I made some New Year's Resolutions and plans I want to try and stick to this year.
First of all, welcome to 2025! This is my first post of the year on my blog. I wish you a happy new year. At the end of 2024 I sat and had a little think about what's really important to me right now. I made a couple of decisions on what needs to change. Let's start with the basics.
Social media
x
While my website states that one of the people who inspired me the most was Elon Musk, I now wholeheartedly dislike what he stands for and have decided that I don't want anything to do with him or his platform. It's not political; I just don't like him anymore. This means starting right now; I'm beginning to move from x.com to Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/jamiebalfour04.bsky.social), which I am hoping many others will do too, so that it can become the number one platform.
Second, WhatsApp. I rely heavily on WhatsApp, but for the last few months, I have considered moving away from WhatsApp and, generally, Meta. It came up in the staff room the other day, and it reminded me that I was thinking about this a few months back, so I added it to my plans yesterday. I want to move to Signal, a more open, privacy-centred chat platform. The problem is trying to convince others to follow suit.
Facebook is slightly more complex than the two previous ones. I've found some social networks like MeWe, which offer a similar experience to Facebook, but I'm not entirely sure about this yet. This is probably the hardest one out of the lot so far.
Life
I want to prepare myself for the next chapter in my book of life, and that is to move to somewhere new. I've lived in this area all my life (apart from 3 years living in Edinburgh when I was very young and living in Halls when I lived in Edinburgh for most of the year).
Some people who follow me on here know I want to own a boat and want to live on a boat at some point in my life. Narrowboating has been a dream but actually isn't so much of a dream now but something I could potentially do now. I've got more than £150k invested in my house, and the sale of that could give me a narrowboating lifestyle. I want to prepare for this because I want to start by the time I reach forty (that's still 7 years away, though!).
Job
I enjoy my job and think I'm pretty good at it (certainly my knowledge is!). But my passion is coding, and I feel that in the next couple of years, I need to get a new job back in the industry. My New Year's Resolution is to try and set down the building blocks to try and do this and find a new job. So, I plan to try to make this my last year of teaching (at least at the moment). If it doesn't happen, then I'm still okay with this, and I don't want to put pressure on myself to find that new job and I do like my job at the moment anyway.
If I'm going to be narrowboating, I want to have all this sorted before I move on with that.
