2026 for the gentle and the curious
resolutions for people that don't do resolutions
At many slavic dinner tables, New Year’s resolutions, along with caviar, are no joking matter: entire rituals exist that facilitate speaking your dream life into existence, which I find both ironic and endearing, given how genetically cynical the cultural fabric is. Traditions vary in extremes, my family’s is fairly simple: you take a full minute from 11:59 to midnight to visualize and compose what you’d like to cultivate in the new year. Many dinners of wishful thinking later, I can’t recall a single resolution I ever made, stuck to, or abandoned. It’s not a memory problem or a discipline problem: perpetually, I think, it’s just been foolish to assume I can fortune tell how any given year would go. It never goes the way I expect it to, so why would I lean on a piece of paper filled with ‘I will’ sentences? No longer enthralled by resolutions that look like to-do pointers, as they assume we know the unfolding of our story better than the story knows itself, I think it might be time to start doing things differently. Maybe we should all go less Bryan Johnson and more Virginia Woolf about our days.
Life happens in the middle of what could never go your way despite your best attempts and what goes better than you could ever hope for. Nestled between truth and imagination, our prediction compass is hopeful but unmistakably incorrect. A resolution is an assumption, and an assumption, even a positive one, quickly becomes a source of great annoyance over not having lived up precisely to what you set out to do: circumstances change, people change, you change, rapidly and with no remorse, all to a point where you become emotionally disconnected from your own goals, probably with a bitter aftertaste of failure and high yield responsibility. But to transgress the unknown and its limitless opportunity means to first allow for more uncertainty than we’re comfortable with. And act from there.
To my heart’s content, my philosophy for 2026 is minimalism of the exterior and maximalism of the interior, and learning to sit comfortably in that polarity. Without passing out.