Avoiding the Void in 2026
If I were walking in a city on a dark, dreary night and decided to cut through an alleyway only to come across an armed robber who demanded that I pick a favorite time of year or else they’d shoot me, I’d have to say the no-man’s-land stretch of time that takes place between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
I have often thought of this particular stretch of time as the annual Void, where expectations are nonexistent, ambitions are nowhere to be found, and the only agenda item is to simply exist without the preconceived notions of survival. The Void is a retreat. The Void is safe. The Void is necessary to recharge for a completely new year of bullshit. Let us all embrace the Void.
That is what I wanted to write two weeks ago. Here I am, a full week into 2026, typing it now because beyond all of the benefits of the Void, it is also seductively dangerous, and is threatening to swallow me whole.
Objects at Rest
The effects of inertia on bodies of matter have been well-studied, so I won’t bore you with an extensive metaphor - I’m the body of matter and I have been at rest. The slippery sides of that annual Void have gripped me and slipped me down into the soft comforts of an empty head that feels no need of expressing itself with words.
I’ll put it plainly, I have enjoyed my time in the void. Now, for some of that time, I was without the means to write one of these blogs or work on any writing projects in the usual manner as I was away from any type of keyboard not found on my phone. So for that time, I will propose, I am excused. This was, by and large, by design. Breaks are good and encouraged. We must all spend some time of the year possessing a body at rest.
For another portion of this time spent away from any such keyboard not found on my phone, I was suffering from an aggressive and intense allergy attack on my sinuses that filled my head with cotton and snot and tissues and frustration and a whole heap of a lack of being able to breathe through my nose (which I love doing). I will also excuse myself for this time as I accomplished next to nothing other than voiding my sinuses of mucus and mixing up medications and wondering why the sudafed I’ve been taking hasn’t been working (spoiler: it was Mucinex).
All of this is well and good and even the people in my life cut me slack during this portion of the Void. However, then the New Year rolled in. I watched it happen myself, I was there. Yet, the portion of my brain that had been besieged by allergies and resting in the Void did not awake. I’ve been slumbering a week past the expiration date.
It’s only now, in this week into the new year, that I am wondering where that drive from last year has gone, what’s stopping me from getting back into gear, so to speak. And for that, we need to turn to an extensive metaphor in the form of a physics explanation that I’ve already said we weren’t going to do.
Cutting to the quick, a body at rest has the tendency to remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force. Okay, wow, we couldn’t avoid it. However, however, I think something interesting is happening in the case of my staying in the void. You see, for most of 2025, I stayed away from getting too “in the weeds” with current goings-on. For better or worse, and with full awareness, I began avoiding news cycles and updates with the birth of my daughter. This coincided with a well-documented change in my priorities as my daughter is now the most important aspect of my life, so that made burying my head in the sand somewhat easy.
Enter the Void. Enter nothingness. Enter my daughter and I chilling in bed all morning because I’m feeling sick and there’s nothing to do besides look at my phone. Ah ha, ah ha, I hear you, me, we have a contingency for this. We read books on our phone, so when we find ourselves looking at news stories for too long, we can pivot back into the next book in The Expanse series so as not to continue the rotting of our brains. But hey, me, we didn’t do that, did we? No, we couldn’t concentrate on the complex space physics of that series because our brains were full of mush, so we just looked at reddit the whole time.
And that’s carried over, is what I’m here to tell you, and now I know far too much about Venezuelan Oil. I know about Somali daycare scams and Tim Walz not seeking reelection. I am far too aware of the completely horrendous murder that’s happened in Minneapolis of a 37-year-old mother by the name of Renee Nicole Good who was gunned down by ICE. I’m too plugged into the rhetoric to be ignorant of how the right-winged media is trying to spin the story and I’m so, so, sad.
These are outside forces acting upon my body but the effect isn’t working as intended. I want to stay at rest. In the Void. Retreat into the nonthinking, non-responsive part of my brain and just stay in those slippery walls. The Void is where these things don’t happen.
Avoiding the Void
I’ll continue to be honest here, I’m having difficulty getting started this year since it seems as though the only thing that’s changed is the number at the end of the date. There’s some magical thinking that takes place at the end of each year. Next year will be different. This year was bad, but the next might be good. Everything’s going to change at midnight of New Year’s Eve. For a child, this is somewhat true. Each new year experienced brings with it a wealth of new opportunities and changes.
We try to keep that feeling alive as an adult, but there’s fewer and fewer milestones to process automatically with the passing of a year. Also, when you’re aware and plugged in, it doesn’t take too long for something to happen that drags the magic right out of you.
The news stories I mentioned in the previous section all happened within a week of each other in 2026 and it’s only the 8th. Clearly, we’re in for another tough year of global and national events happening that are divisive, upsetting, and just plain wrong. There’s a fatigue setting in that needs to be fought, but the sweet nothingness of the Void is threatening to drag us down into silent compliance.
So how do we avoid the Void? How do we climb those slippery walls and make sure we’re getting things done and staying informed and fighting the good fight? These are good questions. I’m not sure I even have an answer to the problem at large, but much like how corporations have suggested we fight climate change by lowering our carbon footprint, I’ll suggest the same strategy. It starts in the home!
