2024 Annual Letter
Year in review and aims for 2025
Conversion
When people think about conversion experiences, they often picture something akin to Paul on the road to Damascus. In the biblical account, Saul was a member of the Pharisees a Jewish sect that was persecuting Christians. One day, after Jesus's crucifixion, Saul encounters a vision of Jesus while on the road to Damascus. The vision confronts him about his persecution of Christians and Saul is struck blind. A few days later one of Jesus' apostles visits Saul to give him the Holy Spirit at which point the “scales fell from Saul's eyes” and he became a baptized Christian.
Following this experience, Saul - renamed Paul - became Christianity's most prominent evangelist, spreading the faith and planting churches throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean. And, the letters he wrote during this period now form the bulk of the New Testament.
This kind of dramatic, overnight transformation is what many imagine when they think of conversion. A lightning strike following which nothing remains the same. While such profound experiences do of course occur, for most people conversion isn't so clean or sudden. There can be moments of profound realization, but transformation usually takes time.
In my very early twenties, I experienced a religious conversion, though I lacked the words to fully describe it at the time. I was struggling with several behavioural issues that caused me serious difficulty - smoking, drinking, undisciplined approaches to work, career, and school. All of these culminated in me being suspended from school for a year. At the start of that period away I had an intense religious experience. Following the experience nothing was immediately different (in fact in most ways my life got a lot worse) but slowly I began to change. It took a year before I was noticeably better, and many years for the conversion to fully take effect. But it is crystal clear in retrospect how this experience marked a clear moment of turning from one direction to another.
This past year, I've been contemplating what it means to actively seek conversion. My first conversion was thrust upon me unexpectedly. I wasn't searching for it and couldn't have anticipated how it would transform my character and life. It's only looking back that I can make sense of the changes.
In recent years, I've felt a yearning for another conversion - a turn toward a more profound vision of my life. But a conversion involves something external overwhelming you - an apparition, vision, feeling, or dream that grips you and fundamentally changes who you are. You have to acquiesce to the change but in many ways it happens against your will. By definition, it's not something you can manufacture from within your current self. This creates a dilemma.
What could it even mean to yearn for a conversion? I’m not sure, but my hope is that by naming this desire and beginning to contemplate what such an experience might entail, I can create space for it to occur or at least come to understand better what I’m looking for.
In another way though this question of conversion is clarifying as it highlights some of the limitations of current self-help culture. At New Year's, people set resolutions - go to the gym, eat healthier, read more etc. - then they try to pursue these goals with a kind of dogged self-control. This discipline sometimes works but the prevalence of lapsed gym memberships in February reveals how we struggle to create lasting transformation. People want to change, but simply stating intentions and muscling through with willpower for a few days doesn't transform them at their core.
Yet we also know profound change is possible. Current psychedelic research has documented pretty conclusively how a single dose of psilocybin, especially when accompanied by a religious experience, can create profound changes in character, personality traits, and behavior - changes reported by both the individuals and their friends and family for months or even years afterward.
Self-help culture is oriented to the creation of a new lifestyle but it often fails to adequately address this deeper potential for transformation. The evidence for free will at a procedural level is overwhelming1. We have the capacity to choose to be different, to have different concerns. We are not slaves to our tendencies, histories, traumas, or nature and the ways that they conflict with our highest potential. This recognition isn't found in setting goals and being disciplined, but in a profound transformation of character. This is why conversion remains so tantalizing and curious.
If I had one question this year, it would be: What does it mean to seek conversion? And as a follow on: What does that mean for how we should pursue our goals?
Professional Growth and Projects
2024 was a year of significant transition. After just over half a decade working at Tim Hortons, I left to explore the next chapter of my career and life. I spent much of the year attending events, meeting people, and making new friends. I learned a great deal about Toronto and about what seems to really matter to me right. I looked carefully and I wandered. As part of that I started several projects:
Skillful Notes
I started a new Substack called Skillful Notes where I am writing case studies on how people, organizations, countries, and our civilization become competent. I released 12 episodes, exploring topics from the Bauhaus to Brian Eno as well as an in-depth look at the structure of apprenticeships. Though I slowed down toward year's end, this project remains deeply meaningful to me and will undoubtedly continue.
Public Lectures and The Toronto Society
I began giving public lectures, something I hadn't previously considered. I spoke to audiences of about 50 people on topics including tacit knowledge, the improving mentality, value capture, and my favourite - the philosophy of Mòzǐ. You can listen to this last one here:
This experience has sparked a deeper interest in lectures as a medium for education and building intellectual community. The lecture is this strange blend of theatre, education, and performance art and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what the medium can achieve.
Building on the momentum from these first four experiments I've organized a five-week lecture series in Toronto called The Viaduct, bringing together five of the smartest and most articulate speakers I know to discuss topics from housing to world-building to Toronto's founding myth.
If you’re in the city you should come check it out. The first lecture is this Wednesday with Eric Lombardi talking about How Toronto’s Housing Crisis Ends.
These lectures are part of a project I’m calling The Toronto Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. A new educational institute to help build a skilled, knowledgeable, creative, and effective Toronto ecosystem. I have a few more schemes in the works here including seminars and other events. If you want to follow along you can check out the X or Instagram pages.
