Rather than set new year’s resolutions, I prefer yearly themes. A resolution usually has specific goals, like reading 20 books. If you “only” read 19 of them, you might consider your year a failure. But by all accounts, your year was successful; you read nearly as much as you wanted!
If you had instead done a “Year of Reading”, you’d come out feeling great about yourself. That’s the key idea: set direction for yourself, not goals you can fail. That’s not to say you can’t grade yourself on the results, but not doing enough of the correct things shouldn’t be considered a failure.
CGP Grey popularized the idea, which he explains in more detail here:
For years, my wife and I have decided on a yearly theme for the both of us. We’ve had a number of long-term projects in flight for longer than we’d want, so we decided 2025 was the year of finishing what we started. Not to spoil things, but it was a smashing success!
To celebrate and document what was probably our best year in a while, I’ve decided to write a post about each project. This is the first of 5 and you can see the whole series here:
This post is part of a series detailing our 2025 yearly theme: Finishing What We Started. They're best read in order, but each post stands on its own.
- Finishing What We Started <-- you are here
Appreciating What I’ve Got
My first project for the year was a little more abstract: letting gaming subscriptions lapse. I talked about it in last year’s media review:
Having 2 subscription services plus 3 consoles and a PC meant I felt stretched pretty thin. I liked being able to try games risk-free and I did get a lot of value from them — about half of the games below were from those subscriptions. But any time I was playing a game on one service, I felt like my subscription to the other was going to waste. To that end, I’m making two changes during 2025:
- Buying 0 new games
- Letting my PS+ and GamePass subscriptions lapse (in February and May respectively)
Instead of paying for a constant stream of new games, I wanted to finish playing the games I had already paid for (and save some money in the process).
Broadly, this went really well! Both the subscriptions lapsed and I don’t really miss them; at no point did I feel like there wasn’t anything to play.
The buying zero games went pretty well. I spent $0 on games until November, when I picked up a couple of Steam keys I’d had my eye on. But, I also participated in the Tildes Game Giveaway and asked family for a few titles as holiday gifts (not even mentioning a steady stream of free games from various PC storefronts). In the end, I ended the year with more to-play games than I started with. But at least it didn’t cost me anything! I liked playing what I had though, so I’ll continue to avoid buying games in 2026.
On top of that, I was sent review copies of 12 games to write long reviews for. While these didn’t cost me any money, they did take time to play and write about. I enjoyed most of the games so it didn’t feel like time wasted, but that much writing & editing definitely took time away from games. Next year, I’ll be a little more judicious about what I take on.
Overall, I’m really happy with how this went. My gaming life felt less frantic and I got to revisit some older games that I wouldn’t have wanted to before.
Stay tuned to see what else we took on this year and how it went!