2026 The Year of Being Okay with Realistic

 I have never really liked thinking of New Year's resolutions. Some idea that I swear by and say This is gonna be what I get done this year. It felt too...naive to think that the year wasn't going to have a few curve balls headed at me I'd need to deal with along the way. There was too much internal mental pressure to make it something "worthy" of being my primary goal of the year.  Finding the Goldilocks zone sweet spot between scope and achievability and ultimately abandoning the idea due to whatever unexpected events occurred that year.

Towards the end of 2025, I was looking at the books I had read that year and how it fell short of my reading goal. Toward the end of the year I started to feel guilt about not achieving the goal I set out to achieve. I was pretty down on myself with a typical mental exercise of remembering the goal, seeing where I fell short, and assigning blame to all the things I could have been doing different. All the moments I did other things that I enjoyed my brain tells me in that instant were obstacles I let derail my noble goal of reading a bunch of books.

Realize struck me when I found a self-hosted media journal that covered not only books, but movies, music, tv shows, and anime if I wanted it. After fiddling around to get it set up on my mini server, it sorta made me remember that I had read a ton of comics, articles, and role playing game books that were certainly valid candidates for my "things" read list. 

On top of that, shows I wanted to watch/was watching that I felt were interesting and valid stories worth me experiencing. One of the primary reasons I was pushing myself to read more was to ingest more stories and ideas. I decided shouldn't ignore the things that I take in that aren't specifically books. If I was going to combat my brain's misplaced feeling of guilt for not completing an arbitrary task that I myself made up, I at least deserve a fighting chance and being realistic about what I'm actually doing with my time.

This may seem sort of superficial or trivial in the sense that it's just a reading list, and it is just a reading list, but that is all the more reason to use it as an opportunity to practice being more kind to myself. Admittedly being kind to myself is a life skill I should have learned young and I am just now starting that 10,000 hour journey to become an expert in, but at this point it is too late to start earlier so there's no better time than now work on it.