RLT Wrapped 2025

We’re in the era where everything has a Wrapped.

Your bank will tell you your “top spending category” is Regret. Your phone will announce you spent nine hours a day on “Screen Time”, like that’s a cute little wellness badge and not a welfare check. Somewhere, right now, an overexcited product team is pitching HR Wrapped:

“This year you attended 46 meetings that could’ve been an email. Your top collaborator was ‘Slack Fatigue’. Share your results?”

So obviously I made one for myself.

Because if the world is going to quantify my existence, I’d like to at least be the one choosing the charts.

Welcome to RLT Wrapped 2025.

My 2025 Listening

Which means, statistically, I was either:

• A person with a healthy relationship to art
• A man attempting to drown out his internal monologue
• A devotional practitioner at the Church of Nu-Disco
• Obsessed with listening to other people's thoughts
• All of the above

My 2025 Locations

I spent the year moving between two cities like a migratory bird, except instead of instincts and elegance I had WhatsApp voice notes and a suitcase full of black jumpers.

My 2025 Language Skills

Which is to say: I can order a coffee, talk like a native, and apologise for existing with increasing grammatical accuracy.

All pretence that I'm just visiting Berlin is quickly evaporating...

My 2025 Nightlife

If this were any other Wrapped, by now it'd be saying something like: “Your year was all about connection.”

And I'd go: "Yes, because dancing is one of the only ways I’ve ever found to make my nervous system shut up and behave. And all the best friendships are made on dancefloors."

Also: cardio is expensive in this economy. I’m not paying 80€ a month to run on a treadmill when Berlin exists.

Top Artists aka Things-I-Somehow-Made-While-Everything-Was-On-Fire

Scratch

Scratch shipped for testing. It’s in beta with over 500 testers, which is a terrifying number of human beings to invite into your brain and then ask, politely, what they think of your taste.

Also: Tiefe, a new design language. Because naturally, while building a music app, I decided I should also invent an entire aesthetic system so the UI can feel like a piece of hardware you’d actually want to touch. Completely normal behaviour. No notes.

Also also: I created and curated 17 playlists for Scratch, and designed the cover art for all of them, which means at some point I became a small boutique record label that only employs one tired man with a MacBook and a lot of discarded coffee cups.

Dead Keen

My business is nearly 3 years old, and this year I took on 6 new clients, which I’m genuinely proud of. Partly because it’s work I care about, and partly because it confirms I wasn’t hallucinating my ability to function.

Voir

This year I took on a fractional CTO role at Voir, designing and developing an internal web app that’s fuelling creativity in the business.

Also started a company-wide brand refresh strategy which is nailed, with the visuals and design language refresh landing next year. I’ve also started nudging things toward a more thought-led, creative-first mentality, which is slow work because culture change is basically trying to steer a bus made of opinions while everyone argues about the playlist.

What I love about my work here is despite the AI arms race, Voir is committed to a human-first, tech-second approach. And it’s working.

I’ve enjoyed being part of the team this year immensely.

Negative Space

This isn’t something I’m talking about yet, but it’s coming. All I will say is I have shared it with my inner circle and they didn’t hate it. Hurrah.

It still feels like a slightly dangerous thing to make, which is how I know it’s probably the right thing. Hopefully...

See you in 2026 on this one.

My Most Shared Moment

I wrote an article about Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) and his betrayal of LGBTQ+ rights following his actions this year. It got a lot of attenton.

This is one of those things that sounds fake even when it happens. Watching words you wrote in your own little corner of the internet suddenly appear in places that have buildings named after them is, erm...wild.

It’s also a reminder that writing down my thoughts and posting them to this site isn’t just shouting into the void. Sometimes the void shouts back. I am very proud of this moment. I never want that kind of freneticism in my life ever again. Thank you and good night.

My System Status

This is the part algorithms don’t like: the messy human bit.

This year I dealt with mental health issues, burnout, ADHD, and the aftermath of a messy relationship.

So, imagine trying to run a high-output creative practice with your brain set to “scattergun”, while the one thing that helps—ADHD meds—is stuck somewhere in a supply chain blackhole. Then add grief and administrative chaos, and top it off with the general sensation that reality has been replaced by a series of pop-ups asking you to accept cookies.

And yet:

I still made things.
I still wrote.
I still danced.
I still shipped.

Not in a hustle way. In the quiet, stubborn way. The way that looks unimpressive from the outside and feels heroic only because you know what it cost.

I listened to music like it was medicine—because, well...it is. I danced, because moving your body is sometimes the only way to remind yourself you’re still here.

And I kept creating, not because I’m particularly noble, but because creation is the one place the noise gets organised into something that makes sense.

My Closing Card

A lot has happened this year. When I sat down to write this, I thought there’d be nothing. Ironically, despite all the personal stuff that’s gone on, I’ve built stuff nonetheless. In fact, I’ve probably had the highest creative output this year of any year before it.

I kept choosing to create. Thank you, creativity. I owe you it all.

Anyway. That’s my Wrapped.

See you next year for RLT Wrapped 2026, assuming capitalism doesn’t turn being alive into a subscription model, and the medication supply chain remembers I exist. Ha!

Congratulations, Ryan, you survived the algorithm. I hope you did too.

All the best for 2026. Much love x