2025 Letter
Year in review and thoughts for 2026
A late reflection on the past year (it’s almost a week past Plough Monday!)
Purpose
At the beginning of last year I asked for a conversion. I could sense I needed a new orientation and I was eager to discover what it might be. At the time I imagined this might look like some kind of intense experience. I wrote:
A conversion involves something external overwhelming you — an apparition, vision, feeling, or dream that grips you and fundamentally changes who you are.
Well, it wasn’t what I expected but I got what I asked for.
In 2025 I found the love of my life, asked her to marry me, and she said yes.
Sherry is the most pure-hearted, whimsical, gentle, and beautiful person that I have ever known. Her writing is magnificent. She plays the piano with soul. Every day she makes me laugh and wonder, and teaches me more about what it means to be human.
It is almost a cliché to ask for a sign from the heavens. But it makes sense why it is so desirable. A sign can revivify your spirit. It is motivating, inspiring, and clarifying. All emotions that can help you carry on day-to-day to feel better.
It is another thing, though, to be transformed by something that is unambiguously in the world. A spirit that is also flesh and blood. Sherry gave me an answer to a question I didn’t know I had about who I was meant to live my life with.
To be intended for another is a kind of conversion that is concrete, directed, and continuous. It is a purpose.
I wonder what else in life is like this? In our society the idea of a purpose is often considered childish, quaint, even anachronistic. Life is deemed too complex and too impersonal for us to have a calling. We want clarity about what we should do in the same breath as we decry the idea that the universe wants something from us.
If we do take ideas around purpose seriously, it’s always in the context of work, achievement or some kind of utilitarian outcome. We have internalized Nietzsche’s and Rand’s stance that it is the achievement of the goals we set to change things out there that will make us happy.
“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
“The moral purpose of a man’s life is the achievement of his own happiness”
—Ayn Rand
This can be compelling. But it is a limited answer to the question of why. Purpose can’t emerge out of yourself alone. If it could, then it would be endlessly mutable. Instead, purpose comes from a responsibility to something else. Another person, the world — perhaps even God Himself. When you have a purpose, the question changes from which thing is best for you to simply what is best.
The scary thing about this is that a purpose has real demands and there’s no backing out. You can’t change your mind about purpose because it wasn’t something you made up your mind about in the first place.
Maybe you have a responsibility to try for the best outcomes at your work even if it entails stress and risks. Maybe though you have a responsibility to do worse at your work because the job is morally grey. Maybe that person you’ve been dating is going to be the mother of your children. Maybe God will test you in ways you’d rather avoid. And — most anathema to our culture — maybe your purpose is in some dimension of life you hadn’t even considered before now.
These are some of the questions I am going to be considering going into the new year.
Projects
Alongside getting engaged this was a big year for a couple of projects.
First, in January, I helped launch Build Canada with Melody Kuo, Andrew Potter, Todd Scheidt, Brendan Samek, Lucy Hargreaves, and Dan Debow. Since then Zander Fraser has also joined the team.
Our aim was to try and use modern technology, our networks, charm, and a little bit of pluck to bring some new ideas to the Canadian political landscape and start to change the conversation to the bright future Canada could have as the most prosperous nation in the world.
I think we can simply say this was a massive success. The team launched products to publicize government finances, explain key elements of policy and help track progress towards important goals. We helped top Canadian entrepreneurs write almost 50 policy memos and a number of these ideas affecting billions of dollars of spending were picked up and implemented. We also galvanized a community of thousands, hosted meetups, ran reading groups, built open source projects, and more.
Along the way, I got to take a crash course in public policy, non-partisan engagement and the Canadian political system. I learned more than I ever could have imagined and I am incredible grateful for the experience.
Second, this year the The Toronto Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge became a real institution. I hosted almost 2000 people across 10 lectures, a debate, a roundtable on religion, a film screening and half a dozen other events. I also partnered with Michelle Jia to create the best reading group in the city as part of an experiment in pursuing rigour and intellectual excellence.
I increasingly think of this project as an experiment in building a humanities-centred research and education institution outside of the research university. As Dan Wang put it in his letter this year: “We need to cultivate the skill of exact thinking in demented times.” 2025 proved to me that it’s possible to create a new civic institution that could actually help achieve this aim. Now that I know this is possible I feel we are just getting started.
At the beginning of 2025 I could see a path forward for both of these experiments. As with all things the final outcome looked different to what I might have guessed at the beginning but I am incredibly pleased with the results.
Going into 2026 the exact work I have ahead of me is not quite so clear. I’m dedicated to seeing just how far I can help push the creation of new economic, cultural and social institutions and have a few clear avenues to pursue that.
I also want to understand better the finer points of great craftsmanship. I am willing to take the bet that human skill will not be subsumed, supplanted or otherwise displaced wholesale by the advent of the current wave of AI tools, unless we let it. Nor, would it make human excellence any less meaningful if it did. So, I am excited to continue the pursuit of mastery.
In that regard, I’m going to return to Skillful Notes. Writing these essays in 2024 helped me set a new bar for learning and articulating what I had learned. It also gave me a set of ideas and tools that I have applied in my work ever since. I think turning back to this will bear much fruit.
Travel
I had a bunch of travel this year. This included many chances to visit NYC where Daniel Golliher showed me how to transform a political system, Andrew Rose showed me there is no upper limit to intentional community building, Coby Lefkowitz blew my mind with a new understanding of the history of urbanism, Kasey Klimes taught me about how to honour friendship, family, craftsmanship and work, Jake Orthwein inspired me like he always does, and a long walk with Matthew Jordan helped me think much more clearly about the future.
Last year I also got to visit Vienna for the first time with Sherry (it’s where we got engaged). Vienna is a fascinating and glorious city. The aesthetics of endless detail, and shimmering gold confront you everywhere that you turn. The atmosphere it creates is one of near endless overwhelm and the grandeur of the human enterprise. yet this is also strangely out of place and time. Austria today is a country of just over 9 million people. It is hard to walk through such an environment without thinking deeply about how quixotic we really are, and what a delightful state it is to be in.
Reading
Last year I started a Goodreads account to track all my reading. At the time I said that I read about 50 books a year but I had never formally tracked it. Well last year I read 20 books…. I’m not sure if this was because I got busy with other things or I just have a hyper-inflated view of my reading habits but I hope this year will bring more chances to sit with the written word.
The best book I read was The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgement. It offered me multiple new dimensions for thinking about what exactly AI systems are doing and what it really means for a person to be “intelligent” and useful.
I am disappointed that I didn’t learn about Brian Cantwell Smith’s work before his passing earlier this year (though Jake Orthwein tried multiple times to properly turn me onto it). It would have been lovely to find some way to help him share his ideas with more people in Toronto.
His last book Computational Reflections is set to be published by MIT this year and it is billed as a full length treatment of the topics he started in The Promise of Artificial Intelligence.
Falling in love has taught me that you must let yourself be pulled. The world beyond you — the place where your calling lies — beckons and charms but it will never compel. You have to let go to the tug of that attraction.
What’s calling you?
Is 2026 the year you let it in?
Thank you. If there’s ever anything that you would like to talk with me about 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.
These are my letters from previous years:
2024 Letter
2023 Letter
2022 Letter
2021 Letter
Congratulations Benjamin! I’m so excited for you both!!!!
Congratulations and keep up the great work! Canada is a better place because of you.