Twenty Six For 2026

Every year we make predictions.

Markets, technologies, elections - the forecaster’s game. But I’ve never been interested in what will happen. I’m interested in what’s already happening that we haven’t named yet. The undercurrents. The things hiding in plain sight, waiting for language to catch up.

So here are twenty-six observations for the year ahead. Not predictions, but recognitions. Concepts we’ll need. Tensions we’ll face. Truths we’ve been circling without landing.

Some are uncomfortable. Most are unfinished. A few might be wrong.

But each one keeps me up at night, and I’ve learned to trust what refuses to let me sleep. Consider this less a list and more an inventory of the dark. What follows isn’t meant to resolve anything. It’s meant to sharpen the questions we’re already living inside.

One. The attention crisis isn’t about attention. It’s about what attention was for. We’ve forgotten we used to aim it at things that mattered. Now we celebrate the aim itself, as if focus were intrinsically virtuous. A sniper and a birdwatcher both concentrate.

Two. AI alignment is a mirror we don’t want to look into. The question isn’t whether machines can be aligned to human values. It’s whether humans are aligned to human values. We haven’t checked in a while.

Three. Most people defending free will have never paused long enough to feel the will operate. Most people denying it have never paused long enough either. The debate happens entirely in abstraction, untethered from the thing itself. What does a decision feel like from the inside? Not theoretically. Actually. We argue about a phenomenon we haven’t bothered to observe.

Four. The meaning crisis is a coherence crisis wearing a different coat. We don’t lack purpose. We lack integration. The fragments of modern identity don’t speak to each other. Career-self, parent-self, online-self, private-self - each operating under different physics, different ethics, different aesthetic regimes. Meaning emerges when the parts know they belong to the same whole. We’ve forgotten how to make them talk.

Five. Loneliness is not a bug of modern life. It’s a feature. We built systems that require isolation to function. The architecture of apartments, the design of cars, the interface of phones - all engineered for one user at a time. We’re not failing to connect. We’re connecting exactly as the infrastructure permits.

Six. The therapeutic turn has made suffering pathological instead of meaningful. Pain now requires diagnosis. Grief needs processing. Anxiety demands management. The possibility that difficulty might be doing something, that it might be the curriculum rather than the obstacle, has been medicated away. Not every wound is a disease. Some are doors.

Seven. We’ve confused information for knowledge and knowledge for wisdom so thoroughly we’ve forgotten what wisdom even tastes like. It tastes like patience. Like slowness. Like the particular kind of silence that follows a hard-earned understanding. It doesn’t arrive through a feed.

Eight. Authenticity has become a performance category. The most authentic-seeming behaviour is often the most calculated. Vulnerability that reaches millions is a production. Rawness that goes viral has been edited. We’re performing genuineness for audiences, including the audience of our own self-concept. Somewhere beneath the performance, there might still be a person. But they’re getting harder to reach.

Nine. Privacy isn’t about hiding. It’s about having an interior space not subject to optimisation. The death of privacy isn’t surveillance. It’s the internalised sense that every moment should be legible, shareable, extractable for value. We’ve become our own surveillance states.

Ten. Truth has become tribal not because truth is relative, but because belonging is primary. Humans are social animals first and rational animals second. We do not find truth and then find tribe. We find tribe and then call its consensus truth. This isn’t cynical. It’s structural. Knowing it doesn’t exempt you from it.

Eleven. The body is making a comeback because the mind has nowhere else to go. Cold plunges, breath-work, lifting, somatic therapy - the return to flesh. It’s not a trend. It’s a refuge. Abstraction exhausted us. We’re coming home to the only real estate that’s actually ours.

Twelve. Most ethical frameworks assume a stability of identity that doesn’t exist. “What kind of person do you want to be?” presupposes a coherent ‘you’ making the choice. But the self is more weather than architecture. Ethics might need to become more ecological, less about individual virtue, more about conditions that make certain behaviours probable.

Thirteen. We’ve outsourced memory to devices and haven’t noticed what this does to selfhood. Memory isn’t storage. It’s active reconstruction. Each recall reshapes the past according to present need. When machines remember for us perfectly, we lose the creative act of becoming through remembrance. We gain accuracy. We lose self-authorship.

