100 bits of text after the last one, here is 2025’s Oblique Strategies power ranking. (Previously: 2022, 2023, 2024.) See you in 2026.

10. Don’t break the silence

Given the current stakes, it is now necessary for all of us to lay low. Oh, you’re still creating, of course, but it’s all in deep storage, waiting for the right moment.

“The silence” here is a broad-scale one, one full of monitoring & suspicion, one where we step back to assess. The best way to “deal” with the social media panopticon is to disengage fully from it, in all forms. Group chats? We, collectively, have never been here before. Measure twice, cut once, and in the meantime we move in quiet, in private places, waiting, planning.

9. Simply a matter of work

Stay in your lane. Shut out the noise. Through creation you witness.

8. Ask your body

A little while ago, there was a moment where everything was hitting right in the business, I was getting some breakthroughs in my personal life, and I threw a couple of events where I felt very held and loved.

At the same time, my body was miserable. I wasn’t sick, but I was off, activated, all of my somatics pinging in all of the worst ways. I was doing too much? Or not enough of something else? Sleep? The answer is usually sleep.

You have been here before, of course. The answer in these situations is to step back and ask yourself. You know.

7. What to maintain?

Pare back all things. Nothing is off the table. Find the center. Don’t be afraid to throw away things that once worked for you and are no longer doing so.

Look then at what is growing. It may not be much but it will always be something.

6. Breathe more deeply

Feels obvious. But I guess I’m into yoga, so this would be obvious.

5. Gardening, not architecture

I think often of frameworks, systems, structure. All fall apart when you are outside.

Aphids cloud your natives; rabbits eat your eggplants. Weather, oh god, the weather. Weeds, because globalization caused seeds to come over here from everywhere else, and now invasive plants have done their thing and invaded.

You could, of course, adopt a yellow lab who eats the rabbits, and find somebody to spray the plants. Nothing will help the weather.

To garden is to constantly fight back the entropy of urban existence while also mass-murdering aphids, small animals, and other plants. You once bring this up to a total hippie type, that gardening involves weed genocide, and they say that is awful, a horrible thing to say. They have clearly never dealt with ground cover.

Gardening as boundedness, as what-is-allowed. We ascribe quality to some types and banish the rest. This is never questioned.

4. Would anybody want it?

See #10. Work made for others, as a way of communicating. You write to be read. There is no receptiveness right now. This will change over time but it may take many years.

Worse, of course, is the idea that you would create “it” and “it” would backfire and you’d have to hide. The risk really is always there. So you continue to create in silence and wait for the collective to open itself up to new possibilities again. You will know it when you see it.

3. Don’t stress one thing more than another

The idea of holistics. Looking beyond the thing that creates stuckness. No one problem is so big that it needs to take up the field.

2025 as lesson in field protection. What you experience defines you. Screen as poison for this. “Gardening” is one solution, both metaphorically and literally. Focus on the work, stay in your lane, remember the love that must surround you. Water what grows.

2. Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities

Literally the point of all creative work made from any position of power in 2025 is to blur the thing, to speak around something. I’m sure you paid careful attention to the dialectic in 2019-21, no?

The fastest way to route around WWIC is to make the author unconsultable, to create work that asks more questions than provides answers. What about this? What if that? What then?

1. The inconsistency principle

Early in the year, I remarked to my therapist about how there is no real correlation between your outer world – what’s happening everywhere else – and what’s happening in your private life. To wit, most people had a great 2015; I did not. 2024 was the best year of my life; for many people, it was not.

Every time you ask someone how they’re doing now, they reply with a statement on how the world is bad. Yes, but how are you doing? Oh, I’m fine, kids are great, my business popped off, I’m really happy. But the world!

I’m well aware of how the world is doing. That’s not the question I asked. A better question, then, would be: how are you, the sack of meat & consciousness in front of me right now, responding to the world?