“Monday 5 Things” ….. Of 2025 …..
December 29, 2025 by D. Paul Graham
Ever curious and always amused by the quirks of life, join D. Paul Graham each Monday for more M5T pondering.
“Coming Soon to a Life Near You” photo, D. Paul Graham
Each year leaves fingerprints everywhere on our lives. On our calendars, our conversations, our relationships, and our attention spans. 2025 was a year that promised efficiency and delivered exhaustion. A year that spoke fluently in acronyms, dashboards, and optimization, while quietly begging for meaning. Somewhere between the updates, the alerts, the quick wins, and very long thought-provoking pieces built on very short ideas, a few truths kept resurfacing. Not loudly. Not trendily. Just persistently. Like warm light streaming through the same window every day. This morning’s M5T looks back on a year of patterns that became impossible to ignore and five things 2025 made clearer than it probably intended to.
1. EFFICIENCY IS NOT THE SAME THING AS EFFECTIVENESS. Anno 2025 esteemed efficiency. Worshipped it, perhaps. Everything had to be faster, tighter, automated, optimized. If it couldn’t be measured, it was inaudibly mistrusted. If it couldn’t be graphed, it was politely ignored. And yet, somewhere along the way, the pursuit of efficiency led us into a Pluribus-like cul-de-sac.
We became remarkably good at doing more things quicker. More emails, more posts, more meetings, more multi-tasking, and more decisions. Productivity everywhere but progress became less certain. Speed began to masquerade as clarity. Motion pretended to be meaning. Activity stood in for purpose.
Effectiveness, alternatively, asks better questions before it builds better systems. It pauses. It listens. It resists the tyranny of “now.” It understands that the most durable work often looks inefficient at first; slow, quiet, even impractical, but leading to better decisions.
Questioning our actions revealed the uncomfortable truth that just because you can do something faster, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worth doing.
2. EVERYONE BECAME A BRAND. By 2025, branding was no longer optional. Everyone had a presence. A tone. A color palette. A content strategy. Even those people that insisted they “weren’t a brand” were, of course, brands. Just with worse fonts and less self-awareness.
We were told we had to show up authentically, which ironically produced an ocean of identical authenticity. The same looking captions. The same looking angles. The same looking posts. The same confessional vulnerability. All carefully choreographed and optimized for social media. All dutifully scheduled. What became evident this year was something quieter, almost rebellious. We recognized a cultivated sense of taste and restraint. The confidence to leave space for thought. The discipline not to explain everything or chase every algorithmic twitch. The willingness to let coherence do the heavy lifting. Truly distinctive voices chose mystery over messaging. Editing over oversharing. Intention over noise. Attention over acceleration. We realized this year, that originality doesn’t shout. It edits, choosing what to take out, with purpose and intention, leaving only what matters enough to endure.
3. AI DIDN’T REPLACE PEOPLE. IT EXPOSED THEM. 2025 was supposed to be the year AI took everything over. Instead, it mostly rearranged the furniture and asked a few uncomfortable questions. Who thinks? Who exercises judgment? Who knows when something is finished? Automation didn’t eliminate creativity. It raised the bar for it, uncovering cleverness and imagination. AI tools got smarter, faster, and cheaper. Conversely, AI output only got better when a human with taste, intention, thought, and an actual point of view was still in the loop and in control. Templates multiplied. Unexceptional scaled exponentially. Average and mediocrity became frictionless and accepted as the norm. Discernment meanwhile has become uncommon, exceptional, and ultimately more valuable. Taste has become a competitive advantage. Judgment a differentiator. Knowing what not to do may become more important than knowing what the tools can do. The real divide isn’t human versus machine. It has become thoughtful versus thoughtless.
4. LUXURY QUIETLY CHANGED ITS ADDRESS. Luxury used to announce itself loudly and, at times, obnoxiously. In 2025, it purposefully slipped out the side door. Luxury became time. Margin. White space between commitments. A calendar that could finally breathe. A well-made thing that didn’t need to shout to explain itself or prove anything.
Luxury looked like leaving early. Like saying no without a story or explanation attached. Like choosing fewer things and choosing them well and deliberately. Excess grew exhausting. Subtlety became magnetic. In a culture addicted to scale, restraint is starting to feel almost rebellious.
5. KINDNESS BECAME UNEXPECTEDLY SUBVERSIVE. Somewhere along the way, kindness acquired a reputation problem. Kindness seemed inefficient, unstrategic, and difficult to measure. In a culture obsessed with optimization, kindness looked almost naïve. But in 2025, kindness quietly endured while everything else competed for our attention. Kindness revealed itself in listening without fixing. Disagreeing without performing. Letting people change without keeping score. Kindness didn’t trend. It didn’t optimize. It didn’t convert. But it outlasted most things that did. In a world obsessed with leverage, kindness refused to be leveraged at all, which ultimately may have been its greatest strength.
As we approach the end of 2025, if this year taught me anything, it’s that clarity ages better than cleverness, restraint outlives racket, and the most interesting people I know are no longer in a rush to prove they’re interesting. They’re deliberate, they’re paying attention, they’re present, they’re choosing carefully, and they’re leaving room for silence for what matters to them.
In the clamor of our world, I’m so grateful for each of you who make space for Monday 5 Things each week. Here’s to a 2026 shaped by fewer distractions, better questions, and the kind of space that allows the most important matters to rise to the surface of your life.
© 2025 D. Paul Graham, All Rights Reserved
Paul continues to seek better questions.
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