Rebirth: My 2024 Annual Review
A story of new beginnings, deeper connections, and finding home
Welcome back friends! As 2024 draws to a close, I’ve recently returned from a week in Sedona, AZ where I conducted my annual life review. I spent my mornings poring over journal entries and writing about my year while admiring the mesas from my Airbnb. In the afternoons, I’d hike up to Cathedral Rock or the Devil’s Bridge and fill a Field Notes pocket journal with the stray thoughts of my wandering mind. Finally, I’d end my nights with a nice dinner out and a relaxing movie.
(If you're curious about my review process, I shared my complete framework)
2024 was the kind of year that needed a bit of extra reflection. That needed me to escape my daily routines to truly process it. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that almost every part of my life has changed. By the end of my process, I felt clarity unlike I’ve ever felt before. As I put the finishing touches on my review, I walked around my house laughing. Not at any joke, just feeling joy emanating out of me uncontrollably.
This year was, without question, the best year of my life. By a lot. After a CHAOTIC 2023 marked by endings and tough decisions, 2024 emerged as a total reboot filled with new beginnings and transformations. Through those changes, I’ve reshaped my life into something so much better suited to my nature. I’ve healed deep wounds and found a more coherent purpose.
But enough with the conclusions, let’s get into the details!
2024 Recap
Leaving Baltimore
My story of 2024 really begins in mid 2023 when I made the decision to end my engagement with my partner of five years. That choice severed the last tether tying me to Baltimore. After seven years, Baltimore had become the place I’d lived longest in my entire life.
I loved parts of my life there, my house and my weekly movie club especially, but I wasn’t happy there. I hadn’t made a new friend there since pre-Covid and felt so far removed from the cultural vibrancy of the world I’d see on Twitter in cities like New York, Austin, and SF. I didn’t even like the food.
My dissatisfaction became a self-fulfilling prophecy as I gradually sank into myself. By the end, my life barely extended past the walls of my own house.
At the end of last year, I picked a date and hired movers. I planned on renting my house, so I spent the end of 2023 doing repairs and finding tenants. On February 2nd, I loaded my cats in the car and drove South.
Before arriving in Austin, I made a month long pit stop in New Orleans. I lived with my parents while I waited for my household goods to be shipped across the country. Catching multiple weeks of Mardi Gras was a nice bonus, but I struggled living in that “in-between” period. My old life was over, but I desperately wanted to start my new life.
Finding My Home in Austin
I arrived in Austin on Saturday February 24th. After unloading my air mattress and toiletries, I took my shoes off to recover from the drive and get ready for bed. Curiously, my socks started feeling wet. It turns out, my landlord’s unlicensed plumber had flooded the house earlier in the day and thought it was… fine? Not exactly the start I imagined! Despite living with an army of industrial fans and having an out of body experience in Costco as I attempted to buy my initial household provisions, something clicked almost immediately.
Austin and I just get along. The food, the weather, the people, the vibes, all of it just resonates with every fiber of my being. Moving here is already one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Every morning I wake up here feels like a gift.
The Social Renaissance
Perhaps my most dramatic transformation came in my social life. I arrived in Austin knowing precisely two people, my former coworker Mike and a fellow Heidelberg High School grad named Carrie. Today, I’d say I have an order of magnitude more friends than I’ve had at any other point in my life. I tried counting recently: I’ve made at least 30 genuine new friendships this year (not just acquaintanceships!), and if I count meaningful connections more broadly, that number is easily over 100.
But the number only tell part of the story. The real transformation was in my mindset and approach. I shifted from feeling constant anxiety about my friendships (or lack thereof) to experiencing true social abundance.
More importantly, I evolved from being a passive “social waiter” to becoming what I call a "social creator."
What does that mean in practice? Instead of waiting for invitations, I:
Hosted 11 house parties, each one better than the last
Joined existing communities like the Board Walks (a weekly walking group), a local writing club, and my class-based gym
Started my own life reflection club where we discuss our personal growth
Created spaces for others to connect and form their own friendships
Learned to show up consistently for the communities I joined and give back where I could
Transforming My Health
After 15 years of being a runner, I finally admitted to myself that running alone wasn't going to give me the body of my dreams. Some post-move weight gain pushed me to finally get serious about my fitness goals. I decided to get a DEXA scan to establish my baseline, and the results shocked me — I was sitting at 30% body fat, not the 20% I'd estimated. I’m not an anxious person, but I had a panic attack even worse than the house flood.
That moment became my catalyst for change. I threw myself into a complete lifestyle overhaul:
Joined a group fitness gym (shoutout to Atomic Athlete!)
