I I have a suggestion: 2026 should be the year you spend more time doing what you want. The New Year should be the moment when we commit to devoting more of our limited hours on the planet to things we truly and deeply enjoy—activities that capture our interest and make us feel full of life. This should be the year you stop trying so hard to be a better person and instead focus on leading a more exciting life.
Naturally, I foresee certain objections to this proposal.
Perhaps you feel too busy to even think about spending time the way you like, and you wonder what monster of privilege could even bring up the idea. In this economy, when will AI come to your job? Or maybe you're convinced that you first need to deal with your personal shortcomings – procrastination, sedentary lifestyle, terrible diet. On the other hand, perhaps you think it is morally outrageous to focus on oneself while the Earth overheats or while the sinister forces of ethnonationalism pursue it. Or perhaps you're worried that if you gave yourself permission to do what you want, you'd find yourself slouched on the couch, scrolling through Instagram slack-jawed while consuming Hula Hoops or gin or heroin.
However, none of these objections stand up to scrutiny. In fact, there's good reason to believe that doing more of the things you want in 2026 will only benefit your health and well-being, your feelings of overwhelm, and even the state of society.
To understand why, let's first consider the hidden logic of the traditional approach to self-improvement and habit change – an approach that, if it actually worked, would presumably have destroyed the market for further books and courses on self-improvement and habit change some time ago. It all starts with the premise that there is something wrong with you and you need to fix it. It then prescribes daily patterns of behavior that – if you followed them with enough discipline – could eventually lead you to the point where you would become an acceptable member of humanity and therefore be able to relax (though not too much for fear of going backwards).
However, it is quite possible that there is nothing wrong with you other than the belief that there is something wrong with you. And even if there isIt's not obvious that organizing your life around the grim struggle to fix it is a particularly effective strategy. Every day becomes an exhausting internal battle between different elements of your psychology. Ironically, this can be a convenient way to avoid starting the life you really want to live—like changing a fulfilling career or having the courage to enter into a relationship. “The claim that we are problematic,” notes psychotherapist and author Bruce Tift, “means that we don’t need to fully commit to our lives because we’re not ‘ready’ yet—there’s something wrong that needs to be fixed first. [So] we have a good excuse not to come.”
As a powerful illustration of the futility of correcting yourself—and the positive benefits of doing what you want instead—consider the ubiquitous problem of spending too much time online. If you're prone to mindlessly rewinding events or swooning over superficially amusing entertainment, you've probably experimented with a variety of ways to resist temptation, such as when Odysseus ordered his sailors to tie him to the mast of his ship to resist the call of the sirens. But blocking apps and strict personal rules rarely work very well or for very long. (The most effective such intervention I've discovered this year is Brick, a tiny device that blocks distracting phone apps so that you physically have to move yourself and your smartphone to where you put the device in order to regain access. It turns out there's something more powerful than the temptation to waste time online, namely the inertia of not wanting to get up and walk up the stairs to find your Brick.)
A much more reliable way to stay offline is to simply do something so exciting that you won't think about going online at all. Those few magical days in 2025 when I realized that I had even forgotten where my phone was, it was because I was so immersed in reading, writing, talking or nature that the thought of it completely left my mind. “If you want to win the war for attention,” according to the New York Times columnist David Brooks once put it: “Don't try to say no to the trivial distractions you find at the information smorgasbord; try to say yes to a topic that causes terrible melancholy, and let the terrible melancholy crowd out everything else.” Or, as Katherine Martinko, author of Childhood Unplugged, argues in the context of how parents can encourage their children to spend less time online: “If we want our children to enjoy reality, then the most effective way to teach them is to do it ourselves… My advice is to fight [internet dependency] less with fleeting (and unreliable) hacks like time limits, tech-free zones, digital detoxes, technology fasts, focus mode and gray screens, and more with a great deal of love and appreciation for being present, active and engaged in the real world.”
It is not difficult to see how this principle can be extended to other areas of life. Instead of focusing on the food groups you're planning on banning yourself from eating this year, are there healthier ways to prepare meals that you'd actually be interested in learning about – so that by the time you usually reach for that unwanted snack, you're already too full of nutritious food to crave it? Instead of inventing a workout, you will have to force yourself to exercise three times a week, all the while waiting for the moment when it will “get out of the way” so you can enjoy life again. Are there forms of movement that you naturally enjoy that you might only need to practice a little more often or more intensely?
Be careful, though: this is when it's tempting to make all sorts of elaborate plans to do something more enjoyable – walk in the park five times a week! Working on your art project an hour every day! – which in themselves can become depressing or frightening and therefore quickly abandoned. You're trying to spend more time doing things you enjoy, rather than turning the idea of ”doing what you enjoy” into an unwanted addition to your already terrible to-do list.
If you're the aforementioned type of person, convinced that you don't have the ability to spend most of next year doing what you want, I think it's time for you to reconsider. First, as a finite human being in a world of infinite resources, you will always have too much to do. So there's no point in delaying enjoyment or revitalization until you're no longer faced with an unmanageable to-do list; I regret to inform you that you will most likely end your life with a long list of undone tasks. On the other hand, much of what we don't like about feeling overwhelmed isn't really a simple quantitative issue of too many things we think we have to do; what's more pertinent is the feeling of being at the mercy of a task list, of having no choice but to live out your days in service to it. As a result, adding a project to your list that you really want to tackle can have an unexpected effect: reduction feeling overwhelmed by increasing your experience of agency and what psychologists call self-efficacy. You freely decide to include something extra into your day because you really want to do it; accordingly, it becomes more difficult to think of yourself as nothing more than an indentured servant to your to-do list.
You also don't have to worry that doing more of what you want will turn you into an unproductive, socially isolated slacker and irresponsible citizen. Note the extremely low opinion of yourself caused by such fears: the implication that you are such a personality nightmare that only the most brutal self-improvement schemes, applied with constant vigilance, can save you from disaster. (This is also a counterintuitive concern, since it's unlikely you'd have much interest in the topic of changing your habits at all if you really were such a loser.) Isn't it at least possible that none of this is true—that if you pay close attention to the question of what you really like, you might find that this includes feeling healthy, connecting well with others, and making any kind of change in the world at large? At the very least, it might be worth experimenting.
Ultimately, however, there is a consideration even more fundamental than any of these, namely: it is unclear what life really is. For at all, if not for the desire to do more of what makes you feel most alive. As we know, it is easy to fall into the unconscious assumption that any such liveliness is for later: after you have sorted out your life; after passing the current employment phase; after the headlines stopped being so alarming. But the truth for limited people is that this is where real life is. And that if you're going to do something that's important to you—and feel pleasure and aliveness from it—you're going to have to do it before you've got it all figured out, before you've solved your procrastination problem or your intimacy problem, before you feel confident that the future of democracy or the climate is secure. This part of life is not just something you have to go through to get to the point that really matters. This is the part that really matters.
A famous study in child psychology known asmarshmallow experiments” suggests that it is very useful to have the kind of self-discipline that allows you to delay the gratification of one marshmallow so that you can get another marshmallow later. But life offers no rewards for being so good at delaying gratification that you accumulate a thousand uneaten marshmallows and then drop dead. At some point, you will have to eat a marshmallow. This could mean devoting time to art, writing, or music, or a long-forgotten friendship, active social activity or an exhilarating escape into the wild; it could mean a life lived more quietly than your current one, or, alternatively, a life lived much more loudly. Apparently no one else can tell you how to spend more of 2026 doing what you really want. Human rights activist Howard Thurman: “Don't ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive, and do it.”
