The Ego Death, The Stats, and The Soundtrack of a Ghost: Why I’m Skipping a Traditional Resolution for an Exorcism December 2025

“I don’t think only reflecting once a year about things is helpful.”

I So, I found this note on my phone from last year – December 22, 2024. I was reflecting on 2024, and it's funny, because now I find it hilarious. Here I am, exactly a year later, doing the very thing I used to knock. But, after looking at all the data I've been tracking for the past year, I think my past self had a point. These yearly reflections often turn into performance art—a way to look good and signal virtue to people we don't even know.

The Age of Disembodied Discourse

We are mimetic creatures. We adopt the behaviors of the people we believe ourselves to be like, or those we wish to be like. This is a remnant social behavior from our pre-modern days when tribes and clans - rather than institutions and governments - established our standards of decency. In those days, leadership roles were tangible and impressive. Even the smallest congressional district today has ten times the population of a pre-modern governance structure. We used to mimic leaders we could touch and see; today, we mimic ghosts in the machine (I think I use this metaphor way too often).

We are living in an age of disembodied discourse. This shift has allowed for rampant information asymmetry in a majority of our relationships. We draft blocks of text appealing to a diverse, invisible audience, which leads to ambiguity, hedging, and virtue signaling. It is, in essence, performance art.

I suppose navigating gay social circles necessarily leads to the adoption of these mannerisms that truly only exist online—or perhaps that is just the only place I’ve engaged in them. But the horror of parasociality bleeds into real life. It shows up in conversations with men I have crushes on, where I know too much because of this semi-public medium.

I should know better than to ask how the soup at Panera tasted because you posted a selfie with it two weeks ago. Let's be real: Bitch probably only goes to Panera once every seven months. But the cheap, useless information we get from these platforms distorts our reality. We take people's curated projections and project them onto ourselves in an effort to relate. Like a mirror's reflection, it seems real, but there is something off about it. It’s a funhouse mirror that we mistake for a window.

We gaze into this mirror, seeing distorted versions of success, intimacy, and happiness, and we adjust our own posture to match the reflection. We become actors in a play where the audience is also on stage. And in 2025, while I was busy trying to smash that mirror by quitting social media, I didn't realize I was still carrying a piece of the glass in my pocket.

The Erasure of Identity

If the internet is a funhouse mirror, 2025 was the year the lights turned on and showed the cracks in the glass. It was a long, drawn-out ego death.

It was represented largely by a job search that felt less like a hunt and more like a systematic dismantling of my self-worth. I kept the receipts, and they are demoralizing.

• 154 initial screening calls.

• 57 interviews beyond the first round.

• 1 finalized offer.

• 0.65% total success rate.

It took over 150 conversations to secure a finalized offer. In the nation’s capital, where status is the local currency and "What do you do?" is the second question asked at every happy hour, that kind of rejection is visceral. It forces you to recite your biography 154 times, only to be told it’s not quite right. It creates a dissonance between who you know you are and what the market says you are worth.

This, too, is a form of disembodied discourse. The automated rejection email, the ghosting after a third round, the feedback that never comes - it is all communication without connection.

The "Productive" Distraction

To cope with the silence of the inbox, I turned up the volume on everything else. I didn't squander my leisure time. If you looked at my spreadsheet, you’d think I was thriving.

I published 38 blog entries (34,000 words) and two massive Substack essays totaling 16,000 words on the decline of community and digital burnout. I read 18 books (mostly non-fiction, sociology, and history) trying to understand the invisible forces of grief and social structure. My reading list was a deliberate turn toward reality: The Art of Gathering, Superbloom, You’re Not Listening. I was trying to learn how to connect in an analog world.

I even quit the dopamine factories.

• Facebook: Clean for 96 days.

• Instagram: Deactivated (mostly) shortly after Facebook.

• Twitter: Long gone since 2020.

I replaced doom-scrolling with square dancing (DC Lambda Squares), which offered a surprisingly profound metaphor: just listen and do what you're told. It was more fun than any bar or club, and a relief to surrender control. I leaned into the Highwaymen, finding that brotherhood isn't complicated - it's just showing up, paying your dues, and looking out for the guy next to you.

I did all the "right" things. I analyzed the data. I wrote the words. I showed up. But I failed the only goal that mattered.