Switched to a high-protein, calorie-restricted diet (40% protein, 40% carbs, 20% fat)
Started consistently hitting 7,000+ steps per day
Ate the same breakfast every day, using a scale to ensure proper measurements
Used a meal service to get ten meals per week with perfect macros and calories
Followed my health diet as closely as possible 5 days per week and allowed myself to go outside the zone two days per week
I didn’t go sober, but I mostly gave up alcohol
Nine months later, the results speak for themselves. After consistent training, I achieved my first pull-up (I can now do 9+). My body fat dropped below 18% (last measured in October), and for the first time in my life, I can see my abs. Even better, the persistent knee pain I'd struggled with for three years completely healed! I've never felt stronger, more confident, or better looking. Sure, I might have peaked the week before Thanksgiving, but even my "off-season" shape is better than my previous best.
Professional Evolution
This April, I did something I'd been dreaming about for years. I left my comfortable startup job at Ava Labs to build something of my own. The transition from employee to founder wasn't exactly smooth. I incorporated my LLC (hello, IceBlock!) and spent a few months exploring different paths, including a brief foray into consulting.
Eventually, I settled on building Know Your Worth, a net worth tracking tool. Over six months, I:
Set up a legal entity so I could collect payments (and deduct my expenses!)
Became a front end developer to complete my full stack coding knowledge
Built an entire SaaS from scratch
Battled Stripe compliance (and won!) to avoid getting deplatformed
Successfully launched to paying customers
Discovered just how much I didn’t know about running a business
The journey hasn't gone exactly as planned (does it ever?), but that's precisely what makes it valuable. While the revenue isn't yet replacing my old salary, the experience of creating something my way has been incredibly fulfilling.
More importantly, I've proven to myself that I can survive and even thrive off the default path. I don't know exactly what 2025 holds for my professional life, but I know I much prefer my “weird internet career” to traditional employment.
My first real challenge in 2025: learning how to file my taxes!
The Single Life
After ending my engagement in 2023, I fell into another relationship in the second half of the year. Although I put my best efforts into it, we parted ways in the spring when it became clear our visions for life weren't aligned. After three back-to-back serious relationships, I knew it was time for me to embrace being single, something I hadn’t truly done since I turned 23.
I took several months to process everything that had happened. Instead of rushing into dating again, I focused on building my life in Austin and working on myself. When I did re-enter the dating world, I approached it with a completely different mindset. As someone who was “not successful” with dating in high school and college, I picked up some emotional scars and have tended to struggle with operating from a place of scarcity. Now, I do my best to focus on being selective and understanding what I really want in a partner.
The process hasn't always been easy, but I know it’s necessary to finding the right relationship for me. While I'm still single, I feel more confident and clear about what I'm looking for and my ability to find it than ever before.
What Didn’t Go So Well
No year is perfect, even a transformative one. 2024 brought its share of difficulties, particularly around travel and family transitions.
Cursed Travel
My year of amazing local community was balanced by some truly difficult travels. The low point came during what should have been an exciting five-week trip to Korea. Instead, my relationship ended one week in, leaving me stranded in a foreign country, processing a breakup while trying to fill endless empty days. Although there were still good moments, I felt incredibly stuck and isolated. Several other trips this year also went sideways, leading to something I never expected: a genuine travel aversion. For the first time in my life, I feel nervous about planning trips, especially solo ones.
Thankfully, my trip to Sedona felt like the first step towards healing. I still love adventures, but I'm ready to spend more time enjoying the home I've built rather than living on the road three months of the year.
Losing My Anchor
This was also a year of profound family transitions. My uncle passed away unexpectedly in his early 60s, and my grandmother moved into assisted living, forcing us to liquidate her house. But this wasn't just any house. It was a living museum of 1970s New Orleans, complete with original USA Bicentennial wallpaper, a mysterious darkroom, and more books than many book stores I’ve been to. The house itself is a architectural fever dream — imagine if Dr. Frankenstein decided to become a contractor, adding rooms at random whenever the family expanded. There's an entire wing without air conditioning (in New Orleans!), floors that could double as skateboard ramps, and tile patterns that defy both geometry and good taste.
As a military brat who frequently moved from place to place, that unique house was one of the few constants in my life. No matter where I lived, that house stayed exactly the same. I sometimes say that New Orleans is my ancestral home, but really I mean my grandmother’s house. Now that it's gone, I'm not sure what New Orleans means to me anymore.
Food Poisoning
You might think that unopened canned and jarred food never expires. That may be true of some things, but it is not true of tahini! As I was trying to use up all of my remaining pantry supplies in Baltimore, I made some hummus. For 24 hours, I was the sickest I have ever been in my entire life.
Miscellany
I got a new hair cut! After four years of long hair, I’m back to short hair and I couldn’t be happier with it!
I turned 30! And in classic millennial fashion, I was too busy with life chaos to have an existential crisis about it. Now that I’m more relaxed, 31 is very much on my mind!
By the Numbers
Mood Scores
Average happiness score: 4.1/5 (2023: 3.8)
Rad days: 106 (50) !!
Good days: 209 (224)
Meh days: 39 (63)
Bad days: 10 (22)
Awful days: 2 (6)
2023 for reference. Can you spot my breakup?
