Disclaimer: This is not a chronology of events, but my attempt to understand how a year was lived, endured, and judged.
Image generated using ChatGPT (OpenAI), based on the author’s prompt.
Source: https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6954acf0340c81918adbab70dcf56f78
There are years that pass like calendar pages, measurable, divisible, easily summarized. And then there are years that resist being counted, years that do not yield their meaning to chronology alone. Looking back at 2025, I recognize it as the latter: a year lived not merely in Χρόνος, but in what the Greeks once called καιρός, a time of thresholds, ripening, and irreversible significance. To borrow Henri Bergson’s formulation, a year that unfolded as durée réelle: lived duration, irreducible to dates, saturated with consciousness, memory, and moral weight (Bergson, 1910; Phipps, 2004).
This sense of lived time as irreducible duration resonates strongly with what Max van Manen calls phenomenology of practice: an orientation that does not treat experience as data to be processed, but as meaning that calls for attentiveness, tact, and responsibility. Phenomenology, as van Manen insists, “is not just the name of a philosophical perspective, it is also the source for questioning life meaning as we live it and the nature of responsibility for personal actions and decisions” (van Manen, 2023, p. xvi). In this sense, reflection is never neutral. It is already ethical.
Only now, at some distance, does the year begin to disclose its inner coherence.
Ethics as Orientation, Not Ornament
The year did not begin with closure or resolution. It began with attentiveness. The early months of 2025 were marked by a quiet discipline, almost monastic in rhythm, of reading, teaching, evaluating, and repeatedly interrogating my own stance. Ethics, during this time, was not a topic to be discussed or cited. It functioned as an orientation: how I spoke to students, how I read their work, how I resisted the twin temptations of cruelty and indulgence. What I was practicing, often tacitly, was what van Manen describes as phenomenology not as doctrine but as attitude.
As he puts it, “Phenomenology is not a body of knowledge but rather a philosophic way (methodos) to meaning… a certain way of seeing and thinking” (van Manen, 2023, p. 26). This explains why ethics, for me, could not be reduced to principles nor compliance. It lived in tone, hesitation, restraint, in how one dwells with a student’s answer rather than how quickly one judges it.
Unsurprisingly, as the kairos unfolds, I found myself returning, almost instinctively, to classical moral touchstones: gnōthi seauton (know thyself), ataraxia, responsibility before the Other. These gestures resonate strongly with phenomenological and existential ethics, where moral life is not grounded in rule, following but in attentiveness to lived situations and to others as irreducible presences (Levinas, as discussed in relation to phenomenology; see also Heidegger, 1962; Merleau-Ponty, 1962).
During this period, my reading practices also took on a distinctive form. Blinkist became part of my daily intellectual diet, not as a shortcut, but as a sharpening device. Condensed texts forced a decision: Is this idea worth expanding? Does it resist me? Does it demand correction? In this sense, efficiency did not negate depth; it intensified the demand for judgment, echoing Polanyi’s (1966) insistence that meaningful knowledge always exceeds what can be made explicit.
Pedagogy as Ethical Trial
Looking back now, pedagogical practice became the first ethical testing ground of the year. Grading, rubrics, oral examinations, forum discussions, and the growing presence of generative AI converged into a recurring question that refused to go away: How does one exercise authority without abusing power?
My pedagogical struggles throughout the semester echoed what van Manen calls the primacy of practice. Phenomenology of practice, he writes, “is sensitive to the realization that life as we live and experience it is not only rational and logical… it is also subtle, ambiguous, and saturated with existential and ethical meaning” (van Manen, 2023, p. 27). This insight helped me resist both algorithmic grading and sentimental leniency. Pedagogical judgment is never purely technical; it is always tactful, situated, and ethically exposed.
Looking back, I felt two temptations constantly. One was leniency born of fatigue, which means a lowering of standards disguised as compassion. The other was punitiveness, or, a moral reflex against shallow, derivative, or AI-assisted answers. I resisted both. What emerged instead was a principled middle: transparent criteria, weighted rubrics, explicit reasoning. Evaluation became, for me, an ethical act, an attempt to be fair not only to students, but to the discipline and to truth itself.
This position resonates strongly with critical pedagogical traditions that reject both authoritarianism and false permissiveness (Freire, 1970; Dewey, 1938). It also aligns with phenomenological pedagogy, where teaching is understood as an action-sensitive ethical practice rather than a mere transmission of content (Van Manen, 1990).
It was also during this time that my skepticism toward institutional prestige sharpened. I became increasingly convinced that rigor is not guaranteed by rankings, accreditation, or symbolic capital. Rigor is enacted, or betrayed, in small, daily decisions. As Nussbaum (1997) reminds us, the cultivation of intellectual responsibility depends less on institutional status than on habits of judgment and care.
The Doctoral Threshold: Arrival Without Triumphalism
June 2025 marked a decisive threshold: my viva voce in the doctoral program of Communication Science at FISIP Universitas Indonesia. The defense did not feel triumphant. It felt sober. Existential. Like a checkpoint rather than a finish line.
I had arrived, yes, but without triumphalism. What lingered afterward was ambivalence. Relief coexisted with critique. I had survived the system, bitter in some ways and also challenging, but I was no longer willing to romanticize it. One conviction returned repeatedly in my reflections, almost verbatim: the culmination of formal education must never be confused with the cessation of thinking.
