Writing anything at the threshold of the new year, regardless of what side of it we’re on, is tricky. Too many new year missives end up as Resolutions in another name, big lists of things we aim for or that we want to rail against, or shakily hopeful prognostications for the coming year that, in the same breath as we make them, pile on qualifiers to remind that no, we don’t really know what’s going to happen, and it could all go sideways, and the end of the year will undoubtedly look different from the plan we’ve laid out for it.

So fuck all that. This is not a Resolution post, where I tell you what I’m going to do because I crave accountability or the chance to fail publicly at the end of 2026. This isn’t an Inspiration post where I want to wind you up with some fluff about things being better because of a delineation of linear time, or lies about the work getting easier, or even how undamaged we might find ourselves at the end of it.

Instead, this is (I think) an exhortation to Hope; or, put differently, a call to find Hope not merely hiding somewhere in the dark of hopelessness, waiting to be pulled free, but to find it because and through the hopelessness we so often feel.

Limping Toward Positivity

This isn’t a negative framing. It’s only that if I’m going to write something positive about the New Year as a nominative concept, I would be dishonest if I didn’t frame it in the context of where we are—and I mean this as the “we” of authors writing in a bottomless pit of an industry, the “we” of artists attempting to create during the rise of anthropocidal technology, and the “we” of the majority of humans attempting to carve out a safe, tolerable existence in a world controlled by extremely rich, evil people.

So let’s get it out of the way in the name of honesty: shit’s fucked. Call a spade a spade. The world’s been cooking, and it’s impossible not to feel cooked, all the more if you’re dealing with atrocity in Palestine or Venezuela, war in Ukraine or Sudan, or if you’re watching your country slide into fascism on a greased chute in its quest to perpetrate those kinds of war and atrocity.

Everything is fucked, yes. We must acknowledge this even as we try to find a way beyond it.

Of Different Stripes

Yet it’s also in that trough of despair that humans have found the means to pull through. So much of the art that has spoken to me and truly mattered hasn’t been rainbows and sunshine. This is part of what marks humans as something special, because even given the tremendously heavy gifts of consciousness, self-awareness, and self-determination, we’re a graviportal species that somehow finds a way to bear the burden and continue.

I cannot stress enough how important this is. It is unfair, make no mistake. Blame God or evolution as you like. But you bear a great weight, and you were born to bear it. For as much time as I spent contemplating the Zebra Metaphor my therapist often liked to champion (back in the days when I could afford a therapist), I came to the eventual conclusion that it’s not an apt comparison.

The idea makes sense, I get why it’s used, and a good therapist doesn’t use it as a false comparison to human experience. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s the concept that a zebra under threat of being eaten by a lion doesn’t continue freaking out about it once the lion leaves the watering hole. It sounds great, and wouldn’t we all love the simplicity of responding only to immediate threats without dwelling on them afterward?

But there are problems that arise depending on how the metaphor is used. To begin with, it implies that animals don’t have impressions left upon them, but we know that they can and do experience trauma. While one desperate encounter with a lion might not leave a zebra crippled by ruminations on mortality, any animal that’s endured cruelty and abuse will be lastingly affected by it.

More importantly, we aren’t fucking zebras. We don’t live in a zebra society. Zebras haven’t invented complex systems of economic and political oppression for a subset of elite zebras to take advantage of. A good therapist knows this and uses the metaphor as a means of differentiating the types of weight we’re under, explaining how they affect us in what might seem like calm circumstances. A bad one suggests a zebra is happier than you because it doesn’t worry about shit, holding it up as an example to strive toward.

Which is, of course, impossible. Because you are not and cannot be a zebra. Even Thoreau, living in the blissful simplicity of nature by Walden Pond, couldn’t be a fucking zebra, as evidenced most immediately by the fact that he built a cabin and wrote Walden.

As Close as We Get to God

You are, for better or worse, more powerful than a zebra. You’re all but divine.

Of course, the divine does not exist; but there’s a beautiful dichotomy there. A massive portion of humanity would rabidly disagree with that statement, which points to the deeper truth that you and I are as close as we get to God. Because we’ve created God, and gods, pantheons upon pantheons, whole systems of philosophy, regimentation, and instruction based solely on the concept of the divine that we, as human beings, have invented.

There’s enough to unpack there to fill a lifetime of books, so a newsletter isn’t going to cut it, but if I may strip it to its essence: what we can do is unbelievable. Even contemplating the complexities of the historical record with our magical brains, it’s difficult to comprehend the amount of power that we, as humans, have wielded over the land, each other, and our very nature.

You may not feel like a god. I often don’t. I spend a lot of time mired in frustration about the limitations of my humanity compared to a more functional average. I’ve got killer ADHD. I’m probably autistic, but I’m too poor to find out, and I don’t want to end up on a euthanasia list compiled by the leathery lich creature currently lurching around the HHS.

Just because we don’t always feel the power doesn’t mean it’s not coursing through us. In fact, that we’re at all able to, as Shirley Jackson put it (no matter the assertion that it was impossible), “continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality,” is testament to the beautiful, wretched tenaciousness of the human spirit even under the worst of circumstances.

In reading Chuck Wendig’s New Year resolution post, I was struck by one line in particular. He talks largely about the ultimate weakness of generative AI, how what it does is not and cannot be creative, how it’s built on the theft of human achievement, and about the human artist as a lens. But this core principle is what settled with me the most: “It wouldn’t steal what we do if what we do wasn’t special.”

Be Assailed

What you and I do as human artists is like nothing else on earth. Whether you’re writing a novel, compiling a history, crafting a journalistic screed; or drawing, knitting, sewing, looking at the insides of rocks, putting time into your Letterboxd reviews, bullet journaling, getting better at chess, growing vegetables, composing music, running for city council, or learning to play the theremin; whatever you’re doing, it’s unlike anything that other creatures do, unlike the output of any tool ever invented.

And we do this because there’s a compulsion in us to create and explore. We are assailed by art, assaulted by it, mauled by the things inside us that demand release. That is not something that any known nonhuman intelligence, process, or machine can emulate. It’s not something they can aspire to, because they aren’t capable of that kind of aspiration.

The art I create, I create because it haunts me. A machine cannot be haunted. A machine can do no more than process and regurgitate a soulless, joyless, artless imitation of my haunting.

So as we begin to take our first tentative steps across the arbitrary line of demarcation we call 2026, I wish you the same. Whatever you’re creating, for whatever myriad reasons drive you to create, I hope that you’re haunted by it. Ruined by it. Driven mad because of it. I hope that it consumes you in the way only a human being can be consumed by an idea, and I hope that you pursue it with all the love, pain, compassion, and beautiful heedlessness that go into the creation of art.

You will not go undamaged. It will be painful, and you’ll be stronger for it, your jaw more set, your roots deeper-reaching.

You are more than a machine. You are a divine monstrosity, and that is a thing to be reveled in, this year and for the rest of your life.