Writing a review about one’s past year when it’s already September seems crazy. The new year is already more than two-thirds through; why would you be stuck in the past? Still, it’s what I’m about to do. Before I get started, I will tell you why.
I haven’t been actively writing blog posts for a while. In 2025, I only wrote the annual review for 2024 in January and a report from TREEWEEK TWO. In 2026, so far, I have only written one post about social dancing—plus a short TREEWEEK check-in, which wasn’t there when I started this post (actually had to update August to September in the first sentence just now). I had countless things on my mind that I wanted to write about but never took the time to sit down and actually write them. Looking at the big timespan between my last posts and glancing at the 2024 review, I was struck by the feeling that probably nothing happened in 2025 and I’ve just wasted my time. It felt horrible. But just seconds later, I realized that, in fact, many things happened in 2025 (some of which may have been the cause of why I didn’t spend any time writing). It’s likely worth putting them down so I can reference them in the future and remind myself of where I am.
In my 2023 review, I wrote about starting Salsa and Bachata classes. I didn’t mention it again, but I continued in 2024 as well. In those years, I enjoyed a new hobby but felt I wasn’t progressing much. In 2025, I started multiple classes at a local dance school (previous classes were from a freelance teacher) and also went to parties regularly. I realized that once a week wasn’t enough, and if I wanted to become a better dancer and have confidence in my skills, I had to practice more. Moreover, I finally knew enough people in the dance community that I could go to parties assured I’d meet someone I know. So, in 2025, I spent more evenings and weekends on the dance floor, providing me with both physical exercise and socializing. I definitely want to write more about my experience as a social dancer and hope I can find the time soon.
Another thing I started in 2025 was a workout routine. The thought that it’s about time to care more about my body now that my forties are starting coincided with a small local gym aggressively pushing online ads for their “six-week challenge” in my Instagram feed. This small gym isn’t your average commercial gym; it’s a small-group personal training concept. The idea behind small group personal training is that there’s only a small group, in this case a maximum of six people, in the gym at one time, and there’s one coach who will guide them through their training plans. This format has many advantages. You don’t have to care about what to train because the coach makes your plan, and you don’t have to worry about doing exercises wrong because they are there to correct you. It’s much pricier than just a regular gym membership, of course, but it’s obviously cheaper than hiring a personal trainer just for one person. Furthermore, the advantage of being in a group isn’t just sharing the cost for the coach; it’s also that you immediately have a community around you to support you. I took part in the six-week challenge and then decided to sign up for a full membership. Except when traveling, I’ve gone to this gym 3-4 times a week, usually three times for strength training and once for their more cardio-focused conditioning sessions. It’s costly, but I don’t think I would have been able to keep up a workout routine any other way, and I feel the benefits of strength training. I haven’t lost as much weight as I wanted to, but I’m seeing gains in muscle mass and reduced body fat, and I feel better and more confident in my body.
The combination of social dancing, going to the gym, and walking at least 10,000 steps a day works well and makes me feel like I’m taking good care of my body. So “exercise” has been one of my new priorities in 2025. Now I just need to get better with nutrition and lose some weight, which I’ve recently started focusing on.
I’m a member of a local cooperative that supports cultural, creative, and social projects by offering spaces for rent. My first touchpoint with the cooperative was in 2018 when I found their board game nights, started volunteering as a co-host, and later took over when the previous host left town. Then, I started renting a desk in their co-working space. I became the person who spent the most time at this space but had little idea of what was going on behind the scenes, so I gradually got more engaged with the cooperative. In 2025, this led to them asking me if I wanted to become one of their management board, and I agreed. The general assembly voted me in for a 2-year term, which I’m currently in the middle of. The cooperative is a non-profit, and board positions are unpaid, although we pay people for the daily business. We are also supported by public money, and those city funds are always tight. As a board member, I sat in on meetings with local politicians and officials about preventing budget cuts around culture, which was an insightful experience.