The Anchor and the Ocean

I have had the same goal to limit "sad boy music" to just a couple of hours a week at the gym in both 2024 and 2025. I failed spectacularly.

Despite the intellectual "turn toward reality" in my reading list, my internal monologue was scored exclusively by Juice WRLD. My recap isn't just a playlist; it's an obsession.

YouTube Music:

1. WRLD Crash (Unreleased) prod Prathxm - Juice WRLD

2. Empty out your Pockets - Juice WRLD

3. Dark Inside (Unreleased) prod Colabeats - Juice WRLD

4. Couple Pills (Unreleased) prod Colabeats - Juice WRLD

5. Empty ft. XXXTentacion (Unreleased/Remix) prod Prathxm - Juice WRLD

6. Wishing Well (Unreleased/OG Version) - Juice WRLD

7. Dance in the Moonlight (Unreleased/Remix) - Juice WRLD

8. Runaround (Unreleased) prod RexVZ - Juice WRLD

9. I Don’t Know Who I Am Anymore (Unreleased) prod RexVZ - Juice WRLD

10. Too Close (Unreleased) prod ColaBeat - Juice WRLD

10. Beautiful Pain (Unreleased) prod Xina - Juice WRLD

Spotify Music

1. Fading Away (Unreleased) prod Berouw - Juice WRLD

2. Misfit - Juice WRLD

3. Goodbye - The Kid Laroi

4. AGATS2 (Insecure) [with Nicki Minaj] -Juice WRLD, Nicki Minaj

5. Best Friend (with Fall Out Boy) - Juice WRLD, Fall Out Boy

6. McLaren Drive (Unreleased) - Juice WRLD

7. It’s All My Fault (Unreleased) - Juice WRLD

8. Starstruck (Unreleased) - Juice WRLD

9. Adore You - Juice WRLD

10. Cold Blood (Unreleased) - Juice WRLD

SoundCloud

1. Sprite Dirty (Unreleased) - Juice WRLD

2. I Had Some Help (feat. Morgan Wallace) - Post Malone

3. La-Di-Da (Unreleased) - Juice WRLD

4. Thankfully (Unreleased) prod Max Chris - Juice WRLD

5. Cali Walking (Unreleased) - Juice WRLD

6. Drowning ft. Taylor Swift (Unreleased) - Juice WRLD

7. Cali Girl… Where are you? (Unreleased) - Juice WRLD

8. AP Tik Tok (Unreleased) - Juice WRLD

9. Murakami (Unreleased) - Juice WRLD

10. Lonely Road (Unreleased) - Juice WRLD

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    For a long time, I judged myself for this. I saw it as a regression. But looking back at the brutality of 2025, I need to be gentler with myself, and more grateful to the artist. Juice WRLD was prolific He spent his days living in the studio, churning out thousands of tracks, articulating a specific kind of pain that I didn't have the vocabulary for. When the rejection emails piled up and the loneliness of my circumstances engulfed me, his voice was the only thing that made sense.

His music acted as an anchor. When the storm was raging, when the waves of "ego death" threatened to capsize me, that heavy, dark, familiar sound held me in place. It kept me from drifting into the abyss. It provided a fixed point of empathy when I felt entirely misunderstood by the "disembodied discourse" of the world.

But an anchor is only useful during the storm.

If you leave the anchor down when the skies clear, when the wind picks up and invites you to sail, that same tool of safety becomes a tool of stagnation. The storm of 2025 is passing. I have the job. I have the community. I have the words. We are not in stormy waters anymore. The ship is ready to move, but I can feel the drag of the chain.

The Antithesis Project

So, I am honoring that note from 2024. I am rejecting the "New Year's Resolution" in favor of a gratitude ritual. I am not exorcising Juice WRLD; I am thanking him.

My course of action is to hoist the anchor. I plan to go through my top tracks—the Runarounds, the WRLD Crashes, the Misfits—and identify the themes that held me together when I was falling apart. Then, I will find a song from a different artist that embodies the antithesis of each track. I plan to document this process, one song a day.

There will always be space for Juice in my life's soundtrack. He saved me when I needed saving. But you don't keep the life vest on once you've reached the shore. It’s time to cut the anchor, thank the harbor that sheltered me, and finally, after a year of treading water, start to sail.