2026…

Last year is a complicated one to retrospect on. I’ve been incredibly lucky in so many ways, and also have had to grow through some incredibly difficult personal challenges. Despite the tumult, I’m grateful for everything that happened this year, and I wouldn’t change a thing.

To welcome in the new year, I’d like to pour out a bit of gratitude and express some wishes for what I hope to see unfold in 2026.

The Year of Taste

I hope that this will finally be the year of tastemakers and those with a strong aesthetic compass. Technical ability has become less and less important to create new things, and I think this year we’ll finally reach the point where those who may have been averse to using AI find a way to engage it that expresses their creative drive.

Collectively, I think we’re approaching a breaking point to our digital apathy that will need people will vision to lead us towards a more organic, vibrant digital existence. I’m ready for cool new things to do on the internet, and a healthier relationship to software generally.

I’m tinkering around with some ideas in this domain myself, but I’m excited to see things explode here. Slop is out in 2025.

Writing

This is somewhat related to the taste conversation, but I think good writing is going to become more important this year than it has been in at least a decade. Partially as a result of general apathy, people are going to crave Human Made ideas and strong articulation. LLMs flatten and compress ideas into its own language, and this leaves open a lot of space for new ideas in idiosyncratic language to fill the gap of novelty.

I’m really excited for the next wave of strong cultural voices to emerge, and I hope to be one of them.

Caring

2026 will be the year of earnestness. It’s no longer cool to not care (thanks Chalamet), and I love it.

I hope we all start to embrace this, pour our hearts out more, and give ourselves to the world more completely without holding back.

Finally…

2025 was a year of massive transformation, and I hope to embrace what is present and nurture the new life that it has brought.