The cooperative is also hosting a volunteer initiative that runs a vegan café on a donation basis, meaning it’s pay-what-you-want. The community space is right next to the coworking space, and, at first, it was just an opportunity to eat a piece of cake and have a little chat during breaks at work. Similar to how I got deeper into the inner circle of the cooperative simply by being there, the same thing happened with this initiative. I went to their meetings first as a connecting person between them and the cooperative. I then saw they had a difficulty attracting volunteers to fill their shifts and agreed to support a bit with Friday late shifts after work. This happened mostly in 2024, but in 2025 I became more of a regular on the team. That included covering a few shifts, but the initiative also runs events. Another team member and I started a new event that we called “campfire night,” which had nothing to do with an actual fire but encapsulated the idea of coming together to sing songs—as one might do when sitting around a campfire with friends and someone brought a guitar. We ran this three times in 2025, two regular editions and one special Christmas edition.
Which brings me to the overlap between dancing and this initiative, because one of the other active members is also a dancer. She came up with the idea of running a Salsa and Bachata party in the community space. I immediately agreed that this was a great idea, and we had a very successful first workshop and party in 2025, which we then turned into a regular series in 2026.
A few paragraphs ago I said that “exercise” was a focus in 2025, but as you can see, so were “volunteering” and “community building.” And the things mentioned above weren’t even all I did. I also started working in another volunteer-run café that provides a hangout spot for people who don’t want to be alone on a Saturday night. For our target audience, going out wouldn’t be possible because of noise, exposure to alcohol, or simply because of affordability. We provide a chill hangout spot and sell non-alcoholic drinks for as cheap as we can. I already knew the organization behind this café, saw they needed help, and thought there was very little collision on late Saturday nights.
In 2023, I wrote about intercultural exchange and my observation that Germans and foreigners don’t mix as much as I think they should in a society that doesn’t want to consider itself racist. I thought of ways of changing that and tried using the board game night as a vehicle. Since I never published the promised update on the blog, here it goes: I did a one-time project with a nonprofit that, among other things, works with refugees and asylum seekers and provides a buddy program for them. The idea was to invite them to my regular events (located in a space of the cooperative I mentioned above). It was successful as a one-time run, but it didn’t stick, and I hardly saw any of these guests again at future events. In 2025, I got another opportunity to run an intercultural event. A new friend I made at the end of 2024, who moved to my hometown as an exchange student from Delhi, came up with the idea of a multilingual poetry event. He ran this idea by me and another friend, and together we refined it into a concept called “Words of the World.” Because of my connection with the cooperative, I agreed to take care of the logistics of the venue. We ran our inaugural event in June 2025, and it was a huge success, so we did a follow-up edition in October. I will share more about the poetry event in another dedicated post or in a 2026 review because it’s still ongoing. I’m super happy that I found something that works to support intercultural exchange in my city, and I hope I can expand from here.
In 2025, I traveled thrice, not counting two business trips to Vienna, where my major client is located. I joined Coworking Island Life in Ikaria, Greece, for the second time. This time, I also added a day in Athens, which I had only passed through in the previous year. Then, as one of my friends stayed in Glasgow, Scotland, for an academic exchange summer, I visited him there. What was special about that journey was that it was a complete railway trip, with no flights involved. From my home, I traveled on high-speed trains via Frankfurt, Brussels, London, and Newcastle upon Tyne (to be honest, part of the onward trip to Newcastle included a rail replacement bus). I added a bit of a stay in London on both sides of the Scotland part and explored more of the British capital. Then, I went to TREEWEEK TWO. The time between the UK trip and TREEWEEK was only two weeks, and it felt like I had strained myself a bit with travel and came back with the thought of slowing down and being more locally grounded.
