Second Substack-iversary

Life, death and looking ahead to 2025

Candi Penataran, East Java

Hello, and Happy New Year! A huge apology for taking such a long break (it’s been six months since my last post, at the start of my Java rail journey). While I had planned to take a short hiatus after my return from that trip, events intervened and it became much longer than expected. I feel that I owe you an explanation.

Life alternates between exciting, planned activities (a big trip! moving to another country! a new job!) and unexpected but nonetheless important mundane stuff. If 2023 was dominated by the former — my overland journey across Wallacea, which was absolutely amazing and all-encompassing (I still have a couple of posts to catch up on that I promise will be coming this year) — 2024 was mostly a series of disconnected domestic activities that required attention but were collectively somewhat less exciting than a big expedition. Our new Indonesian residence visas early on in the year, along with multiple house projects throughout, ranging from installing a solar power system (not a straightforward task on Lombok), to repainting the house after the meteorological whiplash between La Niña and El Niño that increasingly seems to set the weather tempo here, to dealing with a leaking pool (it hadn’t been sealed properly when it was built ~15 years ago), to…well, you get the idea. Lots of niggling things that demanded attention but certainly didn’t follow an inspiring narrative arc.

Added to this, and looming over the latter part of the year, was my mother’s unexpected death in the autumn, which has needless to say been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. Everything is fine now, but I didn’t really feel like writing about medieval Javanese kingdoms or early human migrations in the midst of it.

Finally, and this is something I think many are still processing, there was the global elephant in the room: the US election. Not the election per se — the American electorate has chosen its new leader, for better or worse, and the actual process of ballotting and declaring a winner was largely uncontroversial, unlike 2020 — but the way it became apparent that a small number of powerful tech oligarchs effectively control the narrative around such an important democratic exercise. This isn’t a political Substack, and I have no intention of heading down that messy path, but I think many people finally realized in 2024 that the social media platforms most of us use to communicate online, and where we get much of our news, are being manipulated in ways that increasingly make their algorithmic contortions impossible to ignore. Algorithms are not designed to be unbiased arbiters of the truth — quite the opposite — and 2024 seems to have been a turning point for many where the overt manipulation simply became too onerous to stomach.

Escaping from the algorithmic muck on X, Meta, TikTok and the rest isn’t easy, but I personally feel even more committed to formats like this as we begin a new year. Email newsletters that we choose to subscribe to are less sullied by algorithmic machinations, hopefully, than what we see browsing a social media timeline. While such self-curated content will inevitably lead to ‘audience fragmentation’, the opposite of the vaunted ‘town square’ role to which Twitter once aspired, it seems increasingly clear that the notion of a single online town square for everyone is rather naive in 2025. So be it.

The Lombok Diaries is entering the new year in good shape, despite the lengthy break. This time last year it had just over 900 subscribers, increasing to just under 1300 today. Thank you for your continued interest in the content I post here, and for sticking with me during the lull. I want to assure you that there is a lot more to come this year: two in-depth pieces on my trip across Java that dive into the history of the Majapahit and Mataram kingdoms, as well as a handful of posts on Wallacea — think encounters with quirky birds and unique primates while retracing Alfred Russel Wallace’s journey through Minahasa, virgin coral reefs in the Gulf of Tomini, and Second World War shipwrecks and shark feeding frenzies on the remote island of Morotai. I’ll also have a post about a trip we made two months ago to the fabled Andaman Islands, home to some of the most genetically isolated people on Earth.

Southeast Asia is an utterly fascinating part of the world, and I feel lucky to be able to share my explorations of it with you. My wife Holly and I also have more trips lined up this year, and I want to start posting more about our lives here on Lombok…so much to cover, in other words.

With that as a preface, here’s to more exploration in 2025. Sampai jumpa lagi!