Thorne Wolfenbarger - Blog

2024 In Review

Thorne Wolfenbarger -

Follow up on "2023: Reflections and Looking Forward".

This is the year I became a reader, writer, poet, and meditator on love. I took an ~6 month break from personal programing projects. 2024 was about the same as 2023, earning it a tie for "best year of my life".

Books

Audiobooks (reverse chronological):

  • A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
  • Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
  • Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
  • A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
  • The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami
  • After the Quake by Haruki Murakami
  • Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
  • Blue Nights by Joan Didion
  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  • My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
  • The White Album by Joan Didion
  • Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion
  • What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz
  • Start with Why by Simon Sinek
  • Good to Great by Jim Collins
  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
  • The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen

Kindle (reverse chronological):

  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
  • Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
  • The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
  • Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.
  • The Trial (Original 1925 Edition) by Franz Kafka
  • The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
  • After Dark by Haruki Murakami
  • Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright
  • The Trial by Franz Kafka
  • Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
  • A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
  • Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
  • Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Physical:

  • Madness & Civilization by Michael Foucault
  • The Maid by Nita Prose

January

My new year's resolution was to do no personal programming for 3 months. I decided to supplant programming with reading. I made reading my main hobby for January-March. This 3 month no coding goal ends up extending to nearly 6 months.

February

Repeated the previous year's BHM practice of only listening to black musicians for the month. I write my first poetry here.

March

Nothing particular of note.

April-June

I pick up my pace of writing. I work on essays, short stories, poems. I spend a lot of time meditating on love.

July-September

I pick up coding again. A friend and I sprint towards our next great startup idea and burn out due to poor scope specifications and a lack of industry understanding.

October

I relax. My girlfriend and I start looking for new housing. We gather a large group of friends to all travel to Phoenix AZ and rent an AirBnB together. We have a great time.

November

I relax.

December

I take some time off to have a 2 week break for the holidays. I complete "Objects of Focus", my first poetry collection.

"Objects of Focus" - Also available at https://poetry.thornewolf.com/

Conclusion

Much is left unsaid. I carry anything remaining in my heart. I wish I had written more. I wish I had read more. I wish I engaged with the world more. Though I feel satisfied with what I did do.

I matured a lot over this year. Surprisingly, this maturity made me more in touch with my emotions - I felt more.

Postscript

I wrote the above post in its entirety before I re-reviewed my 2023 reflection post. Reviewing the final paragraph of last year's post:

I'll turn 25 next year. I want to relax. I want to focus on creating things that have no goal other than to make something I find beautiful. No ideas of money, clout, or influence. Maybe I just want to have control over my emotions.

I'm very happy to see that I achieved the goals I set out for myself at the beginning of the year. I'm looking forward to next year again! My focus will be creating more beautiful things and sharing them with my community. The focus this year is to embody what it means to be a tinkerer.