2026 oh là là

Vondelkerk (designed by Pierre Cuypers) burns down at New Year's Night.

In his Time of Indifference, Alberto Moravia describes a society not undone by dramatic evil, but by emotional withdrawal. The characters in this novel sense that something is wrong yet choose comfort, irony, or distance over involvement. Indifference is not a personal defect so much as a historical condition: the failure to respond when response is still possible. Or even existentially necessary. Almost a century later, that diagnosis feels frighteningly familiar.

We usually greet a new year with standard wishes—health, happiness, and good luck. May dreams come true, etcetera. Do they capture at all the urgency of our situation? Or have they become our contemporary version of indifference?

2026 will not ask whether we are comfortable. It will ask whether we are attentive. Whether we recognize how close we are to thresholds that cannot be uncrossed—ecological systems tipping out of balance, technologies accelerating beyond the reach of our ethics, and weapons inherited from another century, still waiting for a failure of judgment. Not separate threats, but a convergence: a destructive logic formed in full view.

So rather than wishing you happiness, I wish you clarity—the ability to see the moment without panic or denial. Rather than wishing you health as a goal in itself, I wish you resilience: the steadiness to remain present when disengagement tempts, when fatigue itself becomes political. And rather than wishing your dreams come true, I wish you agency—the courage to act where action still matters, and the humility to accept responsibility where there are no guarantees, and even no views nor likes.

May the coming year make us less distracted and more alert, less ironic and more brave, less algorithmically bubbled and more consequential. If 2026 demands something of us, may we not turn away. And if we manage to make it the year in which we avoided the worst, let it be because enough people understood that hope is not something we feel, but something we do.

Let 2026 begin and may our thinking catch up with the world we have made.