2026: From Feelings to Function

This coming year, I’m filling my life with what matters most: care, trust, mutuality, love, grace, joy, understanding, meaning, aliveness, gratitude.

I mean, when I think about it,, I’ve always focused on these things. But 2026 is the year I start talking about them out loud… to as many people as I can reach.

Why? Because we’re losing our grip on foundational principles that hold our world together. And they need to be salvaged. Not by mythologizing them or imbuing them with renewed significance, but by restoring them to the functional vocabulary of our lives.

Less talk. More action.

I’m starting with care, trust, mutuality, and love. These aren’t abstract concepts for me. They’re pillars upon which amazing things can be built.

But to build on them, the pillars themselves must be strong. They can’t rest on wishful thinking, passing sentiment, fair-weather investment, or the detritus of unresolved emotional baggage.

As emotional as people get about these principles, there’s much more to them than feelings. When I talk about care, trust, mutuality, and love, I’m not talking about feels-y teenage flights of fancy or sensations that arise under just the right conditions.

I’m talking about them as causes, not effects.

For me, these principles are about the hard work of putting yourself aside and showing up for someone or something bigger than yourself… when it matters most, or maybe when it might not matter at all, but you don’t dare take the chance of dismissing it.

They’re about making deliberate personal choices to take impersonal action. Taking responsibility for what happens in a situation or in the wider world, and putting your own wishes aside.

It’s not about self-destructive sacrifice or martyrdom. Sometimes stepping away and taking care of yourself is the most caring, loving thing you can do for another person. But it is about understanding that the world doesn’t revolve around me, my pain, my history, my definition of what’s best for ME in a very narrow, individual context.

It’s not about asking “What’s in it for me?” It’s about asking “What’s in it for we?” (Yes, I know the grammar’s wrong, but it rhymes.)

We’ve been conditioned to judge situations by how they feel. We trust our guts more than our brains, and a lot of times we don’t use our brains nearly as much as we should.

Over the past 40 years, pop culture serenaded us with “It can’t be wrong when it feels so right,” while the corporate directive “Don’t think, act!” echoed through acres of cubicles. Somehow, the romance of instinct, manifestation, and magic took precedence over self-sacrifice and hard work.

Let’s do something about that.

Let’s talk about how function gives rise to feelings. How we can use our understanding of that progression to make actual, substantive changes in how we live in our world.

Let’s explore how doing certain things in a certain way makes us start to feel things in a certain way. Let’s relearn that in order to get, you have to give first. And sometimes you have to give until it hurts, then keep giving, in order to receive the most beneficial reward.

And let’s also relearn that it’s not all about our own individual reward. It can’t be. It needs to be about a reward greater than us—one that elevates us above the simple sum of our parts.

And it needs to be about more than just dealing with our own individual pain.

We all have our pain. We all have our wounds. We all have our frustrations, our irritations, our agonies. We always have, and we always will.

But as long as we stay focused only on our own trauma, our own difficulties, our own humiliations, we will stay in the wasteland that is both cause and effect of our self-centeredness.

This isn’t just about escaping the wasteland, like Percival could have done in the Fisher King’s castle if he’d just been paying attention.

This is about finding something greater. Building something more robust.

Maybe it’s not heaven on earth.

But maybe it is.