Something was nagging at me so I took time to write this post. I hope you will consider it in its entirety.

I’m not going to say “Happy New Year” because what I’m hoping for—and personally working toward—is a “Better New Year” for us all.

Better doesn’t mean louder, faster, or more triumphant. It means more thoughtful. More intentional. More aware of where we are, how we got here, and what kind of future we’re actually choosing to build together.

As we move into another year, I keep coming back to a simple, unsettling thought: we’re getting this wrong. Not just one side or the other. Not just “them.” All of us, in different ways.

We’re no longer really listening to each other. We’re reacting, posturing, retreating into silos that feel safe because they’re familiar. Social media and a 24-hour news cycle reward speed and outrage, not reflection or curiosity. Extremes get amplified because extremes grab attention. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, that constant noise erodes our ability to hear anything else.

Meanwhile, the world feels increasingly unstable. Wars are spreading. Alliances are fraying. Trust—between nations, communities, even neighbors—feels fragile. This is not the 21st Century I imagined growing up. Not even close.

I truly believed we’d be wiser by now. More grown up. More capable of handling complexity without tearing ourselves apart. What worries me most is that we’ve started to treat all of this as “normal.”

We live in a perpetual “now,” as if the way things feel today is how they’ve always been and how they’ll always be. But the truth is, much of what we consider normal—our technologies, our pace of life, our constant stimulation—is less than a century old. Humanity in its current form has existed for hundreds of thousands of years. The vast majority of that time looks nothing like this.

Our nervous systems didn’t evolve for this. Our social structures didn’t either. And part of why we’re struggling is that we haven’t slowed down long enough to acknowledge how radically—and how quickly—our world has changed.

I don’t write this as an accusation. It’s a plea.

We have to relearn how to listen. Even—especially—to people we disagree with. We have to resist the temptation to reduce each other to labels or tribes or talking points. Right and left. Liberal and conservative. None of those categories capture the full complexity of a human being.

I still believe in humanity. Deeply. I believe in our capacity for reason, empathy, imagination, courage, and kindness. I believe we’re capable of doing better than this. But it requires effort. Attention. Humility. It requires us to admit that we don’t have all the answers and that certainty isn’t the same thing as wisdom.

We live in a universe—vast, ancient, and indifferent—and yet here we are, conscious enough to look back at it and try to understand our place within it. That makes us both infinitesimally small and profoundly significant at the same time. We are the universe, in some small way, becoming aware of itself.

That perspective matters. It should humble us. It should also inspire us to grow up, to think longer-term, to choose a path with intention rather than stumbling forward driven by fear, distraction, or ego.

So no—this isn’t a “Happy New Year” post.

It’s a hope for a better one.

A quieter one.

A more thoughtful one.

One where we slow down enough to remember what actually matters—and who we want to be.

—Jeffrey Morris, January 1st, 2026.