, overnight flights, daytime flights, remote income, in-person spending, wipe-outs, check-outs, check-ins, lock-ins, friends-for-life, friends-for-a-day, languages (too many to count, let alone remember the vocab I’ve been told), and everything else that I could easily keep listing for another 20 minutes.
But it hasn’t been easy either. If I’m being honest, I finish the year almost flat out of money, self-isolating for the sake of focused work in butt-fuck nowhere in the middle of an outlandish country over 10,000 miles from home. But the knowledge, experiences, fun and games and overall understanding I’ve gained from this year tops anything I could have hoped for, no matter where I sit now. We’re going to work hard, heading into 2026 and be, as my manifesto/goals/ideal life document states living ’the same lifestyle as this year, because it was perfect’. Just this time with more financial incomings than outgoings.
Wants and priorities may change, of course, but that’s for future Theo to figure out why and to do something in response.
For now, I’m sitting with the gratitude. Bring on 2026 – 2025 Theo is over and out!
