Stop stressing about self-improvement or waiting until you are on top of everything. This year, give yourself permission to prioritise pleasure.
I have a proposal to make: 2026 should be the year that you spend more time doing what you want. The new year should be the moment we commit to dedicating more of our finite hours on the planet to things we genuinely, deeply enjoy doing – to the activities that seize our interest, and that make us feel vibrantly alive. This should be the year you stop trying so hard to turn yourself into a better person, and focus instead on actually leading a more absorbing life.
Naturally, I anticipate certain objections to this suggestion. Possibly you consider yourself far too busy even to think about spending time in ways you would enjoy, and you wonder what sort of monster of privilege could even raise the notion. In this economy, and with AI coming for your job? Or maybe you are convinced you need to address your personal failings first – your tendency towards procrastination, your sedentary lifestyle, your atrocious diet. On the other hand, maybe you think it is morally outrageous to focus on yourself while the Earth is overheating, or while the sinister forces of ethnonationalism stalk the land. Or perhaps you are worried that if you were to let yourself do what you want, you would find yourself slouched on the sofa, scrolling slack-jawed through Instagram while overconsuming Hula Hoops, or gin, or heroin.
None of these objections hold any water, though. In fact, there is excellent reason to believe that doing more of what you want in 2026 will do nothing but good for your health and wellbeing, for your feelings of overwhelm, and even for the state of society.
To see why, consider first the hidden logic of the conventional approach to self-improvement and habit change – the 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 starts from the premise that there is something badly wrong with you, which you need to fix. Then it prescribes the daily behaviours that – were you to follow them with sufficient discipline – might eventually lead you to the point at which you would be an acceptable member of humanity, and could therefore relax (although not too much, for fear of backsliding).
Yet it is entirely possible that there is not anything badly wrong with you, other than the conviction that there is something badly wrong with you. And even if there is, it is not clear that organising your life around the grim struggle to fix it is a particularly effective strategy. It turns every day into a grinding internal struggle between different elements of your psychology. Which can become, ironically, a comfortable way to avoid launching into the life you really want to live – making the career switch that would fulfil you, for example, or daring to commit to a relationship. “Claiming that we are problematic,” the psychotherapist and author Bruce Tift points out, “means we do not have to engage with our lives fully, because we are not ‘ready yet’ – there is something wrong that needs to be fixed first. [So] we have a good excuse not to show up.”
