Dear 2026...

To be frank, 2025 was fucking insane (semi-derogatory). Just existing (keeping up with life, work, relationships, the news) felt like an accomplishment most days. And yet, here we are. Still standing. On the precipice of another year, staring down the familiar mix of pressure and possibility.

How daunting. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Trying to scroll through my camera roll and assemble a highlight reel of the past twelve months feels less like reflection and more like psychological warfare…proof that time moved faster than I noticed.

For me, a new year always arrives with a strange combination of deep introspection and cautious hope. It asks questions I don’t yet have answers to, while quietly insisting that time will keep moving regardless. Here are a few thoughts I’m carrying into 2026, largely inspired by a quote I came across recently:

“…happiness, like success, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of dedication to a cause greater than oneself…”
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)

In 2025, I relentlessly pursued success and with much avail. I did what I set out to do. I hit the milestones. I checked the boxes. And yet, I’m ending this year feeling more lost than fulfilled. As if I followed the map perfectly, only to arrive back tob where I started asking the same question:

What in life truly makes me happy?

For most of the last decade, each new year has begun the same way: a list of goals, usually work-related, written with conviction and taped to my wall. Then I cross them off one by one in the months that follow. But as 2026 approaches ( in a matter of hours) I’m finding it harder than ever to name what I want.

—
Dear New Year,

I’m finally starting this letter in the airport as I wait to head back to LA after some overdue family time in Toronto. There’s something i find strangely comforting in the shared quiet among strangers before a flight. At your gate nothing is expected of you but to wait. A rare time I know, with certainty, that I am exactly where i need to be for what is coming next. There is a peculiar kind of peace in watching an airport move around you (just watch Love Actually if you don’t know what I mean.)

So here, at Gate F88 (eight also happens to be my favorite number), I finally feel compelled to take a moment and think about 2026. Unlike years past, this won’t be a list of goals to accomplish or conquer. Instead, I have a single intention I want to carry forward:

slow down and savor what you already have before it’s gone.

That’s it. Simple enough, right? Wrong.

I carry deep regret for how absent I was throughout much of 2025. I was so focused on things unfolding according to a plan and crossing goals off a list that I missed parts of the life happening right in front of me. Moments passed quietly, uncelebrated, because I was already thinking about what came next. And now the year is over.

…happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue,

Sitting here at my gate, watching people board flights to places I may never go, I’m reminded that life is happening whether or not you’re planning for it. So many of life’s best moments are unplanned, they arrive quietly and you have to be in the present to appreciate them.
——
Back in LA and trying to find any motivation in the lackadaisical days between Christmas and New Years. Planning some travel for January and I realized I forgot to finish this letter.

Through the good, the hard, and the inevitable unexpected days ahead, I want to notice them. All of them. Basically be on my carpe diem type shit. This isn’t a rejection of my planning or ambition, quite the opposite. Some of my best work has always come from passion and curiosity, not from chasing validation or outcomes. I’m ready to return to that way of moving through the world.

In 2026, I don’t want to measure my life by productivity. I don’t want to reduce the coming months to another checklist. I want to measure it by how often I laugh, how deeply I connect with those around me, how much beauty I find in the mundane, and how often I catch myself thinking, wow—this is nice.

To be at peace in the present, and nowhere else. There will be big days this year, and there will be far more forgettable ones. My “goal” is to learn how to love the forgettable days too. Enjoy the days that may not make the highlight reel, but quietly make up most of my life.

So, dear New Year, if you give me anything, let it be the ability to notice. To slow down. To trust that happiness will ensue. That joy doesn’t always live in what you have planned, but in what’s already here.

Here’s to hoping.