This realization echoes a long phenomenological suspicion toward bureaucratized knowledge and procedural reason (Husserl, 1970; Heidegger, 1962). Completion, in this sense, imposed a heavier ethical burden, namely, to think more carefully, to supervise more responsibly, and to render assessment more justly. The doctorate did not close a chapter; it opened an ethical obligation of becoming a more responsible and engaged gatekeeper of knowledge.
Yudisium and Repositioning the Self
The yudisium on July 10 merely formalized what June had already confirmed. Yet instead of closure, July became a moment of repositioning. I realized, clearly and without past bitterness, that I felt more alive in undergraduate supervision, editorial judgment, and ethical debate than in doctoral rituals themselves.
This realization was not disappointment; it was clarity. I began to articulate, more explicitly, what I stood for and what I resisted. Not novelty for its own sake. Not metrics without meaning. Not fluency without depth. These concerns resonate with critiques of productivity culture and academic performativity in contemporary higher education (Irani, 2020; Zuboff, 2019).
My editorial work in UltimaComm journal intensified during this period. Desk rejections, reviewer ethics, and AI-detection dilemmas were not bureaucratic chores to me. I came to see gatekeeping not as exclusion, but as stewardship: an ethical responsibility to protect the integrity of scholarly communication (Habermas, 1984; Bohman, 1996).
Loss, Silence, and Ethical Memory
Then the year shifted registers.
Mid to late 2025 was punctured by episodic bereavements. I lost friends, colleagues, mentors: Anton Binsar, Kanisius Karyono, Muliawati G. Siswanto, Margaretha Margawati van Eymeren, Asmi Arijanto, Tino Luas. And then, only days ago, my teacher and mentor, Prof. Dr. Mudji Sutrisno, SJ.
Grief did not erupt loudly in my writing nor tears flow profusely. It entered quietly, but persistently. A different gravity settled in. Ethical questions deepened and slowed: What does it mean to inherit a tradition? How does one remain faithful without becoming dogmatic? How does one honor teachers other than by imitation?
Here, phenomenology revealed its ethical depth. In mourning, I came to understand more deeply van Manen’s insistence that phenomenology begins not with explanation but with wonder and dwelling. “Phenomenology is a perpetual practice,” he writes, “an eternal practicing to get, explore, and disclose meaning in all its complexity” (van Manen, 2023, p. 27). Grief, then, was not an interruption to thinking. It was a modification of its tempo. Loss demanded patience, silence, and a slower ethical gaze. One that does not resolve experience but stays with it.
Introspectively, grieving was not merely an event; it was a modification of my horizon of meaning. Thought itself began to appear as a form of remembrance. Teaching, writing, judging; these became ways of keeping voices alive. The sadness did not resolve. It lingered. It still lingers. As Carel (2016) reminds us, lived experience, especially suffering, cannot be “solved,” only inhabited responsibly.
At some point, words no longer explained loss; they only accompanied it. Rilke’s Pietà (1922) reverberated with me in that silence.
Fills now my cup, and past thought is
my fulness thereof. I harden as a stone
sets hard at its heart.
Hard that I am, I know this alone:
that thou didst grow—
— — — — — and grow,
to outgrow,
as too great pain,
my heart’s reach utterly.
Now liest thou my womb athwart,
now can I not to thee again
give birth.
(Rilke, “Pietà”)
Refusing Fragmentation, Weaving Unity
After this, I no longer sought resolution, only meaningful coherence. Toward the end of the year, my attention turned insistently toward integration. I kept asking whether phenomenology, ethics, communication, pedagogy, and technology could still speak to one another without collapsing into slogans or empty interdisciplinarity. Van Manen nudges that phenomenology loses its soul when it becomes saturated with jargons or proceduralized. He reminds us that phenomenology “avoids abstraction and codification” and resists becoming a mere technique (van Manen, 2023, p. 143). This soft guidance enhanced my refusal to treat AI, pedagogy, or ethics as isolated domains and incommunicable arrays of monads (Leibniz, 1714). What mattered was explication of sources and coherence of meanings, not methodological fancied fashion.
My stance toward generative AI matured during this period. I was no longer merely critical, nor defensive. I became calibrated. AI revealed itself as a mirror—exposing where academic culture had already hollowed itself out, and where ethical seriousness still mattered. I refused both technophobia, Neo-Luddism, and naïveté. What I demanded instead was disclosure, accountability, and judgment, echoing broader ethical concerns about technology, autonomy, and responsibility (Winner, 1977; Johnston, 2020).
Beyond 2025: Duration as Responsibility
If one sentence were to hold the year together, it would be this: thinking is an ethical responsibility that does not retire with degrees, titles, or mentors.
2025 was not simply a year of achievement. It was a year of thresholds: intellectual, institutional, and existential. I graduated. I lost those I loved and learned from. I wept with losses and leapt with joyeuses fêtes. I read more efficiently, but judged more slowly. I taught, examined, rejected, affirmed, and grieved. What endures is not a list of accomplishments, but a stance: a refusal to flatten meaning, a commitment to ethical seriousness, and a willingness to carry memory forward through responsible speech, action, and intersectionality.
In Bergsonian sense, this year cannot be divided without being distorted. It must be lived as duration, durée réelle (Bergson, 1910; Phipps, 2004). And in that duration, responsibility does not diminish. It deepens. Some lessons mature like good wine, not to be sipped in haste. Some losses do not ask to be healed, only to be held dear. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards, echoing Kierkegaard’s Livet skal forstaas baglaens, men leves forlaens (1843).
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