five years
when getting a laptop and searching up dua lipa's age gets you shockingly existential, written: 26 november 2025
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Hi friends, Sav here.
It’s been a while! Or maybe not.
For those of you unaware of my most recent positioning, my refurbished-to-the-moon Lenovo Thinkpad decided to one day make menacing video game death sounds and then never turned on again.
It lived for about 1.5 years in my care as a work laptop, and then 1.5 years as a personal laptop — not to mention a decade of service to at least three other employees in my previous organisation as I spreadsheet-junkie, email-hamster processing machine.
RIP Thinkpad. You will be missed — and I genuinely mean this — as it had served as my primary writing device throughout all of 2025. The vast majority of words you read here on Journaling in Public was done on those clacky little keys.
After mulling through the pros-and-cons in my head which constituted the for-some-reason-difficult question of whether I wanted a bulky and powerful gaming laptop or a sleek and productive business laptop — I settled on the latter with the Asus Zenbook A14. It’s sophisticated, matte, incredulously lightweight and has a battery life that rivals even the most efficient MacBooks. This laptop will be my primary writing and computing device for, dare I say, the next five years.
I paused for a second as I typed ‘the next five years’.
A commonplace interview question but honestly a petrifying concept.
I happened to name-search an artist recently, I think it was Dua Lipa and seeing Born: 1995 (age 30 years) made me sick in the mouth. People born in the 90s, whom I still mentally refer to as ‘young’ — half of them are in their big threes, and in literally just a few years, I’ll find myself at the same dining table.
A lot of things can change in five years.
I could be married or single or in a relationship that I hardly recognise or one that I never thought would happen. I might be a manager or department head or C-suite executive or in a similar role or in an entirely different industry. I could still be into writing, or perhaps painting or gardening or sleight-of-hand or 3D printing had taken the spotlight, with writing taking a backburner or erased out of my life completely — or perhaps even published. I’m likely in Sydney, but I may be in Jakarta, but it could very well be Melbourne or Perth or the Cayman Islands. The people whom I call good friends we may no longer be in speaking terms with. My best friends may be people I don’t even know today. My favourite artists are surely different, and statistically speaking, one or two of them may be cancelled or incarcerated — I may be vegetarian or paleo or bodybuilder who eats exclusively steak, broccoli and beans. I might be sick and dying, I might have lost an arm, I could even be dead — from a mistake that wasn’t even mine, because someone across the road had too much confidence in their ability to drive while intoxicated and I had the misfortune of walking down the same street that I always did while wearing black.
And to think that this Asus Zenbook, which I did get with a five-year warranty mind you, would last me all the way till then — it’s a bit funny, perhaps even delusional, to think that it would.
I only took a short hiatus from writing following my exploding laptop and even then, the drafts from two weeks ago (which I published anyhow) are near unrecognisable to me. Still, the problems I’ve outlined in my exploding laptop post are still largely the same1, so there’s some consistency there, at least.
Just know this, friends — and when I say friends I refer to you wonderful subscribers to the newsletter, you random folks who have somehow chanced upon this post, and selfishly but arguably most importantly myself — I continue to promise writing for you.
Writing builds clarity, and clarity is something I’d like to carve a little more of in these trying times, as we turn to the end of 2025, as I come reluctantly close to my ‘late 20s’, as I can no longer look at an incredible piece of art or meme video without thinking it was generated by Sora AI.
I don’t need 100% certainty of what those next five years look like — and I don’t think any form of affirmation aside from a message from God himself with give any confidence in it. What I do want to know is that I’m on some positive, upward trajectory and that even if I only subconsciously give attention to it, I’ll find myself in a more fruitful and happy position at the end of it all; a location that wasn’t entirely planned but shaped with some silver of intention.
substacks i’ve enjoyed recently:
Everyone is a Strategist and No One is a Writer by Tobias Hess 🎙️
Tweenfluence: Meet Gen Alpha - After School by Casey Lewis 🪟
Hi there, thanks so much for reading. I’ve never been one for paywalling my writing — cause then it would no longer be ‘in public’! If you’d like to support me and for whatever reason show it via monetary means — a link to buy me a coffee is available below:
In my defence, cars are expensive as balls and work has been kicking my ass.