The Year of Pleasure: Savoring Life in 2025

On the first day of 2025, I woke to the sounds of a store alarm wailing like a siren outside my bedroom window. It was a motorbike without a muffler that rattled the street so severely that it triggered the alarm. I pulled a pillow over my head, hoping to drown out the noise, but I knew from this being almost a nightly occurrence that it would take another 15 to 20 minutes before the alarm was silenced, so I got up for the day.

I turned on some Debussy, the soft piano competing with the persistent beeping of the alarm, and started my water kettle. I set up my V60 and weighed what was left of my Ethiopian beans, feeling a hint of sadness as I emptied the bag. Ethiopia is my favorite origin, and I knew it would be hard to find another bag until I returned to the US in late February.

With my coffee and journal in hand, I settled under a blanket on the couch. I sipped the coffee, savoring its bright citrus and lemongrass flavors and reflected back on 2024 in my journal.

While many people make resolutions or set specific goals for the New Year, I prefer to think more abstractly about the year ahead. Doing so helps me identify themes in my thinking and interests. A friend in St. Louis takes this a step further: every year, he selects a theme to help guide him through the upcoming year. In Liz Gilbert fashion, he says he doesn’t pick the theme, rather it reveals itself to him. This year, he cited a video and a poem that led him to the word, clarity.

I like this approach, so I spent a couple days thinking about the direction of my past year and ideas that are surfacing for the upcoming one. Eventually, my word for 2025 came to me–pleasure. And I don’t mean pleasure solely in the sexual sense, though if it comes in that form, who am I to say no?

Coffee brings me pleasure each morning even when I’m jarred awake by the noises that come from living in the center of Mexico City. I love the routine of it–the smell of the beans, the motion of grinding and brewing, and, most importantly, drinking it. My morning ritual has always been a source of joy, but as I learned more about the industry and all the people required to get me that daily cup, my appreciation only deepened. When I learned to truly taste coffee and savor the flavor notes, it added yet another layer of enjoyment.

That is the kind of pleasure I want to grab hold of in 2025.

I want orgasmic meals, wines that make me savor each sip, and conversations that are just as stimulating. I want to read great books, listen to music that makes forget to think about everything else, and be surrounded by great art.

Over the last two years, I’ve become increasingly interested and curious about food and wine. I blame my work in coffee for this. I find the connection between agriculture–shaped by geography and culture and affected by climate change–and the culinary world to be endlessly fascinating. I eat and cook differently. I experiment more, and my supermarket trips keep getting more and more expensive.

Many years ago, I interviewed Stéphane Denève, the French music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. He’s known for introducing each concert by sharing insights about the composers and the pieces the symphony is about to perform. When I asked him about this approach, he gave a beautiful analogy involving wine. He explained that while anyone can enjoy a bottle of wine, knowing a little bit more about it only enhances the experience. He said the same was true for music. If the audience understood just a bit more about the selections being performed, they’d experience more enjoyment listening to the music.

My mind was swirling as I left this interview. Damn, this man knows how to live, I thought, and how wonderfully French. The French are, after all, known for their ability to find enjoyment in life’s everyday routines. They even have a name for it–la joie de vivre (the joy of living).

When I shared my word for the year with my mom, she said, “You already do that. You find more enjoyment out of things than anyone else I know.” She went on to talk about the noises I make when I’m eating something I love. This is true, I suppose, but I want the pleasure of experiences to be at the top of mind for me this year–in my work, my relationships, how I spend my free time (i.e. not doomscrolling on phone).

Over the weekend, I visited a few wine producers in San Miguel de Allende, and during a talk, one of them shared something that really resonated with me: “It’s overwhelming and incredibly fascinating that a glass of wine somehow shows you how fast life goes…you pour a glass, put it inside of your body, and you’re tasting a bottle that was created in a different period of time. It was waiting five years to be opened to create that experience. It’s very precious–the ritual of tasting a bottle of wine.”

That perspective perfectly captures the fleeting nature of time and the importance of fully savoring every experience and meal and conversation. Life can be so rich in that way.

It seems like I’ve already been seeking out things that give me pleasure and books and films that explore this very idea. I recently finished reading The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America, and Judith, too, found food to be an endless source of joy. Her passion for cooking and her understanding of the art of food led her to advocate that food writing was its own literary form. “Other creatures receive food simply as fodder. But we take the raw materials of the earth and work with them—touch them, manipulate them, taste them, glory in their heady smells and colors, and then, through a bit of alchemy, transform them into delicious creations,” she wrote in her book, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food.

On New Year’s Eve, I watched The Taste of Things, a French film that celebrates gastronomy. Largely filmed inside a kitchen with a focus on the preparation of food, the film portrays the art of cooking and savoring life and cuisine. The lighting and the cinematography add an extra layer of enjoyment, enhancing the film’s rich storytelling. It left me wanting more and was a perfect film to end my 2024.

I went to a coffee shop on New Year’s Day and couldn’t stop thinking about the film. My computer was open on the table, and yet, I stared off in the distance, thinking about Juliette Binoche’s character and the decadent meals she made in the movie. And that’s when I spotted it–an entire row of bags of Ethiopian coffee.

This is the year of pleasure, I smiled to myself.