Reflecting Upon 2024

It was a labyrinthian maze that ended with a callback to 2016 in more ways than one.

2024 was the year that felt most like gambling. Once, in a training for my casino management position, the speaker asked us to explain what gambling was and I raised my hand. “It’s the purchase of hope.” He liked the answer so much, it ended up in the following year’s handbook.

This past year was comprised of so much purchasing of hope and the harsh reality that the House always wins as those hopes were dashed to the awful casino carpet. Hollywood bought a lot of hope but the returns were not great. Streaming was the hand doubled down on and left companies choosing to let go of thousands of employees and keep those fat CEO compensation packages that soon the entire industry will be five old rich guys surrounded by AI programs churning out derivative bullshit to flood our short attention spans to oblivion. Democrats spent mountains of $100 chips on the belief that the Identity Revolution could eclipse its own excesses and lost in such a horror show it will take them a decade to become relevant again. American women lost big this year because, with all the rhetoric lobbed about the future being female, apparently female does not vote for itself for a second time in eight years.