2025. A Year Outside the Walls
My year in four stories
This has been a year like no other I can remember, and even allowing for time as an infant, that is over seventy of them. Every year has its own characteristics, from disasters to triumphs, personal moments and breakthroughs. Usually, these are grounded in something tangible, something we can look at together and find a way to a shared view.
This year has not been like that. At its core, it feels as if it were created almost entirely from ever-changing stories, leaving us searching for solid ground.
Muriel Rukeyser told us that the universe is made of stories, not of atoms, and that has never felt more true. The stories we tell each other have always acted as affordances, shaping how we perceive the world and our place within it. The philosopher Masahiro Morioka suggested that life is not something we discover but something we feel our way into, a perceptual dialogue with lived experience in which how we approach life shapes what it reveals to us. As the year ends, that idea feels especially resonant. When deliberately designed stories are shaping us, we must create our own if we are to have any agency.
We now have technology that can not only write stories but also generate the images, videos, and artefacts that underpin and reinforce them, offering an increasingly Matrix “blue pill” existence.
The challenge is that any story or image created in this way is only a shadow, shaped by data and stripped of the human attention that gives stories their depth and force. When these shadows are delivered at scale, through what can feel like a digital fire hydrant, it becomes hard not to be swept along by their mediocrity and lack of ambition for us.
So if there is a gift available to us at this time of year, perhaps it is discernment. The chance to slow down with those we love and trust, to look carefully at what is going on, and to reorient ourselves towards what actually matters to us.
So my year end reflection is centred on the power of story.
Most classical drama follows a recognisable shape. Act I establishes the world and its fault lines. Act II complicates everything. Act III is where tensions can no longer be contained, and something decisive occurs. Later acts deal with consequences and resolution.
A Story of America
Right now, America feels as if it is in late Act II. The story that is the America I have known all my life has not fundamentally changed. It remains creative, dynamic, money obsessed, but at heart generous. A flawed but much valued friend, as I think we in the U.K. have been to them.
What has changed is the surrounding narrative. When friendship is measured in money, the rhetoric of those who would use America for their own selfish ends crowds out gentler instincts.
At times, it feels like one of the endless Die Hard films that appear around Christmas, with Washington cast as the Nakatomi Plaza, seized by a monomaniacal villain and his henchmen intent on extracting tribute from the world, but with no Bruce Willis in sight.
Trust is built slowly over time, based on reciprocity, evolving reputation, and a precommitment to others. When we earn someone’s trust, we have skin in the game, which is their life.
It is sobering how quickly a reputation can be damaged when those foundations erode. Even if the political tide turns as the 2026 midterms approach, the harm done to America’s reputation will be long-lasting. As a Caribbean proverb has it, “trust grows at the speed of a coconut tree and falls at the speed of a coconut”
If I look to classical literature for a lens on this moment, Beowulf offers an illuminating one. Not the story of monsters and muscle that it is often reduced to, but a deeper story about time and the limits of heroic narratives.
In the first half of the poem, Beowulf is young, singular, and decisive. Problems can be confronted directly. Strength works. Glory follows. In the second half, Beowulf is older and now king. The world is more fragile. The threats are slower, systemic, and bound up with what has already been accumulated.
The dragon here is not Grendel’s mother, bent on revenge, but a consequence of past success, guarding hoarded treasure, and our American Beowulf faces it as he always has, alone. The tragedy is not a lack of courage, but a failure of imagination. He cannot step out of the story that once made him successful, even though the world around him has changed. When Beowulf dies, the poem does not end in triumph, but in foreboding. The people fear what comes next because the heroic age is over and no new story is ready.
That feels uncomfortably close to what is happening to America. Not a nation in decline, but one still relying on a form of heroism that no longer fits the nature of its challenges, at a moment when what is required is not greater strength, but a different kind of judgement.
2026 may mark America’s entry into Act III, where tensions can no longer be contained, and something decisive occurs. It will be instructive, and almost certainly unsettling, to see how the story unfolds.
A Story of AI
If America feels like late Act II, then artificial intelligence feels like early Act II. The stage has been set. Act I is complete. The technical breakthroughs have happened, and the plausibility of large scale AI is no longer in question. We have seen the trick work.
From this point on, the narrative arc takes over, and AI is a different story altogether. Much more Shakespeare’s The Tempest, because it is about power acquired through knowledge, exercised through instruments others cannot fully see, and justified by a belief in one’s own enlightenment. In The Tempest, Prospero controls the story. He engineers the storm that isolates them on the island. He stages encounters, decides what others know, when they know it, and how events are interpreted. Much of his authority comes not from coercion, but from orchestration.
Like Prospero, many of today’s AI builders are scholars rather than tyrants. They are convinced, often sincerely, that mastery confers legitimacy. The storm that opens The Tempest feels like fate, but is in fact engineered. In much the same way, the current surge of capital, compute, and urgency around AI has scrambled hierarchies and suspended normal judgment. It is a created storm.
Prospero has two servants. Ariel represents the clean, weightless story of AI. Speed, elegance, leverage. Intelligence without friction. Ariel is compliant, tireless, and almost joyful in service. This is the narrative that animates finance. Scalable, obedient capability that compounds advantage.