I first met [Jacob Huber of Revolutionary Character](https://www.revolutionarycharacter.com/ at an Interintellect online salon. In 2025, he invited me to an online catch-up call. It was around the time I was first in touch with the gym I’m now frequenting. We spoke about it on the call, and Jacob stressed the importance of physical exercise as a first step to self-improvement. He literally said that he’d rather want me to pay for the gym first rather than him for coaching. It was a well-placed boost, and I can certainly give kudos to Jacob for helping me establish the gym routine. But some of my money went to him as well in the end; I joined a cohort of his Unstoppable group coaching program, which was quite insightful.
If you’ve read until here, you might think that everything about my year was completely and utterly amazing. But that’s not the whole truth. For example, I barely spent time at home while continuously moving between my coworking space, the community space, the gym, and various dance floors. Practically no noteworthy moment of 2025 happened within the confines of my home. The house was also not a good place to stay in. Practically all year it was a complete mess. I happened to tidy the living room just once for guests, and the bedroom remained in a horrible condition. In 2024, I hosted three “two-hour parties” and wanted to continue with this event format, but all the hosting I did in 2025 was events in the community space. Partly this had to do with shifted priorities, but it was also due to my inability to make my home guest-friendly. I managed to make a rough cleaning of the living room once to host guests, but my bedroom collected a shameful amount of dust.
In April, I went to the Entrepreneur University Founder Summit in Wiesbaden. I returned full of motivation and also some new contacts to reach out to and a potential coaching partner to move my business forward. However, you may have noticed that, besides maybe Jacob’s program that was about personal improvement, also with the idea of improving work, none had to do with work or building a business. I mostly continued working on my existing client projects, occasionally thinking about business development but not really taking action.
In a way, the things I did and the things I didn’t do may show revealed preferences that conflict with stated preferences. For example, I may—at least for now—value community work higher than expanding the business as long as the bills are getting paid. That would be the most generous interpretation. A less generous interpretation is that I’m running away from the hard things. Always being on the move means I don’t have space to think about the questions I should be thinking about. Valuing instant gratification and a unique brand of hedonism (that includes no drugs or sex but often actual but unpaid work) over long-term goals and building something. Which is also a revealed preference, but probably not one to accept that easily.
I don’t have a conclusion at the moment. I wasn’t looking for one in the scope of this post anyway; my goal was to have a record of my activities and non-activities of the past year to build upon. Furthermore, I hope that, if you’ve read up until here, you have gained some understanding of what I’ve been doing.
It’s the second morning of my third TREEWEEK. I have gone on this retreat, happening at the end of September, for the past two years as well. Both times I wrote a recap post after the event. Last night I felt inspired to write something during the event as well, which is what I’m doing now.
Arriving at Blaue Blume felt like coming home. I entered the venue through the front door, heard someone playing the piano and a woman’s voice singing from the room in the back, and immediately felt I was in the right place. I saw many familiar faces, many new faces, and at least one person that I had met online but never in person. In the first one and a half days of TREEWEEK, I participated in interesting conversations, played games, and jammed with other musicians. I had also already helped in the scullery and put on my playlist to bring a good mood to washing dishes. And I spent some time in the co-working space doing work.
Last night, however, when I felt tired and went to bed, I was somehow filled with a feeling of sadness. Except for meeting the new people coming to the event, everything felt too familiar. It felt like a mismatch between expectations and reality. Before writing this post (but after deciding to write it), I read both previous accounts and noticed a pattern of what I’m noticing now. It’s like I’m waiting for something special, something transformative, to happen during the week. Something that will give me a totally new and life-changing perspective. Based on the experience of the first two days, I have the expectation that it won’t happen this year either, even though there are more than five days left.
At least one part of it is completely outside the control of TREEWEEK, its organizers, or participants. I was planning to use a lot of time for myself, for writing and for figuring stuff out. Yesterday’s client meeting made me realize that I will probably spend much of the personal, non-socializing time this week in client work. It likely could’ve been avoided with better time management in the previous weeks, but that would have involved trade-offs I wasn’t willing to make. I hope to get at least some writing time, and the first session has produced this very piece you’re reading right now.
