It’s the most blunderful time of the year

Well, aren’t we glad that’s over?

Christmas is tricky and exhausting. New Year’s is fraught.

It’s the time of year overachievers make lists of all the things they did in the previous 12 months. Reading these makes me want to throw up – all they ever do is remind me of all the stuff I didn’t get done – so I won’t subject you to one. If you’re keen to get a picture of what did and didn’t self-improve you can always go back and read the archives.

And I’m not keen to do an New Year’s Resolutions post, or even an anti-New Year’s Resolution post, because I feel like there are enough of both of those? And mine would be deja vu all over again, again; I’d like to be fitter, I’d like to spend more time doing the things I want to be doing but never want to do in the moment instead of the stuff I have no interest in long-term but can’t resist at the time.

So here, have some scattershot reflections, disguised as not-resolutions.¹ It’s what you’re here for!

Become suspicious of entertainment, and things that are labeled leisure but aren’t

While it’s definitely possible to burn out on overwork, it’s just as possible to burn out on lack of sleep, shitty food, and too much scrolling or streaming or videogames.

If certain things fall into a mental “leisure” or “chilling out” or “giving myself a break” or “#selfcare” category, we have a tendency to ignore that they are often very tiring.

Maybe that’s why we’re all all Surprised Pikachu when the holidays turn out to be exhausting.

Then there’s entertainment. Like everyone else, I have my Shows, but I watch less than I used to and it’s not just because of parenting. I’ve never quite articulated this in a way that I like (I have tried, like in this Webworm article) but I suspect our modern media surplus is an “opiate of the people” situation; that the consumption of media that explicitly teaches about the danger of billionaires and power-mad dictators and even provides us with instructions for their disestablishment is actually inuring us to the status quo. That if we content ourselves with imagining a better world, there’s no need to build one.

Which kind of leads on to:

Dream purposefully

So much of our time is spent in an escape, dreaming ourselves elsewhere. Fancying ourselves other. I think scrolling fits into this category too. Peel away the pop science of “dopamine hits” that we currently use to frame our relationship with technology – especially phones – and shed some of the cultural baggage, and we are left with a kind of augmented daydreaming and personality projection device, something Phillip K Dick would write a cautionary tale about during a palpitating amphetamine haze.

I think dreaming or looking around to find ideas is fine, but I’d rather be writing them down and turning them into projects and story plots than just letting them run, unharnessed, not taking me anywhere in particular.

Put another way: I have spent hours, days, years, thinking about the things I want to do. How much more effort would it be to actually do them?

If I’m going to mention dreaming I should probably lay into the other way that dreams manifest:

The horrors

I started drafting this post after Christmas, in the little interregnum before the new year went comprehensively to shit. I could be talking about any number of things but, this time, it’s about Venezuela.

It is not ideal that mad emperors with the power to extinguish all human life have started getting feisty in their dying years. Someone who by rights should be an incontinent crank yelling at the aged-home nurse is instead toting around a global doomsday device while invading neighbouring countries and making it clear there’s more where that came from. It is unquestionably terrible, and I do think it vital that the rest of us rapidly find ways to disestablish dictators, foment true democracy, mitigate climate change and end the looming threat of nuclear destruction, but you know what won’t help do that? What I’m always tempted to do, which is scroll the doom and occasionally make a snarky post about it. It doesn’t help the situation at large, and it doesn’t help my brain either, no matter how much I try to tell myself it will in the moment.

you realise he'll press the button, right? and you know who I'm talking about and what the button is

— Josh | writer, painter, tinkerer (@tworuru.com) 2026-01-05T03:38:20.457Z

What I do think will help is:

Be more present and more sociable

I want to be where I am. I’d like to learn the names of the plants in the garden. Identify native trees. I’d like to learn the constellations, so I can tell my children the names of the stars.

I want to spend more time with friends. Not with my friends on the other side of a screen. Making the effort to go meet them, or have them over for food, and hang out in person.

I want to play with my kids more. Sure, I need time away from them to do work, but I can be a bit more purposeful about this than I sometimes am. If I am letting the kids go on devices just so I can spend aimless time on devices, what have any of us gained?

I want to seek out friction. Technology is a boon and I love a lot of it, but so many tech things that should be easy are too hard, and things that probably should be harder are too easy. For instance, I want to find ways to get my money directly to artists instead of routing micropayments through rapacious intermediaries like Spotify. Listen to music on CDs or MP3s that I’ve downloaded from Bandcamp. I want to restore my old iPod. Get that valve radio I found at the side of the road working. Make myself less dependent on tech rented to me by megacorps that are so eagerly throwing in with a dictator.

Being more present and less tech-dependent might have some side benefits. How much of my neck pain is from simply staring straight ahead, at a small rectangle, or a slightly larger rectangle, or a road?

How much better off would I be if I did a bit more looking left and right?

That isn’t a metaphor. I just think I’d like to be more of a monk.

Become a schemer

I feel like lot of folks – particularly young men – took Heath Ledger’s Joker character a bit too seriously, which is much funnier when you consider the character’s catchphrase, but I still want to use this now 18 year old movie to make a point.²

There’s a sequence where Joker claims that he doesn’t make plans because he’s not a “schemer”. “I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.”

Of course, Joker is lying; he is a meticulous planner! All the same – maybe it’s the ADHD – something about that scene really rang with me. I grew up thinking plans were a bit pointless: something is always going to go wrong, so why bother?

Of course, I know logically that not planning is sophomoric at best, but this tendency clings to the back of my brain, and in many aspects of life I still end up winging it.

So in an attempt to provide a better metaphor than that offered by a fictional psychotic clown, I think plans are more like sailing ships. You can’t control the wind, but you can harness it. You might get blown off course from time to time, but you can still set a course, and do your best to return to it.

On that sober note, I’d like to propose that next year:

Be more unhinged

So much of what I do is because I’ve spent a lot of effort learning about what made people like and dislike about me, and acting accordingly. This is true for us all to some extent, this is simply the way that cultural and social dynamics are, but I feel like with non-neurotpical folks it can be a bit… extra. If you have really extreme rejection sensitivity (clue: were you called a “sensitive child”? Subsequent clue: were you perhaps a bit sensitive about being called sensitive?) it can become both map and compass; things that might carry rejection risks are automatically avoided and you end up spending life drifting down the lazy river of “don’t make waves.”

This may go some way to explaining a personally perplexing trait where I suddenly stop doing something the moment I experience mild success: the urge to achieve is suddenly absent and all that’s left is “people might be mean to me”.

Here I’ll mention, in passing, that I often worry that writing about rejection sensitivity and the like will be seen as a bit pathetic and self-absorbed. In other words, it’s rejection sensitivity about rejection sensitivity.

At least I’m not the only one afflicted:

So this year I’d like to be a bit less afraid of pissing people off. Or, at least, I can make a priority of pissing the right people off. And I’d like to stop avoiding projects I very much want to do because there’s some real or imagined rejection risk. That’s where the good stuff happens!

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Also, comments! I love comments. Get amongst it in the comments.

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“And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that–“

“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

Thinky links

I don’t like the thought that we’re living in a post-literate world but we kind of are.

And I keep meaning to read this piece about reading:

We Used to Read Things in This Country

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1. And if you’re thinking about the New Year’s resolutions post I made last year – I didn’t quit! I’ll have an update on that for you next time! ↩︎
2. The Dark Knight is now almost as old as Tim Burton’s Batman was when the Dark Knight came out. Enjoy your day. ↩︎