Accountability Project
One of the the exciting developments came very late in the year, sparked by a tweet from Shane Parrish and Harley Finkelstein about creating greater transparency and efficiency in the Canadian government. Given our challenges with the misallocation and misappropriation of funds, there's a need for something akin to a Department of Government Efficiency to hold both federal and provincial governments accountable.
I partnered with Melody Kuo to propose a Radical Accountability Project. The structure (and name!) here isn't finalized, but we've committed to exploring how to improve Canadian government efficiency and effectiveness at the start 2025. To begin with that just means learning from people though eventually we expect it to turn into some real initiatives. With an election likely approaching, this timing feels crucial. A new government may offer opportunities for reset and policy changes, but won't solve everything. Now is the time to develop civic society initiatives to help our upcoming government and all future governments thrive.
Learning from Setbacks
Those were some of the successes from the year but I also want to be honest about some failures. Midway through the year, I explored creating a new magazine called Calibre - a collection of stories about craftsmanship and excellence. The concept was to take a broad definition of craftsmanship and examine everything from luxury handbag creation to nuclear power plant operations and effective interventions in Alcoholics Anonymous. The timing felt right - people are craving understanding of true craftsmanship, especially as they grapple with what it means to work with new tools like LLMs, and there's renewed interest in print media after its 20-year lull during the internet's expansion.
However, I learned that such a venture requires substantial financial backing and has a low chance of meaningful economic upside. While the initial explorations suggested funding might be possible, it became clear this wasn't feasible. I've put the project on pause, though I still believe in the concept and may revisit it when circumstances align better.
I also attempted to launch a seminar on the philosophy of progress, a topic I've thought about a lot since the progress studies movement first started to build steam in 2019. I was pleased with the syllabus and launch but I made some tactical errors. I assumed we would need special logistics - like a retreat with a rented cabin - to appeal to people which drove costs up significantly.
I got a lot of feedback on this and eventually decided to restructure the offer to only include the content at $400. But, my mixed messaging on the offer and a few basic marketing funnel mistakes limited the number of people that applied. I was also unable to secure any of the grants I was hoping to get for the course which meant it was financially risky. So in the end I couldn’t run it this spring as originally planned. That said, I now have a meaningful pool of interested participants and look forward to relaunching the course to be run in Fall.
I had some non-public setbacks as well but because I never talked about them I’d rather let sleeping dogs lie. At the risk of being cryptic though I do want to say thank you to Alex Tribe. It was so much fun working together last year. I learned a lot. You’re a hero.
Travel and Personal Growth
This year I traveled to Japan, New York, and San Francisco. For the last of these trips I was privileged to attend
’s progress conference - an exceptional event.
I also began hiking with Daisy, who's now old enough and well-behaved enough for longer walks (though she still enjoys sampling grass and twigs).
Near the beginning of In 2024, I started taking photos in a consistent way. I began by just using my phone more intentionally and eventually upgraded to a Fujifilm X100V.
I post photos from walks around the city of Toronto every few days on X, and over the course of the year I feel I've gotten much better at selecting my subjects, framing them up, and starting to tell a bit of a story with the photos that I take. I’m looking forward to improving this practice. I think this is my favourite photo from the last year.
Looking Forward to 2025
As I promised starting in 2022 I have some goals for the year but I won’t commit to too much publicly but one thing I can say is that looking ahead to 2025, I'm going to implement better systems for tracking and reflecting on my reading. While I read roughly 50 books annually, I've never maintained consistent records or notes to track my learning and growth. I'm starting a Goodreads account to address this. If you’re interested you can follow along here: My Goodreads Bookshelf.
If 2024 was a year of wandering then I hope, in the classic Amazonian pairing, 2025 can be a year of invention. I have some real clarity around what I want to invest in with The Toronto Society, the accountability project and a couple other large projects that I committed to towards the end of 2024 but am not ready to announce yet. It will be good to have a few clear things to put my back into.
My future is still uncertain. I can’t say that I know with total clarity what any of these projects will look like 12 months from now and this personal experience of uncertainty seems to reflect the macro situation. We're living in a time of profound change and discomfort. As the Collison brothers noted in the 2022 Stripe Annual Letter, new alien technologies have landed among us and are profoundly reshaping what it means for us to learn, communicate, and work. At the same time political division is creating additional complexity. Canada had a particularly rocky 2024 and the outlook for 2025 seems likely to be typified by our Prime Minister's resignation this morning and the announcement of almost another half year of lacklustre governance.
But the future remains bright. It is in times like this that we are given the most profound opportunities for personal and communal growth. I am excited for the adventure.
As always, thank you for being a subscriber and an attentional investor in my work. If you ever have any feedback, if anything I write about sparks an idea for you, or you just want to chat about something please reach out! You can send me a note to ben@benparry.ca or DM me on Twitter. I would love to hear from you.
If you’re interested, here are letters from previous years:
2023 Letter
2022 Letter
2021 Letter
These are the images on my moodboard going into 2025: Moodboard
And it doesn’t even matter if you don’t believe this. It’s the only approach to life that works.
Perhaps it's worthwhile to consider a very different kind of conversion story told in the bible. Instead of a dramatic, sudden revelation like Paul experienced, Nicodemus—who was also a Pharisee—is shown to be someone who comes to follow Jesus gradually—starting with quiet inquiries, growing in sympathy to Jesus' message, and ultimately culminating in a public declaration of faith.
came for the reflection, stayed for The Daisy