doing things a little differently this year

Though we’ve recently stepped from one year into another, I’ve never been one to really celebrate New Years. It’s like any other night for me and I’m in bed well before the clock strikes midnight. There was that one time, in my early 20s, where a few of my friends and I travelled to Key West and watched the Red Shoe Drop at midnight. We stood among thousands of other revelers on Bourbon St, cheering and expectant as we watched one year exit and another enter. That was a time in my life where it still felt like each year could bring the unexpected, like the path of life was still revealing itself. That path felt full of sharp turns, dead ends, and sometimes endless detours. Now, as someone in mid-life, the path forward feels less jarring. There are still bumps and dips, blind corners, and turn arounds, but generally each passing year feels a bit gentler than the last. Or maybe I’m just better prepared to welcome what’s to come.

As this year enters, I’m thinking more about what I want for myself in 2026. I don’t like the idea of making resolutions as they can feel too restrictive. Instead I’ve been thinking of what I would like to welcome more of into my life and where I want to focus my energies.

When social media and especially Instagram became a thing, I loved jumping on and seeing snapshots of people’s lives. Many of those I followed were friends who lived a distance away from me or classmates I hadn’t seen in years. They were artists whose work I had to seek out to enjoy. I could “catch up” with people’s lives and share glimpses of my own. It felt inviting, and genuine. Over the last few years, I have seen how consumed I can become by mindlessly sweeping my finger up the screen, rarely seeing the familiar and being influenced by an algorithm that thinks it knows me better than I know myself. It has felt mindless, disengaging, and joyless. While I love the posts from friends and family, these are what I now need to actively seek out, to sort through all the noise to find the ones I know.

I heard an interview recently about AI and social connectedness and the guest made a comment that really struck me. His statement was simple and direct, “reclaim what it means to be human”. As can sometimes happen with good timing, this simple sentence came when I was already thinking about ways I could feel more connected to the world around me and my space within it. I had also stumbled upon something called The Analog Life Project by an artist I had recently become familiar with (ironically through that blasted algorithm) and things simply felt as if they had fallen into place.

I’ve grown so tired of my relationship with devices (and particularly my smartphone) and recognize it does little to help me “reclaim what it is to be human”. So with that, I am making a conscious effort to return to creativity and the life in front of me. What this actually looks like I’m still pondering but it will mean a shift away from social media and a shift towards more tangible things. Through this blog, I plan to regularly share the things I’m doing to be more connected to the world around me. That may look different from post to post but it comes from a yearning for simpler things, of wanting to explore my creative side, of being more present in the everyday, of sharing more of the tangible and less of the fleeting, and the myriad of other things that will present themselves as I get back to my humanity.

I’d love to hear in the comments if any of this resonates with you and if so, I welcome you to join me either through following along with this blog (I plan to write an entry or two a month) or by finding your own ways to reclaim more of your human self.

-Katja