The Instagram account that got me through 2025
I love the end of the year. Not the rituals or resolutions, but the breathing room. It’s a time to slow down, catch your breath, and create. The weeks leading up to Christmas usually bring a little jolt of creative energy that I’ve come to rely on.
But not this year.
This year was hard. I am burned out. This blog will not be publishing any best-of or year-end lists.
Instead, I will share with you one of the things that helped me get through 2025. Perhaps the one thing that brought me more joy, pleasure, and happiness than anything else outside of my own flesh and blood:
Josh Eckert—or @gimpy on Instagram—is a skater and social media manager for Burton Snowboards. But more importantly, he provides me a daily dose of stoke.
I’m not exactly sure what to call his work other than absolutely delightful and completely essential to my day. It is the practice of observational positivity. The eternal sunshine of the stoked-out mind.
It’s unclear how much of his online persona is a bit versus some kind of exaggerated version of himself, but it doesn’t matter. He is like Wanye Campbell meets Mitch Hedberg meets a wizard on a skateboard? The comments on his videos are constantly peppered with GIFs of the Finding Nemo sea turtles.
But what’s not unclear is that Gimpy is a force for righteousness. He is positively positive; mystically optimistic; an antidote to misanthropes.
It’s taken me a month to write this post because every time I sit down to work on it I get sucked into his feed.
Here are some of my personal favorite musings:
Tea (I believe this was the first video I saw.)
Does it bother me that some of his posts are now paid partnerships?
Absolutely not.
Of course he should be doing ads for Duolingo and encouraging me to “expand my vocab in the realms I’ve never even thought to venture before, dude.” That’s what Gimpy does. “It’s free,” he says. “Why not just differentiate your dialect, dude?”
Exactly.
Dude, you know what actually just rips as you get older, dude?
A little bit of Gimpy, dude. ⚑
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