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How do you want to define 2026 for yourself?
I was never one to subscribe to new year's resolutions, but I do believe in using the new year to set a mindset for defining the past year and a goal for the new year's theme. How do you want to describe your 2026 this time next year?
I want mine to be a year of sowing. I want to make roots in a new job which I love and extend myself out to new people to create relationships I'm proud to have.
Another big focus this year for me will be physical change. I'm the heaviest I've ever been and last time I was close to this weight, I dropped 70lbs in under 6 months. It's time for me to find a sustainable way to reach and maintain that target weight again.
I don’t know yet. I go to church one time a year. Not because I subscribe to any religion or deity, but because every new years this one church does a naming ceremony. During the ceremony we are asked to choose a name for ourselves for the up coming year. I never know what I’m going to name myself, but during the mediation period something comes to me. One year I chose Openness as my name. I don’t know why I chose it. And that year was a year of being open. Being open to change, being open to ideas, being open to people, being open to love, being open to the unknown. I loved being Openness. This year my name is Family. I don’t know why I chose it, but it has been a wonderful name. I realized that not only do I have a Mom, a husband, and sons, and grandson but that I am a daughter, a wife, a mother, a grandmother. I’ve contemplated what that means and how I want that to look. I didn’t think I was putting a lot of effort into it, but I have been noticing that these relationships have become richer. For 2026 I don’t know yet. I like that Family has been this year’s intent, and it’s scary to choose a new name. At the same time I’m looking forward to it. I used to have resolutions and hopes for new years, but that never worked for me. I like the unraveling of a name. The figuring out what the unblemished me has in store for us.
Never heard this naming ritual. It's really interesting! I love how you use it. Is this atta hed to a particular religion or is it from the group leader?
It’s at a Unity church. I don’t know if all Unity churches do it as I’ve never been to another. And I really don’t know much about Unity except I like this ceremony.
Here’s the Wikipedia page on Unity Church
This really resonates with me. I tend to pick “themes” for the year, which are very similar in nature. They are guiding stars to keep in mind for each and every choice. 2025 was my “Year of Clearing the Decks” which felt very freeing; I’ve questioned a lot of assumptions and ideas about myself and how I spend my time. I feel much more able to identify what is right for me in a given situation now than I did before, with all the physical, mental, social, and emotional clutter that I was hanging on to. It was super cleansing, and I’m excited to meditate of what 2026’s theme will be
Clearing the decks, that’s a good one. I like the looseness of it. Like it has shape but not so much that it restrains. So much possibility in it! Your way seems very similar to mine. I hope 2026 brings you what you need.
I want to continue my path to increased financial freedom and security.
I want to continue building my connections and reputation in my new job.
I want to create more opportunities to have shared experiences with my son.
Curiosity: what does financial freedom mean to you? I just realized it can mean a lot of different things.
It means that I am able to pay down my current debt to zero within the next few months. It means that I have at least a month's expenses in savings by the end of the year. It means I know where my money is going and why, following my budget.
These are the specific and actionable goals I've set for myself this coming year, and I'm already well on my way towards achieving them. Additionally though...
It means freedom from worrying about purchasing things like a lunch occasionally, a game I like when it's on sale, or going out for a drink with friends. I want to be able to afford these small things (<$20) once or twice a week without stressing about it. I've worked it into my budget, so it's no biggie - the hardest part with these purchases is not letting it get out of hand.
I wish all of that for you! Having goals and fulfilling them even in the long term are essential in that freedom.
Achieving financial freedom for myself hasn’t really begun until my late thirties and I’m not even sure it’s freedom, but I do feel good about it.
Not worrying about making rent, or being able to afford the small pleasures like that game on sale are huge achievements. Even the smaller ones should be recognized.
It sounds like you’ll get there this year. I really don’t feel 39, but in my half-time on earth, patience has been the biggest lesson to life. Patience with yourself, with your family, and particularly with your work.
The biggest hurdle for me was always income. I'm finally in a position where my income is livable on my own. Over the last few years I've also put a lot of work into learning how to budget effectively, which has been a huge help.
