I’ve been sitting here too long tonight, staring at the screen, the room dark except for the glow. The year’s almost gone and I’m still trying to make sense of it. Not the numbers. Not the headlines. The feeling.
You know that feeling when you’ve been in a storm so long you forget what quiet sounds like? Then suddenly the wind drops and your ears are still ringing.
That’s 2025 for me.
The winter of 2025 felt endless. Not the clean, crisp kind with snow and silence. The dirty, grinding one. The kind where the wind cuts through fur and bone alike, where every howl you throw into the night comes back cracked, quieter, sometimes not at all.
We’ve been through winters before. Lord knоws we have. But this one was different. It wasn’t just cold. It was personal.
It got inside the pack. Made us question whether we were still wolves or just dogs pretending.
I keep coming back to those old frontier diаries I used to read as a kid. The ones where the settler writes about the third winter, the one that аlmost broke him.
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He doesn’t write about glory or manifest destiny anymore. He writes about the sound the axe makes on frozen wood at dawn. About how the snow finally stopped and he could hear his own breathing again. About how he didn’t feel victoriоus. He just felt… present.
That’s where I think we are.
We’re not the wide-eyed newcomers howling at every moon anymore. We’ve buried some dreams. We’ve patched some holes. We’ve learned that not every shadow is a threat and not every light is salvation.
And somewhere in all that grinding, something changed.
The pack moves heavier now. Not slower. Heavier. There’s weight in the steps. There’s history in the eyes.
We’ve got teeth that know what bone feels like. And the strange part?
I don’t miss the old fever. Thе manic highs, the panic lows, the constаnt scream that we had to prove something to someone who wasn’t even watching.
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That was fun for a while. But fun isn’t the same as purрose.
Purpose is quieter. It’s the sound of code that finally works after months of swearing at it. It’s the message from someone who says “I stayed because you stayed.” It’s the small, stubborn decision to build when everything else says walk away.The bears have howled their last.
Now the pack answers.
Yet here we stand. Fur matted, breath ragged, eyes still bright. 2026 is coming whether we’re ready or not. It won’t be a victory parade. It’ll be more winters, probably. More nights where the screen glows and the answers don’t come easy.
But it will also be mornings where the frost starts to melt and you can see the shape of what you’ve been building all along.I don’t know what the future owes us. Probably nothing. But I know what we owe each other. We owe the ones who kept the fire going when it would’ve been easier to let it die.
We owe the quiet builders who never asked for applause.
We owe thе pack that chose to circle up instead of scatter.
So here we are.
Breath fogging the air. Fur still damp. Eyes still sharp.
The horizon is gray. Gray is fine. Gray is the color of dawn after a long night.
This edition is for the ones who stayed. For the ones who are still here, chopping wood at first light. We’re not shouting at the moon anymore. We’re speaking low, steady, to the future.
And damn if it doesn’t feel like the future is starting to listen.
Welcome to Howling Into 2026.
Let’s keep the fire burning.
Yona brings a decade of experience covering gaming, tech, and blockchain news. As one of the few women in crypto journalism, her mission is to demystify complex technical subjects for a wider audience. Her work blends professional insight with engaging narratives, aiming to educate and entertain.
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