I turned 60 last week. The "round" birthdays always have a bigger psychological impact, and at the age of 60 one has to stop pretending that one is still middle-aged, and accept the fact that one is old now. Even the eternal optimists that say that you are only as young as you feel would have to admit that at least the perception of others is that I am old now. My employer certainly thinks I am old, so they offered me over two years ago an early retirement plan. In this new year that plan is going to end, and I will officially retire and receive a state pension. Which, admittedly, at 60 is relatively early, compared to the official retirement age. That results in me receiving a lower state pension than if I had worked until that official retirement age, but years of savings from me and my wife make that financially possible without hardship. Of course, retirement is always a financial risk, as nobody knows how long he will live, nor how much health care he will need. But the most likely scenario is me looking forward to 20+ years of comfortable retirement before I keel over. As they say, old age isn't so bad, if you consider the alternative.

I can afford retirement because I had a job for several decades that was both interesting and well-paid. It was also stressful. Many people want to make a career, but there is a vague and totally wrong impression that making a career means getting paid better for no sacrifice. In general, making a career means your employer paying you better in exchange for you taking on more responsibility. Some people are able to laugh off that responsibility, but I was raised to take responsibilities very seriously. You can't be responsible for a multi-million dollar budget and for people working for you, without your decisions affecting people's lives. And there were other responsibilities in my job, like having to speak publicly, and traveling a lot, which came with their own contributions to stress.

You might remember that about 5 years ago, a pandemic broke out. For me, that resulted in a weird timing effect: Working from home, and no more business travel, made my job less stressful to me in a first step, and before the end of the pandemic fully reversed that, the early retirement further reduced my level of stress in a second step. Today, I am significantly more relaxed than I was 5 or 10 years ago. I still have in the back of a drawer a bunch of both actual pills and food supplements that are supposed to help with anxiety and similar problems, but I don't need those anymore. I would say that my mental health has improved, even if my problems were never really serious. I believe a lot of people suffer from some degree of stress, anxiety, and depression in their daily lives, and often that is simply a consequence of their circumstances and problems, rather than a purely medical problem.

On this New Year's Day 2025, my outlook for the year is relaxed. Maybe age does bring some wisdom, or it is simply a growing resistance to both panic and hype, the twin fuels of the internet. Among the people on the internet that are interested in similar games than I am, there is for example a strong hype for the upcoming Civilization VII game. I don't feel that hype. It is extremely likely that I will play this game, and I might even buy it at launch because the price is unlikely to go down fast. But I have enough experience with 4X games and the gaming industry in general to consider the possibility that Civilization VII will probably have some problems at launch, and that years from now people will consider Civ7 unplayable without the DLCs that released only later. With hype being so overused in the marketing of triple-A games (not to mention the "quadruple-A" game of last year), disappointment at launch is basically baked into the system. On the positive side, I am also not subscribing to the various predictions of doom for 2025, be it in politics, economics, or gaming. All I see is pendulums slowly swinging, and even if I don't necessarily like the direction in which some of them are swinging now, I am certain that they'll swing back the other way come time.

I wish all of my readers an equally relaxed 2025. I'm sure it isn't going to be as bad as some people might want to make you think. Just realize that much of the doom is clickbait, created for financial advantage. And even if 2025 is also not going to be as good as some people might want to make you think, for exactly the same reasons, I am certain that there will be a lot of good stuff happening in 2025.