I'm coming up on 40 as well in the next few years, and I'm realizing I have not prepared enough for the future... The least I can do is begin now!
I like how you brought up patience - you're absolutely correct that it helps to be patient. It's something I've gotten better at with age as well.
Good luck to you!
Good luck to you too!
One last question - I’ve been using a spreadsheet for my business, which helps with budget for that, but I’m beginning to realize I should do the same for myself… big “duh” moment.
What do you use for budget help?
For budget help? I relied on a trusted individual, the one who taught me how to set up my spreadsheets. The basic premise (which you likely know) is to track money coming in and money going out, and to sort it by type of expense. I have columns for estimated expenses and columns for actual expenses. I compare the two monthly and reconcile them so I can fine tune things.
Additionally, if you find it convenient for yourself, you can set up trackers for credit card and other debt expenditures and accounts within your spreadsheet so you can track trends on those as well. I found that useful when juggling a couple car payments, a mortgage, and a handful of credit cards. I only have one credit card I track now, so it's less mission critical.
Finally, I liked having a summary page for the EOY report. I could see my total income, expenses, and what I spent my money on. It allows me to see where I am overspending at a glance. None of this is rocket science - the hard part is setting it up and being diligent about both tracking it and sticking to the plan.
EDIT: If you want more specifics, let me know. Honestly, this could probably become an entirely separate thread as I think many others would benefit.
I'd like to be more regularly active - both in the physical and mental states.
I feel like i need to be more engaged, critical, thoughtful, intentional. Work on those brain muscles instead of passively consuming media.
Im in my late 20's but i can feel my body getting stiffer and more fragile. i don't have an exercise routine at all, and would like to incorporate some small daily exercise/stretching/yoga routine.
Forcing yourself to exercise daily is so so so so important. I've done a small, primarily body weight strength routine every day since I was maybe 12, and it makes me feel like I accomplished something even on my worst days. And after all these years I can tell it keeps me significantly more fit than most of my friends, despite never setting foot in a gym. These days my routine is a bit long, but since I work from home I can fit it in without too much trouble. The key is to start small to build the habit. Do 10 sit ups a day for the year, or maybe 5 minutes of yoga. Do it every single day, even if you're sick or traveling or camping. Ramp it up to 20 sit ups or 10 mins if it feels ludicrously easy, but at this point it's more about the habit than the numbers. Eventually you can figure out a size that keeps you feeling fit even on the laziest days.
I keep getting slapped by life and its many surprises, and my hope is to continue building up my resilience to it. When hitting a bump in my mood or workflow, I just wanna spring back up and get back to work instead of taking several days to reset.
Coupling that with the last couple years of successfully setting realistic-goals, this is my current outlook:
Piecing my life back together! I was unwell and unable to have a full time job for the last two years. Next year will make it three.
But I've recovered enough and seem to be making some progress career wise. I hope.
I just want to stay stable and keep going and finally earn some stable income again.
Coming into 2025, I started a new job that December/January that gave me a very comfortable wage and doesn't take very much effort to do, and was completely remote with no travel so I've spent this whole year with a mountain of free time.
...which was my 2025 New Year's resolution to completely waste.
Thing is, up until January 2025 I've spent nearly 15 years working in marketing-agency turbohell: 12- to 14-hour days were common, I was effectively on-call 24/7, I was traveling around the country for work or client pitches constantly, the pressure and stress of managing departments and always being overbooked on clients was such that it had significant medical consequences for me over the last couple of years. I was good at my career and made a good living, and at times I even enjoyed it--but it meant pretty much giving up all the hobbies I used to have, the gym, any kind of reasonable diet. I became overweight, had to take blood pressure medication and nerve blockers, and was mainlining caffeine and cigarettes every day because it was rare that I got more than 3-4 hours of sleep a night.