Caliban, by contrast, is embodied cost. He labours and resists, and remembers dispossession. Caliban is the displaced worker, the energy burden, the data exhaust, the communities whose value is extracted while their agency remains limited. Ariel and Caliban capture the split reality of AI’s promise. Frictionless intelligence on the one hand, and material consequence on the other. Prospero insists he has educated Caliban and that he brought language and order. Caliban replies that the only thing he learned was how to curse. It is hard not to see a future political economy of AI in miniature.
The Tempest is not a tragedy. Prospero chooses restraint. He breaks his staff, drowns his book, and steps back from absolute control. That choice is voluntary. It is not enforced by the system. That is what makes the play such an uncomfortable mirror for our moment. AI remains at a point where it could become servant rather than master, and enabler rather than controller.
The open question is whether, on realising that rule is possible, we will still choose not to rule.
There is one further aspect of this that I will return to in my New Artisans year end review on Wednesday. AI gives each of us Prospero’s knowledge, offering options that once required access to large organisations. What we choose to do with it remains to be seen.
A Story of Finance
If The Tempest helps us understand the limits of data, then Faust offers a darker and more precise lens on finance and where it now sits in its own narrative arc. John Lanchester’s excellent article in the London Review of Books provides a powerful framing.
Read as a five-act play, finance now feels like late Act II, edging into Act III. The phase where the scene has been set, the bargain accepted, its benefits taken for granted, and its costs deferred just far enough to remain abstract.
Faust, at this point, does not feel damned. He feels successful as the acceleration he sought appears to justify itself. Yet Act III is where the consequences begin to surface indirectly, not as collapse, but as unease and distortion as the quiet realisation that risk has not disappeared, only been displaced into the future, into complexity, or onto others who did not consent to the deal.
Finance, like Faust, continues to insist that the reckoning lies somewhere else, for someone else to handle later. Act IV will be the narrowing of options, when the bill can no longer be rolled forward, and the moral geometry of the pact becomes visible. Act V, if it comes, will not be about punishment so much as recognition. The unsettling question is whether we are still capable of choosing a different ending, or whether we remain too invested in the story of progress to notice when we no longer believe the story.
A Story of Us
I have long valued the power of story to illuminate what can otherwise become overly intellectual discussions of personal leadership and strategy, and I was particularly struck by my experience of Richard Olivier’s work at Olivier Mythodrama, which uses Parzival as a vehicle for serious reflection.
Written in the early thirteenth century by Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival stands apart from earlier Grail romances by treating the quest not as a test of heroism, but as a long and uncertain process of inner formation. Parzival’s search for the Holy Grail is often misread as a hunt for a sacred object. In truth, it is a story about readiness, discernment, and the cost of borrowed certainty.
Early in his journey, Parzival reaches the Grail Castle itself. The thing he is seeking is already before him, yet he fails to ask the question that matters. He has learned the rules of knighthood too literally, mistaking obedience for wisdom, and so remains silent in the presence of suffering. His failure is not cruelty or cowardice, but immaturity.
He is still performing a role rather than inhabiting his own judgment. The Grail is present, but inaccessible, not because it is hidden, but because Parzival is not yet capable of recognising what he is seeing or why it matters.
Only later, through years of wandering, disillusionment, and the gradual shedding of inherited scripts, does he learn that the Grail cannot be seized by force, cleverness, or purity. It is revealed when attention, humility, and responsibility align. That feels uncomfortably relevant right now in a world of corporate hierarchies. In a year constructed almost entirely of stories, and in a world where technology can generate endless images, narratives, and plausible answers on demand, the challenge lies not in supplying answers but in finding meaning and learning discernment.
Not knowing what to say, but knowing when to speak.
Perhaps the lesson for us as individuals is that our Holy Grail is not certainty, success, or even truth, but the capacity to recognise what genuinely matters to us, and to ask the right question when the moment quietly demands it.
As the year draws to a close, these stories have stayed with me.
Stories are not entertainment layered on top of reality. They are one of the primary ways we decide what reality is. We borrow them, inhabit them, and repeat them. Over time, they shape what feels possible, permissible, or inevitable. The difficulty is that stories persuade before they are true, and in a year saturated with narratives, images, and ready made explanations, it has become harder to notice which ones we are allowing to do our thinking for us.
Information alone is not enough. We need conversation, particularly in small, trusted groups, where stories can be spoken aloud, tested against experience, and allowed to loosen their grip if they do not hold. Sensemaking is a social act. Meaning emerges not from consumption, but from dialogue in spaces where trust exists, where reciprocation matters, and where our reputation rests on a genuine precommitment to others.
In 2026, The Athanor will be my attempt to create such a space. A deliberately held container for the alchemy of conversation, where the task is not to replace one dominant story with another, but to share our stories to create something closer to our own grounded truth.
In my year commencement review on Friday, I will look forward to 2026 and consider how we might go about shaping the stories we choose to live by.
Finally, my thanks to you for being with me during 2025. I find writing itself a pleasure, and you taking the time to read what I do, gratifying.
As 2026 unfolds, communication, in every form, is going to be essential if we are to take the opportunities that it presents rather than succumb to its apparent threats. I look forward to exploring it with you and wishing you a peaceful, happy, and prosperous year.
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New Artisans - On the role of craft in a world of technology.
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