Don’t forget to get a life in 2026

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• “Cheaters and thieves”: Trump spends New Year’s Eve bashing Democratic Party, blue cities

  The president spent the last day of 2025 attacking his enemies on social media. Read more.

Make me smarter …

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I’m fine, Mom. How’s Washington?

Despite the fact that I send my thoughts out daily to thousands of Salon readers, I don’t really do the whole “public performance” thing. I don’t give speeches. I don’t celebrate my birthday. Mrs. Crash Course, a published memoirist, gets a kick out of the lengths I’ll go to avoid reading anything I’ve written in front of a crowd.

I can’t really say how, this time two years ago, I found myself holding a microphone in front of a gathering of nearly everyone I knew. The karaoke machine’s mic had passed its way around the room and I’d failed to duck it. My hypothetical go-tos – Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis” and Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “I Feel Lucky” –  were both snagged by my lovely wife earlier in the evening. Being a man smack dab in his mid-30s and knowing it was New Year’s Eve, I tapped the buttons in a trance, bringing up a cult classic just slightly too niche for a synced-up lyric sheet.

“Pop open a bottle of bubbly…”

The Dismemberment Plan’s “The Ice of Boston” is about a man trying and failing to wallow. Travis Morrison rambles through a lonely New Year’s Eve spent at home in a newish city. He’s reflecting on the year he’s spent in the Hub of the Universe, running down failed relationships and counting all the things that make him uniquely pathetic. Marching toward oblivion with each newly opened bottle of champagne, Morrison gripes that wintertime in Beantown can’t even bother to be picturesque. 

The outside world keeps intruding on his pity party at inopportune times. The singing of revelers on the street leaks through the walls of his apartment. In a bit of drunken inspiration, he strips naked and pours champagne over his head while standing at the window. His mother picks that exact moment to call. A radio blaring Gladys Knight while he tries to stop the room from spinning reminds him he’s not the first person to feel like a fool. When Morrison plays the song live, audience members swarm him on the stage, jumping and yelling along with this embarrassing ramble in shared jubilation.

Morrison’s song is always apt this time of year, being one of about five songs that are explicitly about New Year’s Eve, but it feels particularly fitting as the calendar rolls over into 2026. The narrator desperately wants to be miserable. With an entire city celebrating around him, he digs in his heels at home and begs to feel bad. If you’ve spent the year reading the same headlines we have, we’re sure you can empathize.

But the world has never been interested in what any of us wants. It will find sneaky ways to creep in and remind you that there’s more going on than the latest Donald Trump scandal. What you think of as the big, important story of the year pales in comparison to phone calls from family and friends. It can’t hold a candle to all the art you’ve taken in, all the rooms full of strangers you’ve helped fill up, all the pets you’ve seen on the street.

Like a particularly nasty breakup or a hangover after a two or four drinks too many, the onslaught of Trumpian malfeasance and stupidity can feel like the only thing that matters in the world. It can consume you completely if you don’t take a beat and look around. If you’re in the market for New Year’s resolutions for 2026, you could do a lot worse than Morrison’s shouted advice to Gladys Knight as she waits on an eastbound train:

“I love ya but, oh, get a life!”

What do you think? How have you found ways to peel away from the news cycle this year? Do you have any resolutions that will keep you from despairing in the new year? Click the speech bubble icon to sound off in the comments.

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