Movement and Health
Crushed 108 gym sessions 💪
Walked 1,300 miles
Logged 2.5 million steps
Spent 89 days traveling (too much)
Content Consumed & Created
Watched 100 movies
Read 11 books
Published 7,500 words
Wrote 20,000 words of my upcoming book
Binged 18+ days worth of podcasts
Media I Added to My Personal Canon
Movies That Hit Different
Us and Them - A Chinese romance that captures the bittersweet reality of growing up and growing apart. I dare you not to cry during the credits
Blue Giant - Watching someone practice jazz shouldn't be this thrilling, but somehow it channels pure sports anime intensity. The best third act musical finale since School of Rock
The Thing - Finally watched this classic and it exceeded 40 years of hype. Maybe a perfect movie?
Challengers - Everything in life is sex, except for sex which is tennis
Shin Godzilla - Bureaucracy: The Monster Movie (in the best way possible)
Hot Potato - My spiciest take of 2024: The Wiggles are one of the greatest bands of all time and no one has noticed
TV Shows I Can't Stop Talking About
Physical 100 - Korean competition show that puts every other fitness reality show to shame. I don’t normally rewatch shows, but I’ve seen season 1 four times this year.
Culinary Class Wars - Physical 100, but for cooking
Games That Consumed My Life
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth - One of my favorite games ever, full stop
Factorio - The factory must grow (and grow it did, for 300 hours, by far my most played game of all time)
What 2024 Taught Me
On Health & Fitness
At-home body fat measurements are not accurate. If you’re serious about understanding your health and improving your body composition, get a DEXA scan. They’re not too expensive and the data is worth it. I plan to get them quarterly going forward.
Meal prep services are a game-changer. Even as someone who loves cooking, outsourcing my nutrition was the fastest and easiest way to hit my fitness goals. Finding high quality recipes that matched my macro and calorie goals was one of my biggest sources of stress in the first half of the year. All that stress? Gone.
On Relationships
Rejection is rarely about you. It’s usually about the other person’s capacity to engage. Whenever someone doesn’t come to my party or even turns me down in dating, it’s not because they truly know me and see that I’m a terrible person. They’ve got their own stuff going on and that guides their actions much more than any deep judgement of me.
Stop chasing people who don't reciprocate. Invest in those who match your energy and who put in effort to be a part of your life. There are too many great new people to meet and too many people already in your life to waste time with people who don’t really want to be there.
Never stop trying to make friends. Life is long and has many seasons. The day you stop meeting new people and stop putting yourself out there is the day you start to lose your social vitality. Even when your cup is full, you need to keep putting yourself out there.
On Personal Growth
The optimal rate of failure is not zero. If you’re not failing occasionally, you’re leaving opportunities on the table. You should go to a social event and have it be boring. You should go on some bad dates. If you stay entirely within your comfort zone, you won’t grow nearly as much as you could.
My urge to travel was dissatisfaction in disguise. Now that I love my everyday life, I don’t feel the same urge to escape it.
Quality sleep is the foundation of everything. Every good day starts the night before. (I wrote this in my journal 20+ times this year and I'm still working on it)
2025: The Year of Alignment
Now that my rebirth is complete, it’s time to grow. My theme for the upcoming year is Alignment. I want to take all of the disparate areas of my life and try to unify them with my deeper purpose.
My purpose is to build deep, meaningful relationships and help others do the same, while living a life full of adventure, physical vitality, and emotional authenticity. I want to be a polymath creator who shows up fully for the people in my life while scaling my impact to help as many people as possible.
Here are some of the changes I plan to make to bring this vision to life in 2025.
Narrative Market Fit
2024 taught me that I have something valuable to share about building community and friendship. This year, I'm focusing on reaching more people through content creation and social media. I want to find my voice online and help others navigate the journey of building meaningful connections.
To that end, I’ve started writing a book about making friends. I want to spend the first quarter of the year testing out its content and seeing if it resonates. My goal is to find narrative market fit so that I can publish something that reaches people and is deeply impactful. The goal in my head is the best book on friendship since Carnegie.
Deepening Community
While I'll keep hosting and building community in Austin, I want to dream bigger. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of The 2-Hour Cocktail Party, but I want to branch out hosting skills to play with different types of parties and events. Think crazy themes, experimental formats, and new ways to help people connect and have fun. I want to continue to meet people, create spaces where relationships can flourish, and be a great friend to others.
Embodying Confidence
My fitness journey showed me what's possible when you commit to physical transformation. Now I want to take it further by mastering how I move and present myself. I have two specific goals: learning to pose confidently for photos and becoming a better dancer. These are both experiments, and I don’t have a ton of experience in either department. That said, I want to push my comfort zone and have fun doing it.
So there you have it: my 2024 journey from Baltimore transplant to thriving Austinite, from social anxiety to community builder, from goal-setter to goal-crusher. If you've enjoyed this peek into my life and want to follow along as the adventure continues, I'm relaunching my newsletter on January 10, 2025. It'll be packed with insights about building community, personal development, and the art of making friends in a world that often makes it harder than it needs to be.
See you in the next chapter!
-Connor