For me, 2025 has been the year of the career break.
Over a 25-year career in academia, I have often suggested to school-leavers that it’s a good idea to take a year out before university. I’ve never encountered a student who did this and regretted it, or whose studies suffered for it. Especially in Britain, where it’s usual to move away from your hometown for university, I encountered many first-year students who would have benefited enormously from taking a year to grow up and feel more responsible and independent.
But I didn’t do it myself. I was already responsible and independent and I was in a hurry, ambitious and I continued to hurry ambitiously for another 31 years. I got where I was going, and a few years later I looked at where I was and wondered what else might have been and might yet be possible.
Starting to write this column was part of my exploration. I’ve been a novelist and a teacher for decades, committed to agnosticism, critical thinking, reflection; approaches to being in the world that still find their places in several columns in this paper but don’t lend themselves to the abbreviations and antagonism of social media.
I began with the general idea that things are complicated, obviously on the geopolitical scale but happily that’s not my beat. Our local, domestic, intimate assumptions are also complicated, from what constitutes “good” weather to the comfort (or not) offered by dogs. I’m interested in the everyday, and the way the everyday accumulates to become life.
But this year I also published a novel that questions the morality of the educated liberal insistence on agnosticism and critical thinking. I am, at heart, by training, a scholar. I have deep faith in incompatible truths, in complexity, in shades of grey and an instinctive resistance to childish tales of good and evil. People do bad things, of course, but not because there are innately good people like us, who hold correct beliefs and say correct words, and innately bad people like them who are wrong in every way and not like us. I don’t believe in monsters, and I don’t think any adult should.
You could say – people do – that faith in complexity is a privileged position, all very well for someone who gets to sit among books and think for hours at a time, all very well for someone with a house and a job and a useful kind of passport. No atheists in the trenches, etc. There comes a point in crisis where agnosticism is complicity, where to insist that things are complicated is to dismiss clear and present evil.
Looking back at 2025, I think we have been and are in that crisis. There is always war somewhere, always humans behaving without humanity, and in some ways the big change of the last few years is that European liberals are forced to acknowledge the violence on which our comfort was always founded, because that violence is being gladly claimed and celebrated by the old men now running the world. There is a time to insist on complexity and a time to stand up and be counted, but I still think it’s possible to do both at once, important to defend everyone’s right to complex being and thinking.
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To insist on perpetual crisis is to insist on simplicity, which is one of the reasons why the far right likes to say that everything is broken. Rage thrives on simple stories. But to insist there is no crisis is to deny patent suffering, whether our own or, more commonly, our neighbours’. Most things – wars in particular – look simpler from further away.
Acute crisis doesn’t feel complicated. We want to live. We want our children to live. We want pain to stop. We want physical safety, shelter and food and water, and then healthcare and education. But the reason we want these things is so we can think about other matters, so we can be curious and loving, so we can make art and science. We need the simple things so we can have complicated thoughts and feelings and make complex things.
So at the end of 2025, I haven’t lost my faith in scholarly thinking, in agnosticism and grey areas. Not everything can be complicated at the same time, but the purpose of simplicity in some matters is to free us – free everyone – for rich complexity elsewhere.
