Well, well well. So another year has passed. 2026 is here. My Black Eyed Peas are on the stove and my neighbor is cooking his collard greens in anticipation of our annual New Year’s shindig that we have every year.

Just like last year and the many years before I didn’t get it right. I will never get it right. I still am constantly at war with my vices. I curse entirely too much, not enough exercise, extremely hard time expressing my feelings until it is too late, procrastination, I feel like I am not a good husband, scream at my dogs……..constantly at war. Same as last year.

I look at 2025 and am shocked at the difference one year has made. 2025 was the year humanity officially outsourced thinking and then complained about the results. 2025 has also shown us that reality needs an update.

In 2025 I noticed that everything now requires an app. Want to order food? App. Want to talk to your doctor? App. Want to speak to a human? Speaking to a human is not an option. Customer service was replaced by “Help Centers,” which helped mostly by reminding you that your frustration mattered deeply—to no one.

Much like 2024, social media in 2025 is still a total shit show. What started as “Hey, here are photos of my dog and my vacation,” has somehow become a 24/7 outrage casino where everyone’s angry, everyone’s right, and nobody’s listening. It rewards the loudest voice, not the wisest one. The more unhinged the take, the better it performs. Calm thought gets buried. Rage goes viral. Everyone’s a prophet. Everyone’s a prosecutor. Everyone’s exhausted. Meanwhile, the actual good stuff—quiet kindness, faithfulness, people feeding the hungry, sitting with the grieving, loving their neighbor—doesn’t trend. It just happens. Which is probably why the healthiest people in 2025 are the ones who read real books, eat meals with other humans, serve someone who can’t pay them back and occasionally delete the app and go outside.

Politics oh yeah baby……..politics. Politics continued its long-running reality show. Even more so in 2025. There is no new plot just the same lines with plenty of shouting. Everyone promised “unity” while live-tweeting insults, and every speech was immediately fact-checked, rage-clipped, meme-ified, and declared either “the end of democracy” or “owning the libs/conservatives”—sometimes all within the same 90 seconds. Voters were told they were “more informed than ever,” which explained why no one agreed on basic facts. If you asked a sincere question, you were either “dangerous” or “complicit.” If you tried to stay neutral, you were accused of enabling fascism, communism, or both, meanwhile regular people just wanted cheaper groceries and fewer passwords.

Faith became a subscription service. Truth was “your truth,” unless someone else’s truth got more likes. Churches argued about culture while Jesus kept doing the awkward thing of caring about the poor, the lonely, and the people nobody was optimizing for.

And yet—despite the madness—people still gathered around tables. Waffle Houses stayed open. The Greer Soup Kitchen stayed busy. Someone always brought extra something. I listen to men telling the same stories. Kids laughed. Mercy kept showing up, completely unbothered by all the noise.

So yes, 2025 was chaotic, noisy, and emotionally exhausted but it turns out the world is still held together by stubborn hope, quiet faith, and folks who show up when nobody’s watching. Cheers to a Happy 2026.