2026 is upon us!
As I'm sure you've already noticed, 2026 is upon us and as is tradition for many, I will be trying to find ways to make improvements and changes to my life. However, I don't want to do this in a vacuum.
What I did this year
Bought a condo
Man, this one was wild, the perfect place came up for sale at a decent price and we just had to have it. It was a huge lift (calling banks to get numbers approved < 24 hrs after a COVID and Flu vaxx was wild) but in the end huge improvement
Ditched a lot of social media
I'm still checking youtube for second screen entertainment and similar but I did pretty fully ditch anything where there's an infinite feed. I do sometimes check into bluesky, but I've unfollowed almost everyone there so I have to seek things out, often leading to me just signing out. I similarly removed all the subreddits on reddit to avoid time wasting there. Vast improvement.
Swapped to a better med regimen
I've got depression, I was on a combo of an SSRI and dopamine antagonist, and still am. However what I did swap up was the SSRI to one that my PCP says should help a bit with my generalized anxiety. 3 months in and I can say it does help a bit, still not 100% sure if I'm getting all the results I want here but it's better.
What I want to do in 2026
Invest time into my self-hosted services
I have been trying my hardest to pull out of the algorithm-fueled media platforms, spotify has bit the dust, I'm buying stuff on bandcamp that gets recommended by blogs that I'm following on a self-hosted RSS reader. The remaining things that I want to get out of my life are streaming services. I'm really done with these things, they're getting more and more expensive each passing year and the selection keeps gettin worse on each of them. I'd love to just do all my media viewing off real hard media or my home server by the end of the year.
Finally lose some weight
This ties into the meds. I have chronic depression and I didn't really have an option for truly breaking through that and feeling better that didn't involve some level of chemicals. The catch is that these chemicals have some side effects, namely that they do make you fat. I wasn't skinny to begin with but it's getting to a point where it's affecting my day to day life. As a result, more walking, more weight lifting, less junk food, more home cooked meals.
I want to write more
I think that most of us at this point have become consumers over creators in a large part of our lives. I want to stick with the idea of blogging more regularly, getting my thoughts out there on paper and seeing what comes of it. An unexamined life is one that is barely being lived in my eyes and I want to commit to that examination
Spend more time with my family
My partner and my dogs are my life at the end of the day. I have other ties to the communities I exist in and no man is an island, but I want to make a big effort to get the little gremlins in my life out and about and living life. I also think that spending more time with my extended family as they continue to get older will only help out in the long term.
Stop chasing the new when it comes to media
I don't want to sound like some freak with a roman statue in their profile picture preaching a "RETVRN TO TRADITION", but I'm not going to be trying my hardest to see things ASAP. I have a huge backlog of things that I should just get through and I can put off seeing the newest and hottest in favor of busting through a backlog.
Logging the hell out when I'm getting upset
I'm not the first person to tell you that a bunch of stuff online is designed to get you upset to interact with it. This is gonna be the year of "block em, stand up, walk around the block and then return". If I catch myself saying internally "that's gotta be the dumbest thing I've seen written today" it's just time to step back.
In conclusion
I know we all do these big lists every year and we all fail, but I do really want to try this time around, if nothing else, losing the background stress of housing being as big of a concern does really help when it comes to just having more mental bandwidth. So to you and yours, happy new years and the best of luck with your own goals.
-- Remember to thank your Town Manager for a job well done!