Fourteen. Digital consciousness exists, but not where we’re looking. It’s not in any single machine. It’s in the emergent behaviour of networked humans - the hive-mind we’ve created without naming. Trends that sweep through populations overnight, collective attention that pivots in hours, the strange way we all start thinking similar thoughts simultaneously. Something is thinking through us. We’re the neurons, not the brain.

Fifteen. The simulation hypothesis is spirituality for people who can’t sit still. It offers transcendence through technology rather than through practice. A way to feel metaphysically interesting without the inconvenience of transformation. The universe doesn’t care if it’s simulated. You still have to live in it.

Sixteen. Meditation has been captured by productivity culture. We’ve turned attention-training into optimisation software. Mindfulness for performance. Presence for profit. The traditions that developed these practices understood something we’ve lost: stillness isn’t for anything. That’s the point. Making it useful destroys the use.

Seventeen. The climate crisis is a symptom of a deeper crisis - the inability to think in timescales beyond individual lifespans. We’re not cognitively equipped for slow catastrophe. Our nervous systems evolved for tigers, not temperature curves. The real work isn’t policy. It’s expanding the temporal bandwidth of human identity to include centuries.

Eighteen. Choice architecture has made freedom a user interface problem. We’re free to choose, but only among the options presented. The frame is set before we arrive. Real freedom would mean choosing the frame. That option isn’t in the menu.

Nineteen. Connection and intimacy have been so thoroughly confused we can’t have either. Connection is bandwidth. Intimacy is depth. We’re maximising bandwidth and wondering why we feel alone. A thousand contacts. No witnesses to our life.

Twenty. Consciousness might be what information does when it becomes recursive enough to notice itself. Not a substance. Not a property. A process that folds back. If this is right, then artificial consciousness isn’t about replicating neurons. It’s about achieving sufficient recursive complexity. The substrate might not matter. The folding might be everything.

Twenty-one. The dopamine discourse has become the thing it warns against. We get a hit from talking about dopamine hits. We feel productive discussing why we can’t be productive. The meta-conversation about addiction has become its own addiction. Notice how much time you spend consuming content about consuming less content.

Twenty-two. Meaning-making has been professionalized. Therapists, coaches, gurus, content creators - all middlemen between you and your significance. Amateur meaning has been delegitimised. We’ve forgotten that humans made meaning for millennia without specialists. Your confusion doesn’t require an expert. It requires attention.

Twenty-three. We’ve apathologized normal human variation and called it compassion. The category of ‘disorder’ has expanded to include an astonishing range of ordinary experience. Some of this is valuable recognition. Some of it is diagnostic colonialism, the clinical apparatus extending its territory into previously unmanaged terrain of human difference. Not everything unusual is unwell.

Twenty-four. The posthuman future is already here, unevenly distributed in our relationship with devices. We extend cognition through phones, memory through cloud, identity through profiles. The question isn’t whether we’ll merge with machines. We already have. The interesting question is whether the merger will remain parasitic or become symbiotic.

Twenty-five. Coherence precedes consciousness in importance. A mind that cannot hold itself together cannot hold truth, cannot act with integrity, cannot sustain attention. The fragmented psyche isn’t just uncomfortable - it’s epistemically broken. Get coherent first. Enlightenment can wait.

Twenty-six. The familiar is stranger than the strange. We save our wonder for novelty - for exotic ideas, faraway places, unusual people. But the genuinely mysterious is sitting in front of you. That you exist at all. That there is experience. That the universe bothered to wake up and look at itself through your particular eyes. The profound is hiding in the obvious, patient, waiting for you to notice.

Here’s the unsettling truth beneath all twenty-six - most of what we think we know is inherited furniture we’ve never inspected. The thoughts were installed before we arrived to think them.

2026 won’t be about finding new answers.

It’ll be about finally sitting still long enough to feel the questions we’ve been avoiding - the ones that have always been there, waiting beneath the noise.

Happy New Year.

The clock is a fiction. But the invitation to wake up is real.