At the start of 2025, I had planned for two separate newsletters: one for general topics, one for public policy. A content calendar mapped out months in advance. The confidence of someone who’d sailed through 2024 never short of ideas.
Good sense prevailed, and I gave up on the dual newsletter idea. But 2025 shook most of my other assumptions.
The Content Engine That Nearly Stalled
2024 was easy because I had accumulated ideas. A reservoir built over years of observation and thinking. I believed I’d never run out.
2025 was the test because the reservoir had emptied by then. And when circumstances turned difficult mid-year, the motivation to write became another challenge to navigate.
Instead of hunting for new ideas, I started using this newsletter as a platform to process whatever I read that week and found interesting. My method became simple: think of a topic during the weekend. Reflect on it during daily walks. Note down relevant points. Write.
Sometimes the conclusion I arrived at surprised me. I’d start with one notion and end somewhere completely different. It reminded me of Paul Graham’s insight: “A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.”
Writing became thinking. The newsletter became less about broadcasting polished ideas and more about thinking through issues in public.
The Market Doesn’t Care If You’re Right
The biggest lesson came from watching my own predictions play out in slow motion.
When AI threatened to turn writers obsolete, I was sure content marketing would make a comeback. I wrote extensively about this. The form and function have changed, but storytelling is back in demand. OpenAI is hiring content strategists. Authenticity has become a premium offering in an AI-saturated world.
I was right. And yet, for months, it didn’t matter.
The market operates on its perception of reality, not reality itself. For a while, I had to navigate the widespread belief that AI had completely made writing skills redundant. You can understand the larger trend and still have to wait it out until the tide turns.
John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, said it better: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
This applies beyond finance. You can see where things are heading and still struggle throughout the runway until you’re proven correct. Being right on the direction doesn’t exempt you from the struggle in between. Being vindicated eventually does not make the waiting easier.
That struggle also showed up in what I actually wrote about.
The Breakdown: What I wrote in 2025
Here’s what I actually wrote this year:
- AI & Writing: 10 pieces
- AI and Future of Work: 6 pieces
- Communications: 9 pieces
- Life/Productivity: 8 pieces
- Marketing: 6 pieces
- Public Policy: 4 pieces
- Art: 4 pieces
- Book Reviews: 2 pieces
- Tech: 2 pieces
AI dominated, contributing 31% of my total output—more than any other single theme. I wrote 16 articles about artificial intelligence when I thought I’d be writing primarily about policy and culture.
Indeed, I ended up doing a 1-month crash course on “Politics and Policy of AI” by Takshashila Institution. I was awarded B+ (equivalent of 70-80%) for my final thesis on whether AI will be a normal technology (normal job disruption) or will it lead to high automation and market concentration (mass jobs displacement).
Compare this to 2024:
- Public Policy: 12 pieces
- Writing: 9 pieces
- Personal Development: 8 pieces
- Marketing: 6 pieces
- Politics/Culture: 6 pieces
My public policy writing dropped by two-thirds. The topics I expected to anchor my work barely appeared. Instead, I found myself writing about life, happiness, purpose, and productivity with a depth I didn’t see coming.
There’s a lesson here about control and surrender. I started the year believing I could architect my content strategy with precision. Instead, 2025 pulled me toward what I was actually grappling with: uncertainty, meaning, survival, the relationship between technology and human work.
The newsletter became less about sharing expertise and more about documenting the questions I was living through.
I thought I overwrote about AI. Turns out I did: 16 articles, nearly a third of my output. But the surprising part? I wrote about life and productivity, marketing and communications in almost equal measure. The work revealed its own logic, one I couldn’t have planned.
Meaning Only Comes Later
This connects to something larger about how we understand our own lives and work.
Steve Jobs said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
Most people think they need clarity to take action. But clarity comes from action, not before it. And sometimes, it doesn’t come at all.
The real skill is learning to live without narrative and meaning. To embrace chaos. To feel comfortable with the randomness of events. To accept being misunderstood. To navigate the arbitrary nature of how life unfolds.
Alan Watts put it simply: “The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
For much of 2025, I caught myself rushing around, treating each week as preparation for some better version of this work. The daily walks, the weekend reflections, the writing itself—these slowly taught me what I wrote about in Edition 99: the waiting room was always the room.
What Next?
No idea.
I may slow down in 2026. I may not. My public policy writing might resurface. It might not. I’ll know when I know.
What I do know: there is no pattern to find. The dots connect backward, never forward.
This newsletter started as a public policy project. It became an exploration of AI, a meditation on uncertainty, a document of survival, a practice in thinking through writing. None of this was planned. All of it mattered.
2026 will pull me where it needs me. The newsletter will follow. Not because I already know the topics to write about, but because I’ve learned to trust the process of not knowing.
Happy New Year.
Here’s to Edition 103, and all the dots we can’t yet see connecting.
Appendix:
Here’s the complete list of all my newsletters in 2025.
Art (4)
- Art vs Artist
- 3 takeaways from Adolescence (Netflix series)
- The Second Coming
- Beyond Propaganda: Defending Art for Art’s Own Sake
Life / Productivity (8)
- Finding Purpose Beyond Work
- Take Control of Your Information Diet
- Why Preparation Beats Planning
- Finding Happiness in Everyday Monotony
- Why Retrieval Practice Beats Endless Study
- Why CORE Traits Matter More Than Skills in the AI era
- The Waiting Room We Never Left
- What 2025 Taught Me About Survival and Meaning
AI & Writing (10)
- Why GenAI will not replace Human Writers
- How is AI impacting journalism?
- Is GenAI a threat to content writers?
- Has GenAI killed the college essay?
- The Unwritten Self: A Writer’s Identity Crisis in the AI Era
- 2025 AI Trends in Content Marketing
- When Struggle Was the Signal: AI’s Challenge to Creative Worth
- Reports of Content Marketer’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated
- The Writing Looks ChatGPTish
- Welcome to the World Where Everyone is a Writer and Nobody Reads
AI and future of work (6)
- AI and Emotion: Do machines feel?
- AI Is Coming for Your Job — And It’s Already Here
- The Great Resume Paradox: How AI Broke the Job Market
- The End of Pretend Work: When AI Exposes What Was Never There
- The Great Inversion: How AI Flipped Copyright Inside Out
- The AI Revolution’s First Casualties: Why Your Entry-Level Job Disappeared
Book Review (2)
Public Policy (4)
- 5 Public Policy problems in an Intangible Economy
- Disintermediated? Think Again. The Rise of the Digital Gatekeeper
- Dr. Ambedkar’s “Grammar of Anarchy”: A Constitutional Warning That Echoes Today
- India’s Op Sindoor: The End of Strategic Restraint, The Dawn of Deterrence
Communications (9)
- Email best practices for Internal Communications
- How to write a Marketing Email?
- Become a high-earning Digital Copywriter with these 10 steps
- Why must CEOs own Strategic Communications?
- Best Practices for Communicating Layoffs
- The Art of Writing is in the Rewriting
- Forget AI Imitating Us, We Are Imitating AI
- Beyond the AI Hype: Why Human Oversight Remains Non-Negotiable
- Wondering If You Should Follow Up After Interviews? Here’s The Answer.
Marketing (6)
- 8 Tips to Nail your Webinar Marketing
- How to make your podcast stand out
- Deception by Design: India’s Crackdown on Dark Patterns
- Why AI Made Marketing Generalists Unstoppable
- Why Arattai’s Positioning Matters And India’s Product Ambition Gap
- From SEO to AEO: How to Make Your Brand Appear in AI Search Results
Musings by Madhav 
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