After one full year of the Eudēmonia Newsletter, it feels like the right moment to reflect on what I’ve learned after writing 100,000+ words about health, wellness, and vitality.

Let’s look at the patterns that kept repeating themselves across 12 months of research, conversations, and reader questions. These principles hold whether you’re 25 or 65, whether you’re optimizing aggressively, actively trying to heal, or just finding ways to feel a little better in your own skin

1. A year is both shorter and longer than you think.

It moves fast—almost uncomfortably fast. But it’s long enough to create real change. To make progress that actually compounds. To look back and realize you’re not standing in the same place anymore.

Most days (or even weeks, maybe months), it doesn’t feel like much is happening. But over a year, your work stacks quietly and your effort compounds nicely. One day, you turn around and realize you are not the same person—and in a way that’s hard to unsee once it’s happened. I wonder where we’ll be standing next year at this time.

2. If you want to grow, what matters most is consistency, not perfection.

I hear it a lot. Chasing perfect routines or checking each box every day isn’t realistic for most people. And it often becomes the thing that stops people from staying consistent at all. Missing once or twice starts to feel like failure, and failure becomes a reason to stop altogether. Certain “wellness badges” are just unavailable to everyone based on a variety of factors.
But when change is important, what matters most is consistency. Real progress comes from showing up again after imperfect days. 

What consistency looks like is yours to define. But I do believe in setting the bar high. Ambition is useful. If you aim high and miss, you rarely land nowhere. You usually find yourself somewhere better than where you started.

But there’s a difference between ambition and overload. We chip away at getting our daily steps, at improving our sleep, at better food and less screen time. Little by little if we have to. 

Taking on too much at once, or trying to change everything at the same time, often sets you up to fail before you’ve even begun.

3. This world is very noisy.

Everyone has questions. And there aren’t a lot of universal answers. 

The modern wellness world demands an important skill: discernment. We live at a time with unlimited information and very limited guidance. Health has become a kind of open-Internet project. 

Everyone is researching. Everyone is comparing notes. Everyone is trying to build a personal operating system from podcasts, papers, bloodwork, and whatever showed up in their feed that week. But there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution or framework. 

Some of it is real progress. Some of it is marketing wearing a lab coat. And the hard part is that both often use the same vocabulary. Which makes it very difficult to make decisions. 

People have questions because the landscape is changing fast, there isn’t a single source of truth, and the old system was not designed for proactive health. It was built for intervention, not prevention. I hear often that your doctors don’t have the answers, and sometimes haven’t even heard of the tests, tools, or concepts people are now asking about.

So a new responsibility emerges: not to find perfect answers, but to learn how to think clearly, ask better questions, and move forward without certainty.