To be fair, even another major part is only on me and not the responsibility of TREEWEEK. I’m reminded of other conversations and attempts at (peer) coaching I’ve had in the past. I might say that I’m looking for some sort of transformation or change, but I don’t think I’m receptive to it, mostly because I’m unwilling to leave things behind or question some of my fundamental beliefs.
Simon, the organizer of TREEWEEK, invited us all to bring our “main character energy”, the motto of this year’s event. Am I bringing enough of it? Could I be more agentic and make my third retreat special, distinctive, and an upgraded version of the experience from the previous two years? What would it even mean? And even if I have an idea about it, would I be comfortable expressing it, or are my desires attached to shame?
I don’t know what will happen and what the answers to the previous questions are, but it felt good to write this down on the second morning of my third TREEWEEK.
Partner dances generally require two distinct roles: leaders and followers. Traditionally, men learn how to lead, and women learn how to follow. Most new dancers learn roles according to tradition. So did I when I first got into Salsa and Bachata dancing. At the time, it was the obvious choice. It made my inner feminist a little uneasy, though. In the time that I’ve spent in the social dance community, I’ve discovered that there are many traditionalists who definitely want to stick with the traditional gender roles in partner dance.
I also discovered that, on the other hand, there are many open-minded, progressive people who believe that dance is for everyone and a role is just a role, not a gender identity. People should dance with the same as well as the opposite gender (and obviously non-gender-conforming people as well) while being able to pick any role they want. They can even switch roles in the middle of the dance through stealing or giving moves, a concept known as role rotation. I found two really cool teachers, both women, who teach role rotation, and even when they don’t rotate, they do their best to avoid normalization of traditional gender roles. I’ve started Bachata role rotation classes, which also means I started learning how to follow. It’s a lot to learn, and I’m still very much a beginner at it, but seeing Bachata from both sides has given me a much better insight into the dance rather than just learning one half of it. I can definitely recommend it. This text is written for people of all genders who have started dancing the traditional role and want to learn the other role, but especially men who wish to learn how to follow and hesitate for some reason.
In practice, at Salsa and Bachata socials, I’ve observed that the vast majority of dancers are in hetero couples that stick to the traditional roles. The second most common dance couple is two women, where obviously one of them is leading or they’re rotating. It’s a much rarer sight to see two men dancing with each other or a woman leading a man. I’ve also had the impression that Salsa is more traditional, whereas you see more women leading in Bachata, but that may be an attribute of my local scene (which includes people like the teachers I mentioned before) and not a global phenomenon.
Women leaders are more common than men followers. My theory is that many women don’t start leading because of some abstract idea that they want to understand the dance from both sides. They go to social events with their female friends and then want to dance with those friends as well, and not just with men they meet at the party. It is something that rarely happens with men. Partner dance isn’t sexual, but it is an activity that involves closeness, emotional connection, and physical touch in a soft and sensual manner. Men tend to avoid such activities among them due to some fear that it is gay and not manly. In theory, I’d say that such sentiments are problematic; they hold men back and might contribute to male loneliness, but I have to admit that, even with this assessment, I must acknowledge they are real, and I have observed them within myself. As a side note: ironically, these sentiments appear to be negatively correlated with homophobia in society. The more a society accepts homosexuality, the more straight men need to demonstrate they’re straight. Women may have some form of this as well, but from everything I’ve heard, read, and observed, women feel much closer to their same-gender friends, both physically and emotionally.
The idea that men lead and women follow isn’t a random assignment because the inventors of dancing had to pick one and threw a coin. It reflects how many people think about masculinity and femininity, where masculinity is considered active and dominant and femininity is considered passive and submissive. You will see people talking about masculine and feminine energy. And we’re seeing another difference between men and women: society is much more open to women taking on men’s roles than it is to men taking on what was traditionally a woman’s role. Feminism and the women’s movements that fought hard (and still fight) to end the discrimination of women established the idea that women are just as capable as men. The masculine is often seen as higher status than the feminine. A woman acting like a man is elevating herself, whereas a man acting like a woman is degrading himself. This should explain, at least partly, why we see more women lead in partner dances than men follow.