Now, I’m sort of against resolutions in that I don’t think a general, sweeping goal made at the beginning of the year sets one up for the follow-through needed to make sure it comes true and isn’t derailed by the lack of specific steps necessary to accomplish said resolution. Instead, I set manageable goals with specific steps that lead to a realistic outcome. (The previous sentence is dripping with SMART-flavored sarcasm).
Goals for 2026:
Write More
Kind of self-explanatory and a continuation of a goal I set for myself in 2025. Before last year, my writing frequency and amount both were rapidly approaching zero. Then, I started this blog some time in March and found myself writing (almost) every day. I want to keep that trajectory going, something that I did not do in the Void, as the benefits have been really good for my mental health and aspirations to publish a novel sometime in my lifetime. Speaking of…
Finish the First Draft of G.J., my Soft Sci-Fi Novel
Sometime in 2026, the first draft of this novel will be complete. I’m hesitant to set a true time-bound goal for this, as deadlines and me don’t work well. But yes, the first draft of this novel I’ve been focusing on since last year will wrap up sometime in a way that is both exciting and frightening. Since, once the first draft is done, that means…
Revise and Polish G.J. until it is Publish-Ready
The true hard work begins. I am not a good revisionist. It’s something that I desperately need to work on. As they say, writing is rewriting. Most of the good stuff comes from revision. As much work as it is to write the first draft, I feel like it’s twice or more work to make it actually good. So once the first draft is done, the second draft begins, and we make sure all of the parts are working to benefit the whole.
Keep Working on Other Projects
I’ve let my focus rest on a singular project for now, but there’s more things I should be working on writing-wise. A sentence struck me while I was in an airport and I spent half a flight composing a little story on my phone. That was refreshing, being unburdened from staying true to some previous 200 pages for the first time in a while. I don’t think the exercise has legs, so to speak, but it was enjoyable and made a long travel day a bit shorter, so that was nice. It was also nice to know that my fiction writing motivation isn’t 100% tied up in the novel. So it’d be nice to get back to writing things other than the novel, you know?
Some Sort of Activism
It’s getting all too clear that America is heading in an ugly direction. As much as I’d like to bury my head in the sand again and just work on my little writing projects, that doesn’t help anyone except myself. I don’t know what this looks like, and I don’t have specific steps or goals here, but staying on the sidelines of facism isn’t an option.
Write More Fun Blog Articles
I miss word reviews. I’m going to write more fun, dumb articles. My goal is to have at least one fun article a month that isn’t a progress update. I’m hoping the Write More goal will play into this and we can have fun content again. If you like this kind of content, then stay tuned. Watch this space. Etc.
So that’s the plan to avoid the Void. Write more. Accomplish things. Revise. Perhaps get published, but right now optimism feels far away. It doesn’t feel realistic to list that as a goal, but there’s a small bit of hope behind the sentiment. Either way, we gotta do something.
Objects in Motion
A lesson that I continue learning over the course of my brief bit of time on this Earth is that my thoughts and opinions of the world are not universal. One of the flaws of my youth was the pig-headed thinking that if I came to a conclusion about something, that must mean that others have arrived at the same conclusion. Somehow, I thought my thinking was universal thinking - that others who were as smart or smarter than me had come to the same conclusions as me and that anyone who hadn’t either wasn’t smart or hadn’t ever thought about it. This is an extremely stupid way to think that the world works.
My worldview has changed, naturally, as I expanded my world from the tiny little swamp town I grew up in and learned that people can have different opinions, beliefs, and ideas about how our world works. I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that there is no universal experience, but that’s an idea for another time.
From time to time, however, I am made aware that one of my previously held notions of how the world works that was formed under this very erroneous thinking still persists today. One such of these notions is that everyone believes, understands, and has embraced The Void, that stretch of time between Christmas and New Years where no one is expected to do anything and we can all rest and eat way too many sugary treats.
But that’s not the case for a lot of people in the world. For one, anyone who works a service job doesn’t automatically get that period of time off. Doctors have to work that stretch of time. It’s not a gimmie, and not everyone subscribes to the notion that it’s a time for rest. Heck, my daughter had absolutely zero motivation to let us sleep in at all, since she’s seven months old and only knows when she hasn’t been fed in a timely manner.
All of this to say, the objects in motion that aim to control everything in our lives, who have been working for decades to keep us at rest, have never rested.
The Void is slippery by design. It wants to trap us there. And the people trying to grab every bit of authoritarian power want us there. Religion is opiate to the masses. Bread and circuses. The Void is just an extension of those types of distraction. Authoritarians want their populace to be asleep, lulled into compliance through silence.
So in 2026, let’s do stuff. Let’s be active. Let’s not be silent. It’s time to fight back in the ways we can. To be clear, I’m not advocating for any sort of violence; there are ways to fight back without actual fighting and that’s what we should be doing. Climb out of the Void and fight like some sort of Eldritch horror - that’s the kind of energy I’m dragging into the rest of 2026. Let my many unblinking eyes remain open and a screech of justice escape from my gaping maw.
Or something. Happy new year.
