Year of Clarity

It’s January, which means it’s time for New Year’s resolutions.

Resolutions typically discourage me, to be honest. I think pretty rigidly, and have never had a good sense of balance between being disciplined towards a goal and outright punishing myself for not reaching it. So, instead of being inspiring, resolutions generally devolve into a bludgeon that I use to beat myself up for perceived failures.

Nevertheless, improvements are in order! Just because it’s difficult for me to set goals doesn’t mean I shouldn’t work towards something. It’s not that I don’t want progress, it’s that I think resolutions are a poor tool for making the progress I want to see.

I’m not alone in this opinion. YouTuber CGP Grey introduces the idea of Yearly Themes as an alternative to resolutions in this video. I encourage you to watch it and then come back, it’s a fantastic video and is only ~6 minutes long. The idea is to pick a theme that is broad, directional, and resonant, and then use that to guide your year.

Resolutions are typically quite narrow goals, whereas themes are adaptable and broad enough to change with you as you go through the year. We don’t know what life is going to throw at us and can only plan so far ahead, so we often have to make small choices in the moment. Where resolutions prescribe plans that, if we're honest, we have no idea if we’ll be able to follow, a theme acts more like a guide as we walk through life. By being broad, it gives us the flexibility to change our focus as we learn more about ourselves and our goals.

Life is a branching web of many different possibilities, but the traditional resolution is a binary: “Lose X pounds”, “Read X books”, “Quit X”, “Start X”, etc. You either accomplish them or you don’t. This all or nothing perspective can do more harm than good and doesn’t match how life often pans out. Suppose you set a goal to read 10 books but you only read 9. Strictly speaking you failed your resolution, but for many people reading 9 books in a year would be a huge increase in their reading. The overall trajectory of their life has been changed, and that’s a win! Yearly Themes focus on the direction of your life, as opposed to setting a goal and hoping that accomplishing it will build the life you want. Themes make the building the top priority, and the things you accomplish along the way are simply proof of change.

The final quality of a good theme, its “resonance”, is how truly meaningful the theme is to you. A resonant theme should feel important, inspiring, and even exciting. Choosing a resonant theme might seem like common sense, but the emphasis on this quality is well placed. Especially if you’re on social media, it is very easy to create an idea of what you “should” be doing, based purely on behaviors that influential people advertise. But just because someone you admire wakes up at 5am and runs 2 miles every morning, doesn’t mean you need to do that too. Focus on what is important in your life, not what popular people or some imaginary version of yourself are doing.

I like the idea of Yearly Themes a lot, so there’s a logical follow-up question: What is my theme for 2026? It’s the sort of question I have a lot of trouble with, because I don’t generally know what I want. Instead of being aware of myself and my environment, I find myself rather foggy and dazed.

In retrospect, it’s not surprising that I find myself this way. The internet is full of distractions and I also happen to make my living through computers, so I spend an awful lot of time staring at screens by default. Between my phone and all the other screens in my life, there is a constant stream of information, most of it completely unactionable and immediately forgotten, beaming into my brain. This torrent simultaneously tricks me into thinking I’m… well… thinking, while creating a deafening mental cacophony that makes meaningful contemplation impossible.

Once you get used to the numbing effect of media, whether it be YouTube, or short-form content, or mindlessly clicking through your favorite link aggregator, returning to the comparative silence of your own mind is anxiety inducing. This discomfort creates a cycle where the more numbing media you consume, the more that’s all you feel comfortable doing. Based on my own experiences, and discussions I’ve had with my friends, this unhealthy pattern with technology appears to be the default experience of people my age, rather than an exception.

The sentiment that whatever new-fangled technological or cultural phenomenon is ruining society is not a new one. People have been deriding “Kids these days…” for millennia and you can find lists of quotes spanning 2,500 years lamenting the latest trends and behavior of the youth. I’ve often heard people point to these lists and say something like, “See? People have always been worried about what’s new. Everything is fine.”

I just don’t know if I buy that anymore. If you think modern technology is gonna be just fine because someone once said that books are corrupting the youth, try taking an iPad away from a toddler who really likes Cocomelon and let me know how that goes for you. They’re simply not the same thing. If anything, the consistent pattern of “Kids these days” indicates to me that humanity has always struggled between some kind of meaningful self actualization and corrupting influences of our own invention. We have always been vulnerable to numbing ourselves into oblivion, and we keep inventing newer and more powerful distractions. Though individual steps in humanity’s technological progression have been successful, the trend does not look promising (AI-induced psychosis anyone?). Furthermore, the pace of innovation is only speeding up, and current technology is far more addictive and invasive than inventions of the past. At a certain point enough is enough.

When I reflect on the days that have been most satisfying to me, they’re the days when I’ve been living with intention, when my purpose and motivations have been clear. To put it abstractly, they’re the days I’ve been well centered and focused. The days when I’ve been least satisfied are days I’ve spent just killing time scrolling on my phone or procrastinating. Far too often, when it’s not been clear what I should be doing, I waffle until the opportunity to choose is gone, instead of just picking something. What I really want is clarity of thought. I want space for my brain to breathe. That’s why I’ve chosen 2026 as the Year of Clarity. The theme is focused on creating mental space again. It’s about removing distraction, cultivating a rich inner world, and building an attention span that can support deep contemplation.

As an example, when I was younger, I had a habit of talking (or thinking) to myself to go to sleep. I didn’t realize it then, but this practice was a crucial part of my day. It’s when I would digest everything that had been happening in my life, process new ideas, or otherwise develop my inner world. As I got older, this practice was quickly supplanted by watching YouTube or listening to an audiobook until I fell asleep. I’ve only realized recently what a loss this transition was.

It’s comfortable to put yourself into a fog with the myriad of distractions available on the internet, but it’s no way to live. The days that have been most fulfilling almost always required making space for my mind to work. It takes time, patience, and intentionality to “get into the zone”, and it requires the ability to be comfortable just sitting with yourself. I’m losing that ability, and I want to get it back.

The biggest change I’ve made because of this theme is cutting out almost all short-form content. My personal opinion of short-form content continually drifts towards “It’s uniformly evil for humanity and should be eradicated”, and I’m doing my best to get it out of my life. My phone is still an embarrassingly prominent distraction in my life, so there’s still plenty of work to be done here, but getting rid of Instagram was an excellent start. Because it was similarly distracting, I also took the BlueSky app off my phone, and now only engage with it as a Big Screen activity. The dream is to get rid of a smartphone entirely, but there are smaller steps I can take along the way.

The Year of Clarity is intended to be foundational. Without the ability to effectively utilize my mind, how can I accomplish anything else? And regardless of what I decide to do in the future, living life on accident, glued to my phone, sounds like a terrible way to spend my time.

Here’s to a clear mind in 2026!