I haven’t grappled too hard with the idea that I shouldn’t follow because I’m a man. However, I have been worried that I’m subconsciously interested in an easier option to participate in the dance or that I’m trying to learn following to make up for a lack of leading skills. If you have similar thoughts, I think it’s important to clarify that following isn’t necessarily easier than leading. Yes, leading and following have different learning curves, and, especially in the beginning, you need to practice more before you can enjoy leading a dance. But as a follower, you are co-creating the dance as well, and that’s a skill you need to learn and practice. You don’t want the leader dragging you around without you understanding what happens; you want to be able to understand cues early so you can help build the flow that makes the dance smooth and enjoyable. Also, just because you intend to learn how to follow, you still want to become a better leader, right? And guess what? Following helps you understand good leading, and dancing with a good leader will give you a motivation boost to match their skills. So if nothing else, consider becoming a follower just for that; think of it as a training ground. And if you’re a follower already, learning to lead helps you better understand the difficulties that leaders might have.
If you are eager to learn the non-traditional role, you have to get comfortable dancing with people of the same gender. As I’ve mentioned before, this is probably harder for men. However, it’s not too bad; you get used to it. Dancing with random women in a class—standing in close embrace with a stranger you’ve just met—took some time to get used to as well (which is something I want to write about some other time). I think the hardest part for me wasn’t being uncomfortable dancing with another man; it was noticing a man being visibly uncomfortable dancing with me, probably because I’m a man. Once, a class partner made a joke in which he asked me to confirm my gender identity to him. This, however, has only made me realize how important it is that we normalize two (straight) men dancing with each other. It also shows that it’s essential that the teachers and the overall community are supportive of dancers in non-traditional roles and encourage you, whatever role you pick, so that people know their choice is accepted.
I think it’s also valid to say that, as a man, even though you are comfortable dancing with another man, you prefer to dance with women. I admit it as well. In role rotation classes, the participants are often dancers who are already experienced in one role and want to improve their weaker role. While you may also dance with men in those classes—the point being able to dance with everyone regardless of gender—you will have more partners who are women. At parties and social events, you can ask whoever you want to dance, so you can also exclusively ask women for dances. Although, as I’ve said earlier, it would be good to at least occasionally dance with men just to normalize it. The numbers are in your favor, as there are more women leaders. And, also based on my earlier observations, women who know how to lead mostly use their skills on their female friends. Most men who ask them to dance are defaulting to the traditional roles. If you, as a man, ask a woman to dance but tell her you’d like to be the follower, you’ll be met with surprise, but in a good way. In my experience, many women enjoy an opportunity to lead a man. I’ve only had positive feedback from women. Also, I’d always recommend remaining an active dancer in both roles so you don’t limit your options at social events.
If you know me, you know that I’m a person who tends to avoid stereotypical descriptions and using gender as an explanation as much as possible. Dancing, however, has shown me that many stereotypes are true to at least some extent. Besides the ones I already mentioned, I want to share another: in my experience, many women tend to underestimate and undersell their skills. They’ll tell you they’re a beginner and then lead flawlessly. Some men, on the other hand, tend to overestimate themselves, and they will also mansplain the dance moves to you while not getting them right either.
Here’s another, final thought. Partner dances require physical touch and proximity, but there’s a sliding scale of closeness between partners, depending on what you’re comfortable with. Both partners can influence it, but the leader has more control over it, as they pick their moves. For women, having this control as a leader can be an advantage. For men, especially those who tend to worry about accidentally crossing boundaries, following a woman and, hence, giving her control, is a discreet way of finding out the level of closeness she’s comfortable with you without asking directly. Your results may vary, but I’ve been surprised, because I’ve had the most physically close dances when a woman has been leading me. It’s not what I expected, but it was another positive experience.
To close, I hope you found my writing useful, and you’re now motivated to try out a new role as a social dancer. I’ll see you on the dance floor.