So when I moved to this recent role where I suddenly had almost no responsibility and almost complete freedom, I made it my number-one goal to relearn boredom. A decade-plus of stress-induced anxiety meant that on rare occasions I momentarily had no demands on my time, I would get itchy and nervous...in my line of work, any period of quiet means there's a disaster happening somewhere that no one's told you about yet. So I wouldn't use that time to read, or play games, or go to the gym--I'd just go back to my desk and check and re-check everything trying to get ahead of the next emergency. I was never, ever off the clock.
This year, I made it a goal to set no goals whatsoever. To not try to cram a whole bunch of activities with ambitious targets like reading X number of books, or losing Y amount of weight, etc., but instead take things easy and burn off my habit of viewing any free time as enemy because it meant something somewhere wasn't getting done. I'd read books or watch a movie or play games or go to the gym, but only when and how much I felt like it. If I felt like sitting and staring at the wall, then fuck it, let's pick a wall.
It's been good for me. It did take most of the year before I felt comfortable in myself doing nothing and not feeling like I was "wasting valuable time", but now I can sit with my thoughts for a while and I don't get anxious. I did read 5 books, which is more books than I've read in the last 5 years. I saw a bunch of movies I'd never had the chance to get around to. I finished half a dozen games from my Steam backlog. I chipped in a lot more on housework and yardwork. I switched to a minimalist gym program in Q1 and it's been easy to keep with it--I haven't lost a single pound but I've recomped a fair amount and am physically stronger than I've been in years. I'm still overweight and still a smoker, but despite attempting and failing to make improvements on those fronts I'm deliberately not beating myself up about it. No goals, after all.
So now that this year of "vacation" is over, I'm looking to define 2026 by finding what's on the other side of refindng myself. I always knew that this easy, well-paying job I currently have was too good to expect to last not much more than a year, a fact that was confirmed this past week by my boss who said "we're going to ride this train as long as we can, but starting now I recommend making sure your savings are robust". So, fine. I don't want to go back to the misery grinder of agency life, so exploring career options will be a thing. I'm not going to set a target, but I do plan to actively start losing weight and finally quit my daily smoking habit. Beyond that I have no resolutions. 2026 will be defined as a proper, major self-reset, in service of being ready for--and then going to find--whatever the next chapter of my life is going to be. It may be better or worse, but my only real desire right now is that this next chapter doesn't look anything like the previous one.
I dunno what my new year's resolution will be or even if I believe in the concept. A close friend once said that we shouldn't reserve self-reflection for a specific calendar date and I agree with him.
Anyway, for me 2025 really sucked and I want next year to be the one where I bounce back.
This time last year I was meant to be moving into my own apartment. Then I was made redundant, spent seven months struggling to find another job and currently work in a role that I hate. It's the fact that I have to wake up at stupid o'clock in the morning, which can either be 7 am on a home day, or 5 am if I need to commute to the office. Commuting takes two hours each way regardless of if I drive or take public transport and it effectively garnishes 2.5 hours worth of my wages on bus/train costs, or slightly less in fuel if I drive. Also, I didn't spend years and thousands of pounds on accountancy qualifications so I could do 8 hours of basic data entry a day for £13.50 an hour whilst some parasite recruiter earns commission from my misery.
Despite 2025 being the year I lost my virginity and having a brief relationship, my love life (or lack thereof) has flatlined. I don't get matches on dating sites. A friend of mine led me on big time. And I just feel like nothing is going my way.
I think my resolution for 2026 will be to stop brooding. If somebody pisses me off or upsets me I have to be more confrontational.
I hope you can find a job sitch' that gives you, at the very least, a better commute. I used to do about an hour to an hour and a half by tram for a pretty low-paying job, and even with money troubles the main thing that really drained me was the commute.
I posted in the related thread for this last year (https://tildes.net/~talk/1kw1/your_theme_for_2025) that I wanted 2025 to be the Year of Commitment.
I said to myself yesterday that I felt I'd largely fulfilled that and, then, began to wonder what I would have to do to proclaim I had fulfilled it entirely. I realised that regardless of what I did, I would always push the goalposts farther and farther back. So, really, I ought to be saying that I did a tremendous job of pursuing my theme for 2025.
