I’ve always been a New Year’s girl rather than a Christmas one. Of course, Christmas has its merits (spending time with family, Baileys at 11 a.m., dragging a perfectly crispy roast potato through gravy, etc). But there’s a sense of promise to the New Year that has always appealed to me. I love hitting reset. If it weren’t completely weird and unsustainable, I would throw away everything I own at the strike of midnight and emerge as an entirely new version of myself—everything that happened before, scrubbed clean.
For that reason, I was always really into New Year’s resolutions, too. I liked the ceremony of them. The taking stock. I’ve thrown New Year’s resolutions into the sea and burnt them beneath the full moon. I’ve written long, color-coded lists and I even, during one unhinged year, wrote them on a piece of paper which I then ripped up and scattered around the city (I think that was after a break-up). But a few years back, I sort of gave up. Not because I couldn’t be bothered, or because I hadn’t read Atomic Habits by James Clear. I just came up with something that worked better for me, something I still do to this day.
Each New Year’s Eve, I like to give the year ahead a particular theme. Last year, the theme was “travel”—and it worked. I was freelance at the time, and I must have gone to a different country every month or so. Whenever someone said something like, “You’ve been all over the place,” I’d reply that yes, I had, because travel was my theme. This year, I switched the theme up entirely and decided it was time for “work.” While that may sound less fun, it actually felt good to commit to a singular focus. If I ever felt guilty for maybe not going out as much I thought I should, I reminded myself that that just wasn’t this year’s theme. There’d be plenty of time for that during my “party” year—which I’ve probably already had (I’m looking at you, 2017).
In 2007, the psychology professor Richard Wiseman tracked around 3,000 people who’d committed to a variety of resolutions, from going to the gym to drinking less. At the end of the year, a whopping 88% of the group had failed to stick to their goals. A similar study from the University of Scranton saw slightly better numbers, with 77% maintaining their resolutions for a week, but only 19% for two years after that. It’s not that I think any of this matters, per se—I mean, who cares if you don’t go to the gym?—it’s more that I personally don’t want making resolutions to be a futile exercise.
Themes, on the other hand, are much more flexible and encompassing, and have, oddly, helped me alter my trajectory in ways that don’t feel overly pressurized. When you commit to a theme, it’s not about “do this” or “don’t do this”; it’s about funneling your energy in one direction and seeing where it takes you. And the affects, I’ve found, can be surprisingly palpable. I finished my “travel” year feeling like I’d been places. I finished my “work” year feeling like I’d done things. Of course, there will be times in which you will deviate from the theme—stay at home rather than travel, go out rather than work—but the overall vibe of the year doesn’t need to change. There’s no failure, really, only moments of divergence.
I’ve yet to decide on a theme for 2026. I’m flirting with the idea of “success,” though how I can actually enforce that remains to be seen. Maybe it’s “growing up.” Maybe it’s “asking for more.” Whatever, it’ll come to me as the night approaches. And when the clock strikes midnight, perhaps I really will be a new person, just like I was last year and the year before that. Not in any major material way—but in the way I view things, and in who I want to be.