This whole exercise began on New Year’s morning when I was scrolling through my camera roll, looking for a picture. As I went through the years, I noticed that there were times when I would take pictures every single day, and then there would be a gap of a week or more between pictures. That bugged me. I thought it would be very satisfying to scroll through my camera roll at the end of the year and not see any gaps.

So, I made a decision, on New Year’s morning, to take at least one picture every day in 2025, and then I proceeded to spend the rest of the day not taking any pictures or videos. And it’s not like I didn’t have things to take pictures of either. We drove down to Redondo Beach that day to stay for the rest of the week. It was an absolutely beautiful, perfectly clear, sunny winter day at the beach. I should have taken loads of pictures, but I didn’t take a single one all day long. In fact, I didn’t take any pictures until the sun went down, which may have been exactly the catalyst I needed to make this exercise work.

One of the things I learned over the course of the last year is that if the goal is to take a picture every day and write at least a short blurb about it, something can be found to take a picture of every day. It was easy on days when I was doing something exciting or interesting, but some days, on the other hand, just don’t need to be documented.

There have been days when I haven’t done anything noteworthy, but because of the daily blog, I forced myself to find something to take a picture of. Some of those days, I’m quite proud of what I was able to come up with, but most of them would have been better off forgotten. The hardest days were when I sat at my computer from the time I got up in the morning until I went to bed at night. Sure, I could have posted a selfie at my computer on those days, but had I done that, the majority of this blog would have been selfies of me at my computer, so I had to get inventive. 

Now that this challenge is over, however, I will not be so inventive because this experiment reaffirmed what I already knew: quality is better than quantity. I would rather scroll through my camera roll or this blog and see great pictures with weeks or months gaps between them than see daily slop posts. Plus, posting every day kept me from publishing posts I really wanted to post because I didn’t have time to focus on more than one post per day. Most days, anyway. 

I don’t know exactly what was going through my mind one year ago, but this wasn’t the only daily challenge I gave myself. I think I was trying to cultivate a strict routine or looking for comfort in predictability. In addition to the daily picture and blog post, I also listened to a song every day in 2025 in an attempt to be the #1 listener on Spotify, but I came up short. I ended up being #2,686. Not even close. There were other things, too. I’ve been keeping a daily journal since 2020, I check into my city every morning on Swarm, I record the time the sun sets and rises every day, and I give my mother-in-law her pills at 10 a.m. and 10 p.m., seven days a week. 

I think I went overboard on my daily habits, though. By mid-August, I was starting to feel burned out by it all. When Spotify dropped my Wrapped at the beginning of December, I was so relieved to finally be free of that stupid song. It felt like a weight had been lifted, and I began looking forward to the end of the month, today to be precise, when I could end this stupid daily blog post challenge. A few days before Christmas, I forgot to check into my city on Swarm. I had been using Swarm since 2012, checking in everywhere I go, but when I blew a 196-day streak, I said, “Fuck it,” and I stopped checking in anywhere. I almost never leave the house during the week, and on the weekend, I only ever go to the same three or four stores, so checking in at the same places had become a depressing bore. 

So, beginning tomorrow, I’ll have one less daily task to do, and as a new year begins, I will not be creating any new challenges for myself. Instead, I will focus only on quality projects that I care about, and I will execute them to the best of my ability. If I end up with gaps in my camera roll, so be it. Every day doesn’t need to be remembered, and most are forgettable. That’s what makes the memorable ones so special.

Still, I’m glad I did this. I started a year-long challenge, and saw it through to the very end. It may have been totally pointless, profitless, and a complete waste of time, but I feel like I accomplished something nonetheless.

Happy New Year!