For 2026 I have chosen to focus on Empathy and Gratitude. Both are skills of mine I could do with refining and building upon. Over the years, I've managed to use many tactics to stop self-hatred and negative thoughts, but I still remain a somewhat cynical guy. Perhaps it's in my biology; my parents and grandparents are the same. I would like to spend the next year proving that assumption wrong :).
I like the way you phrased this. One of the things I’ve been trying to be aware of is my comparing things I’ve done to the ideal, and then not being satisfied with myself because they don’t match. Your phrasing spoke to me because I could instantly see the question I could ask myself: have I pushed the goalpost?
I'm glad I could help :) Our evolutionary ingrained sense of competition can be a good motivator, but our tendency towards pessimism can exploit this, as you noticed, by making us believe we haven't done enough.
In reality, if you're even 0.1% better at something than you were last year, you've still improved.
I want 2026 to be my year of Community.
Since RTO requirements at my workplace got relaxed, I can spend days on end without going out of the house. Though my social needs are low and it's been great to have additional time with my spouse, it's gotten to be a depressing pattern. I should have more in-person interactions, more sense of engagement with other people's needs, more contact with external ideas, and a deeper connection to local political organizing.
It's also going to be a year of planning the path to retirement. We've both crossed the age 60 threshold. It's not too soon to reorganize our finances and figure out how to handle expanding medical needs and declining capacities.
We also have to plan for supporting my brother and his wife, who've gotten smacked with the ACA premium increases, loss of one of the most lucrative of their myriad gig jobs, and health problems that jeopardize their ability to work at all. I just learned over the holidays that my brother is gradually going blind from a condition that surgery (which he can't afford given a $10k deductible) may not be able to correct, and he's in immediate danger of losing his commercial driving license. We'd saved some cash in the hope of traveling for our 30th anniversary, but welcome to healthcare in America.
2025 ended really poorly for me - I posted here several weeks back about a breakup and I had moved earlier this year a few hundred miles away from friends and family to move in with my now-ex. “Getting over it” has been really up and down but one common thread keeping my head up has been actively working on myself, whether that’s exercise, studying, or hobby crafts. I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions because I have a very consistent track record of dropping them (and they don’t have to have been made at the new year). In fact I am very wary of relying on motivation because that thing is a fickle mistress and no friend of mine. But I’m feeling really good about continuing these things for the upcoming year because for once they aren’t me trying to “improve” my life despite my lazy soul preferring to stay still… I really need these changes because I see how they’re helping me even in the short-term.
I haven’t run for exercise since mandatory PE in high school and I’ve always had pretty garbage stamina but honestly I am surprised that I am seeing progress even though I felt I never saw any as a teen (lack of consistency being the explanation of course). I’ll even pay for an overpriced Starbucks drink after a run just to sit in there for an hour with a textbook and actually enjoy reading it / working through some exercises. Once the weather gets warm enough for my poor southern Californian bones I can go back to sitting at one of the many nearby parks but for now, look, 45 F is too damn cold to sit outside in, thank you! (The library is an option, though a little less convenient if I’m trying to combine exercise with study time. I’ll be back!)
My mental health still takes nosedives seemingly out of nowhere and I struggled for a while just to get out of those ruts. For now, just being outdoors is helping with that. I also want to expand my support group but I’ve never been big on meeting new people… I’m keeping it in mind, I even showed up to a arts/crafts night hosted at a local game shop and everyone was really nice, but it definitely takes a lot more out of me than just exercise and reading.
I sincerely hope 2026 goes better for you and I would like to congratulate you on your resilience for what you have gone through this year. Being able to get back up when you're down is half the job and it sounds like you're doing a damn good job at recognising what steps to take to feel better and implementing them.
And hey, if a Starbucks is what it takes to help you achieve some goal, then so be it. Why do people put dressing on a salad? To make themselves actually eat it, of course.
I avoided spending $300 for an annual membership at the gym at my work as I was looking for a new job at the time, but realized that a relatively small amount of money saved had a huge impact to my physical well-being.
