\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span> have a proposal to make: 2026 should be the year that\u00a0you 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n Naturally, I anticipate certain objections to this suggestion.<\/p>\n Possibly you consider yourself far too busy even to think<\/em> about spending time in ways you\u2019d 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\u2019re convinced you need to address your personal failings first \u2013 your tendency towards procrastination, your sedentary lifestyle, your atrocious diet. On\u00a0the other hand, maybe you think it\u2019s morally outrageous to focus on yourself while the Earth is overheating, or while the sinister forces of ethnonationalism stalk the land. Or perhaps you\u2019re worried that if you were to let yourself do what you want, you\u2019d find yourself slouched on the sofa, scrolling slack-jawed through Instagram while overconsuming Hula Hoops, or gin, or heroin.<\/p>\n None of these objections hold any water, though. In fact, there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n To see why, consider first the hidden logic of the conventional approach to self-improvement and habit change \u2013 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\u00a0there\u2019s something badly wrong with you, which you need to fix. Then it prescribes the daily behaviours that \u2013 were you to follow them with sufficient discipline \u2013 might eventually lead you to the point at which you\u2019d be an acceptable member of humanity, and could therefore relax (although not too much, for fear of backsliding).<\/p>\n Stay offline by\u00a0doing things so engaging that it wouldn\u2019t occur to\u00a0you\u00a0to drift online in the first place<\/p>\n Yet it\u2019s entirely possible that there isn\u2019t anything badly wrong with you, other than the conviction that there\u2019s something badly wrong with you. And even if there is<\/em>, it\u2019s 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 \u2013 making the career switch that would fulfil you, for example, or daring to commit to a relationship. \u201cClaiming that we are problematic,\u201d the psychotherapist and author Bruce Tift points out, \u201cmeans we don\u2019t have to engage with our lives fully, because we aren\u2019t \u2018ready yet\u2019 \u2013 there\u2019s something wrong that needs to be fixed first. [So] we have a good excuse not to show up.\u201d<\/p>\n For one vivid illustration of the futility of fixing yourself \u2013 and the positive benefits of doing what you want instead \u2013 consider the ubiquitous problem of spending too much time online. If you\u2019re prone to pointlessly doomscrolling, or numbing out with superficially amusing entertainment, you\u2019ve 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\u2019ve put the device, in order to regain access. It turns out that there\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n A much more reliable way to stay offline is just to be\u00a0doing things so engaging that it wouldn\u2019t occur to\u00a0you\u00a0to drift online in the first place. On the few magical days in 2025 that I realised I\u2019d forgotten where my phone even was, it was because I\u2019d become so immersed in reading or writing or conversation or nature that the thought of it had left my mind entirely. \u201cIf you want to win the war for attention,\u201d as the New\u00a0York Times <\/em>columnist David Brooks once put it, \u201cdon\u2019t try to say \u2018no\u2019 to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say \u2018yes\u2019 to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the \u00a0terrifying longing crowd out everything else.\u201d Or as Katherine Martinko, author of Childhood Unplugged, argues in the\u00a0context\u00a0of how parents might encourage their children to spend less time online: \u201cIf we want our children to revel in reality, then the most effective way to teach them is to do it ourselves \u2026 My advice is to fight [internet dependency] less with fleeting (and unreliable) hacks like time limits, tech\u2011free zones, digital detoxes, tech fasts, focus mode, and grayscaled screens, and\u00a0more with an overwhelming love and appreciation for being present, active, and engaged with the real world.\u201d<\/p>\n Make time for art or writing or music, or long-neglected friendships, for community activism, or exhilarating escapes into the wild<\/span> Illustration: Ben O\u2019Brien\/The Guardian<\/p>\n It isn\u2019t 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 \u2013 so that by the time you might normally be reaching for an inadvisable sort of snack, you\u2019re already too full of nutritious food to want one? Instead of concocting a workout you\u2019ll have to force yourself through three times a week \u2013 looking forward the whole time to the moment that it\u2019s \u201cout of the way\u201d, so you can resume enjoying life again \u2013 are there forms of movement you naturally enjoy, and might only need to do a bit more often, or more intensely?<\/p>\n Be careful, though: this is the point at which it\u2019s tempting to devise all sorts of demanding plans for doing things more enjoyably \u2013 walking in the park five\u00a0times\u00a0a\u00a0week! <\/em>Working on your art project <\/em>for an hour\u00a0every day! \u2013 which may themselves become oppressive or intimidating, and thus speedily abandoned. You\u2019re trying to spend more time doing things you enjoy \u2013 not turning the idea of \u201cdoing what you enjoy\u201d into an unwanted extension of your already horrendous to-do list.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re the aforementioned kind of person convinced you don\u2019t have the bandwidth to spend more of the coming year doing what you want, I think it\u2019s time you reconsidered. For one thing, as a finite human being in a world of infinite inputs, you\u2019re always going to have too much to do. So it makes no sense to put off enjoyment or aliveness until such time as you\u2019re no longer facing an unmanageable to-do list; you are, I\u00a0regret 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\u2019t really a simple quantitative matter of having too many things we feel we need to do; more pertinently, it\u2019s 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 <\/em>the sense of overwhelm by increasing your experience of agency and what psychologists call self-efficacy. You\u2019re 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\u00a0of your to-do list.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not clear what life is really for at all, if it isn\u2019t for doing more of whatever makes you feel most alive<\/p>\n 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\u2019re such a nightmare, personality-wise, that only the fiercest schemes of self\u2011improvement, applied with unceasing vigilance, can spare you from disaster. (It\u2019s also a self-contradictory worry, since you\u2019d 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\u2019t it at least possible that none of this is true \u2013 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.<\/p>\n In the end, though, there is a consideration even more fundamental than any of these, which is that it\u2019s not clear what life is really for<\/em> at all, <\/em>if it isn\u2019t for doing more of whatever makes you feel most alive. It\u2019s notoriously easy to slip into the unconscious assumption that any such aliveness is for later: after you\u2019ve sorted your life out; after the current busy phase has passed; after the headlines have stopped being quite so alarming. But the\u00a0truth for finite humans is that this, right here, is\u00a0real life. And that if you\u2019re going to do stuff that matters to you \u2013 and feel enjoyment or aliveness in doing it \u2013 you\u2019re going to have to do it before you\u2019ve got on top of everything, before you\u2019ve 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\u2019t just something you have to get through, to get to the bit that really counts. It is <\/em>the part that really counts.<\/p>\n The celebrated child psychology research known as the \u201cmarshmallow experiments\u201d suggests that it\u2019s 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\u00a0thousand uneaten marshmallows, then drop dead. At some point, you\u2019re 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\u2019s 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: \u201cDon\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have a proposal to make: 2026 should be the year that\u00a0you 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 \u2013 to the activities that seize our interest, and that<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[2004,537,9656,1569],"class_list":{"0":"post-40171","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-happy","9":"tag-secret","10":"tag-simpler","11":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}