A look back at 2024

I spent 2024 recovering in a pit of despair.

The year before had been brutal on my business. Our customers were struggling, so we were too.

I had spent years working up to being a full-time business owner–something I’d been dreaming of for most of my professional life. And in 2021, I left my comfortable job at Stripe to go all-in on a business my wife and I started two years before.

It was an exciting time. We landed our largest customer, and the checks were in the mail. Even better, word was spreading of our little company, and new leads were coming in regularly. We hired folks to help us deliver our services while I spent most of my time writing software to make the team more efficient. There was enough work and money to go around. It was easily the most exciting year I had ever worked anywhere. It was a dream come true.

Then 2023 happened. I started to notice that many of our customers–and businesses across our market–were no longer hiring. The dependency we had on them doing so became clear as time rolled on. A few months later, our market experienced a massive wave of layoffs. Entire genetic-based organizations shut down. Our customers were affected across the board. When the music stopped, we didn’t have enough work for our contractors and had to reduce hours for our employees. 2023 was a battle, but we survived.

In the middle of that year, I started looking for other opportunities. My savings were dwindling, and I needed to find something to stop the bleeding. I started looking for the right opportunity: a friend working on a startup, another looking for a contractor. Later, I started looking for full-time jobs, even part-time roles. Nothing panned out. Before I knew it, it was November. After receiving two rejection letters on Thanksgiving morning, I gave up looking for jobs. By the end of the year, I decided I was done with trying to find a job as a programmer.

By early 2024, the market’s downturn started to slow. Things were stabilizing, but we weren’t out of the woods yet. I had to find another way to close the gap, but that’s when I faced a new problem: analysis paralysis.

The first half of 2024 felt like I was grasping at straws, hoping that something would take. Nothing did, and I began to feel hopeless. I found myself lacking any desire to do anything with my career. I no longer wanted to write code or run a business–two things that had been a massive part of my identity for longer than I could remember.

Some people call this burnout, others a mid-life crisis. I call it depression–a feeling of drowning without the will to reach for the surface.

The only thing that kept me from going under completely was my family. I joined a local community theatre group, started regularly hanging out with friends in person, read more books than I ever have, wrote and journaled ferociously, and started fiddling on the piano. These things kept my spirit alive and made one of the fiercest periods of my life bearable.

Stress and anxiety kill creativity. But does that go the other way? Can creativity strike back and be the one to kill stress and anxiety? Every time I write or play the piano or act on stage or laugh over some drinks with a few good friends, the weight of everything–while not entirely gone–feels less heavy.

Over the course of 2024, I began to feel the burden of my depression easing up–slowly. I took on a freelance gig and made peace with my career choices.

As the year went on, our business started doing better. People started reaching out again. And little by little, our revenue started growing. In December, we got word that a prospect had the budget to work with us in 2025, with enough new business to propel us into the new year.

I get to live and fight another day. But before I can, I must choose which life to live, and which battle to fight.

I spent most of last year in analysis paralysis. I struggled to choose a path because I kept worrying about the future. But worrying about the future comes at the expense of enjoying the present. I have no doubt, had I been more present last year, I would have improved my situation much, much sooner. So, I decided to move on, to choose, and to bear the philosophy of crossing that bridge when we get there.

I don’t have a full roadmap for 2025, but I do know what I’m working on next, or rather, now in the present. I’ll be writing more about that here on my blog. If any of this resonates with you, reach out and let me know. I’d love to connect.