I’m not much of one for New Year’s resolutions. To me they mostly seem arbitrary and doomed to failure. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that the beginning of a new year always feels like a fresh start. A blank slate. Choose whatever metaphor you like, you get my point.

And as I sit here and type this on January 1, 2026, I have that same feeling. Even more so than probably ever before. For the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about writing the customary “wrap-up” post for 2025, reflecting on all the things that happened last year. But in the end that post never happened, because I could not for the life of me figure out what to write.

Because 2025 was, quite frankly, a bit of a mess. And trying to untangle that mess into something resembling a blog post turned out to be a task I had no desire to even attempt.

So what I’m writing instead is this post, in which I tell myself to leave the rotting corpse of 2025 in the rearview mirror, and look forward to 2026. A fresh start. A blank slate.