6 hours ago
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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’d 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’re 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’s morally outrageous to focus on yourself while the Earth is overheating, or while the sinister forces of ethnonationalism stalk the land. Or perhaps you’re worried that if you were to let yourself do what you want, you’d 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’s 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’s 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’d be an acceptable member of humanity, and could therefore relax (although not too much, for fear of backsliding).
Yet it’s entirely possible that there isn’t anything badly wrong with you, other than the conviction that there’s something badly wrong with you. And even if there is, it’s 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 don’t have to engage with our lives fully, because we aren’t ‘ready yet’ – there’s something wrong that needs to be fixed first. [So] we have a good excuse not to show up.”
For one vivid illustration of the futility of fixing 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 pointlessly doomscrolling, or numbing out with superficially amusing entertainment, you’ve probably experimented with multiple ways to stop yourself succumbing to temptation, like Odysseus ordering his sailors to bind him to the mast of his ship, to resist the call of the sirens. But app blockers and strict personal rules rarely seem to work very well, or for very long. (The most effective such intervention I 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 wherever you’ve put the device, in order to regain access. It turns out that there’s one thing more powerful than the lure of online time-wasting, which is the inertia of not wanting to get up and go upstairs to find your Brick.)
A much more reliable way to stay offline is just to be doing things so engaging that it wouldn’t occur to you to drift online in the first place. On the few magical days in 2025 that I realised I’d forgotten where my phone even was, it was because I’d become so immersed in reading or writing or conversation or nature that the thought of it had left my mind entirely. “If you want to win the war for attention,” as the New York Times columnist David Brooks once put it, “don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.” Or as Katherine Martinko, author of Childhood Unplugged, argues in the context of how parents might encourage their children to spend less time online: “If we want our children to revel in 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, tech fasts, focus mode, and grayscaled screens, and more with an overwhelming love and appreciation for being present, active, and engaged with the real world.”
It isn’t hard to see how you might extend this principle to other domains of life as well. Instead of focusing on the food groups you plan on banning yourself from consuming this year, are there healthier styles of cooking about which you might genuinely enjoy learning – so that by the time you might normally be reaching for an inadvisable sort of snack, you’re already too full of nutritious food to want one? Instead of concocting a workout you’ll have to force yourself through three times a week – looking forward the whole time to the moment that it’s “out of the way”, so you can resume enjoying life again – are there forms of movement you naturally enjoy, and might only need to do a bit more often, or more intensely?
Be careful, though: this is the point at which it’s tempting to devise all sorts of demanding plans for doing things more enjoyably – walking in the park five times a week! Working on your art project for an hour every day! – which may themselves become oppressive or intimidating, and thus speedily abandoned. You’re trying to spend more time doing things you enjoy – not turning the idea of “doing what you enjoy” into an unwanted extension of your already horrendous to-do list.
If you’re the aforementioned kind of person convinced you don’t have the bandwidth to spend more of the coming year doing what you want, I think it’s time you reconsidered. For one thing, as a finite human being in a world of infinite inputs, you’re always going to have too much to do. So it makes no sense to put off enjoyment or aliveness until such time as you’re no longer facing an unmanageable to-do list; you are, I regret to inform you, likely to end your life with a long to-do list of uncompleted tasks. For another thing, much of what we dislike about the feeling of overwhelm isn’t really a simple quantitative matter of having too many things we feel we need to do; more pertinently, it’s the feeling of being at the mercy of the task list, of having no option but to grind through your days in service to it. As a result, adding a project to your list that you actually want to do can have the unexpected effect of reducing the sense of overwhelm by increasing your experience of agency and what psychologists call self-efficacy. You’re freely choosing to incorporate something extra into your day, because you truly want to do it; accordingly, it becomes harder to think of yourself as nothing more than the indentured servant of your to-do list.
Nor should you be concerned that doing more of what you want might turn you into an unproductive, socially isolated layabout and irresponsible citizen. Notice the extraordinarily low opinion of yourself suggested by such fears: the implication that you’re such a nightmare, personality-wise, that only the fiercest schemes of self‑improvement, applied with unceasing vigilance, can spare you from disaster. (It’s also a self-contradictory worry, since you’d surely be unlikely to have much interest in the topic of changing your habits in the first place if you were really such a basket case.) Isn’t it at least possible that none of this is true – that if you paid careful attention to the question of what you really enjoy, you might find that it included feeling healthy, being well connected with others, and making whatever difference you could to the world at large? At the very least, it might be worth the experiment.
In the end, though, there is a consideration even more fundamental than any of these, which is that it’s not clear what life is really for at all, if it isn’t for doing more of whatever makes you feel most alive. It’s notoriously easy to slip into the unconscious assumption that any such aliveness is for later: after you’ve sorted your life out; after the current busy phase has passed; after the headlines have stopped being quite so alarming. But the truth for finite humans is that this, right here, is real life. And that if you’re going to do stuff that matters to you – and feel enjoyment or aliveness in doing it – you’re going to have to do it before you’ve got on top of everything, before you’ve solved your procrastination problem or your intimacy issues, before you feel confident that the future of democracy or the climate has been assured. This part of life isn’t just something you have to get through, to get to the bit that really counts. It is the part that really counts.
The celebrated child psychology research known as the “marshmallow experiments” suggests that it’s a great asset to have the kind of self-discipline that enables you to defer the gratification of a single marshmallow in order to receive an additional marshmallow, later on. But life offers no prizes for being so good at deferring gratification that you accumulate a thousand uneaten marshmallows, then drop dead. At some point, you’re going to have to eat a marshmallow. That might mean making time for art or writing or music, or long-neglected friendships, for community activism, or exhilarating escapes into the wild; it might mean a life lived more quietly than your current one, or alternatively one lived in a far more high-profile way. Obviously, nobody else can tell you how to spend more of 2026 doing what you genuinely want. That’s a question that can only be answered through honest introspection, bearing in mind the words attributed to (but probably paraphrased from) the American theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