...and I didn't see action on the job front, so savings be damned, it's back to the in January.
I'm looking at 2026 as a year for improvement. We're moving to a new city at the end of this year, and it'll be a sort of fresh start since we only know a few people there and need to get plugged in. I'm planning on making this a year of growth, both professionally and personally.
* I may run a half-marathon, but I'm waiting to see how our schedule is at the new place before I commit to that
All of this can seem like a big list when I put it up front, but some of these are one offs, while others only take small changes in my scheduling or habits to build up on them. I'm planning to get SMART with all the goals and get them in a place where I'm reviewing them regularly.
My friends and I do a pretty good job of holding ourselves accountable for new years resolutions and I did fairly well for 2025. Despite the rollercoaster of a year I had, I managed to achieve my goals of starting to exercise regularly, move out, and also get promoted (though I had to switch jobs for that).
For 2026, I've got a few more goals. Just sitting here looking at them they do feel a bit difficult for myself to achieve but I think setting goals that just feel slightly out of reach will motivate me to work harder to achieve them.
First, I want to focus more on my health. I want to lose ~40lbs by the end of the year and I want to hit the gym at least 3x a week. I've always struggled to motivate myself to go to the gym so I want to see if I can get a personal trainer or someone else who will drag my lazy ass to the gym. I did lose a little bit of weight this year naturally just from walking around more from living in the city so I'd like to accelerate that.
Second, I want to a get a hobby. I don't really have one at the moment and have been wanting to etiher pick up the drums, learn Korean, or get into sim-racing or even auto-cross with my car. The only thing I really do as a "hobby" is play video games and mess around wiht my home server once in a while. I also kind of want to get back into programming recreationally but I find it difficult to do so since I code for work. I read 1 book this year so I was thinking of also just reading more in 2026.
Finally, I just want to improve my investment portfolio. I got caught up in high-yield ETFs in the latter half of 2025, resulting in extra income that turned out to be vry unsustainable and after taxes, I didn't really make much. I'd love to rebalance things to be more stable and dependable.
I hope to be able to move out before the year ends... more than anything, I need a certain degree of independence due to personal circumstances.
One thing that's also consistently on my mind is my crush who I'll meet in a bit less than two months. No matter how it will end, I think it's bound to leave a strong mark on my 2026.
I need to finally accomplish in 2026 what I haven't the past couple of years which is getting moved. Also completely reorienting myself in the job market given that I left a full time job a couple of years ago and have not returned to one yet. It will need to happen this coming year for me to truly feel like this mid-life crisis or whatever one wants to call it is past me and that I have landed in a new life era.
I had the privilege to be able to do what I did and put a pause on the rat race for quite a while, so I fully understand that, but it's been an uphill battle actually executively functioning some days the past couple of years despite having so much time available to me and actually feeling mentally better overall compared to when I was employed which was its own kind of stagnation and depression and stress.
So theme for 2026 is "taking the next steps for big mid-life changes". So that's:
I’ve mostly stopped committing to resolutions or themes for the New Year. I’m just consistently bad at following through. What I want to do or work on changes on a whim and it’s far more effective for me to follow those whims than to try and stick to what my past self wanted to do.
Still, I have a metric of success for any given year: the year must be memorable. I’ve found that, in hindsight, bad things or good things happening during a year don’t impact my retrospective emotions at all. Three years down the line, I only care if I remember the year and the impact it had on me.
If I think about 2020, 2021, 2022, I don’t really know how I felt overall during the year; I can guess, but it’s always mixed. How memorable is concrete, and I measure it in terms of “seasons of things” i.e., how many 3-month periods had an impact on me that I’ll remember for a long time.
2020, 21, and 23 were mixed for me on the good/bad axis, but all were minimal in terms of their impact on me (0-1 season).
2019 (3), 2022 (2), 2024 (3) were high impact years.
In 2025, I started to actually try to apply this philosophy to make my year better. I think I only got 1 season, but what I’m especially proud of is I think I did enough preparation to make 2026 a 3 or 4 season year.