An article published by the Guardian and The Irish Times this week promised me enlightenment: “Over 50 ways you can make your life easier in 2026.” Advice meandered from the personally inapplicable (I have neither children nor a garden) to the harmlessly obvious (no, you don’t need to fold all of your laundry).
But – as is always the case with the quick-fix-salvage-your-disaster-of-a-life listicles – it left me feeling exhausted.
This year I must, in no particular order, address “the underlying causes of foot pain”; let go of my ageist beliefs; learn how to dress monochromatically; “grow” (ew) my “own gut flora” (ew ew ew); stop “over accessorising” the flat surfaces of my apartment, and stop worrying about what everyone else around me is doing or achieving. Here I was, naively thinking this list was about to make my life easier.
Rather, it all sounds like a lot of work.
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January is peak time for this always-fashionable delusion to emerge – that we can tweak and tinker our ways to a better existence. But, now that I am 30 and I have no more life-learning left to do, I am confident in the following assessment: I have never met anyone so stuck in life as the obsessive “self-improvers”. And believe me, I am surrounded by them. The meal-preppers, the new-January-gym-membershipers, the inspirational Instagram quote posters, the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck readers. Is all of this a noble quest to better contribute to humanity? Or – and how to put this nicely – a tiny cry for help? (That was rhetorical; and while we’re here, you actually should “give a f**k”!)
I am not minded to blame the avid self-helpers for any of this, though. How else to cope with all that boundless chaos in the world? Donald Trump kidnaps the leader of a foreign, sovereign country; “Welcome to the five-day brain health challenge” the newspapers respond. Defence specialists warn that a Russian advance further and further into Europe is a distinct possibility this year? “Here’s how to get French cool girl hair” (whatever that means). And if you are not entirely sure of what to make of Taiwan, China and the potential of a cataclysm all the way East, well didn’t you know that “January is the perfect month to declutter your home”?
This silly industry – that preys on existential insecurity – is no more conspicuous than in the travel department. While doomscrolling on my sofa last night (another habit to kick, unless I want to totally destroy my cognitive function) I stumbled across “52 places to go in 2026”. I hear you, that is a dauntingly high number of airmiles to rack up: from a trip to Armenia to see wolves and monasteries; to a short skip over to the Seychelles, then to Iceland, and while you’re in the northernmost part of the northern hemisphere, Norway. Don’t forget to then “celebrate the life and legacy of St Francis” in Assisi; and round off your year in Guyana, but not before you discover the Yunnan province in China.
[ The cause of the great reading crisis is unknown. But the solution is obviousOpens in new window ]
Harmless, you might say. However I think I detect a sinister bent to the journalistic endeavour: offering the promise of salvation with just one more passport stamp. There is a lot of wisdom to be taken from Elizabeth Bishop’s dreadfully mawkish and now-cliche poem Questions of Travel: yes! What “childishness” to think that we must rush, in perpetuity, to see “the sun the other way round”; as though it might help us emit some kind of moral glow for doing so.
This is no argument for blind-parochialism, nor is it to suggest that we should not seek to relinquish ourselves from the very worst of our habits (put the cigarettes down, read more novels, drink more water and fewer glasses of wine – all infinitely sensible nuggets). But a relentless pursuit of self-optimisation can only lead us to a very miserable place indeed: will 2026 feel like a failure if I don’t manage to declutter, identify the “source” of that foot pain I didn’t even know I had, and get French cool girl hair?
2025 saw the emergence of one full-throated and totally reasonable anxiety. Artificial intelligence is increasingly seeing us cede our lives to automated machinery; it is smoothing out all the bumps that make quotidian life interesting with its hacks, and shortcuts, and ChatGPT prompts. But I look around at all the listicles and self-help guides and cannot help but think we are rather good at doing this ourselves, machines be damned.
[ New year’s resolutions: optimism bias can perpetuate irrational behavioursOpens in new window ]
How inhuman to seek to maximise every second on this earth with reference to data points, goal sheets and McKinsey-esque KPIs? To travel not for the ambiguous romance of it all, but to tick it off that (horrible neologism incoming) “bucket list” you keep in your pocket.
And so, in 2026 I am not interested in 50 ways to make my life “easier” but instead plan to truculently dig my heels in. What’s so bad about it being a bit hard in the first place? And by the way, I like my “over-accessorised” apartment.
