2026 vision board

did you ever see the 'core desired feelings' worksheets? maybe you weren't in vision board worksheet coaching instagram, that year. you're probably fine.

you're supposed to find a word that's like semantically positive, though, to centre what you DO want instead of keeping your attention on the situation you want to be out of. so people were constantly reminding each other to use 'wealthy' instead of 'debt-free' and, like, 'loved' instead of 'he came back'.

which is all to say that for most of this winter i've been trying to think of a positive word for 'unavailable'. they're all un-words. they all centre the barbarians who are trying to reach you. i like 'elusive' but it indicates that you're actively evading them, like

October 2026

Well, I had this saved in drafts, because I was going to write about this feeling and how it was going to manifest in my life. And then instead of writing about it and posting I have

• reduced my phone screen time from about 7h (down from a peak last year of 11h) per day to less than 3h a day and zero on weekends;
• stopped opening Youtube at all, which is really weird;
• kept up the habit of reading my feeds through Readwise Reader (invitation link which benefits me if you go pro and harms nobody if you don't);
• told my phone to permit me 15m an hour of browser time, so I can still look stuff up but I literally cannot get stuck in the scroll-hole like I used to;
• & begun listening to the radio because BBC R3 is the classical station and you get to listen to recordings of human persons making physical objects resonate pleasantly. It's an actual radio. With an aerial. I didn't have to make an account for it. My listening is unmonitored, unprofitable, & solar powered.

I'm not participating. I'm not fully disengaged? I still know about the plague story & the undersea cables stories & when planes do non-standard things & the clathrate gun &, like, that pretty blonde girl who pointed at another girl & then we all got milkshake-duck-ed good & proper. News.

Gosh, I was going to link to know your meme but apparently it has a wikipedia page. Milkshake duck. Notable. Splendid.

Sorry, where was I. Not participating, that was it, yeah. How it could go better:

• do the work of condensing & connecting the non-fiction books & long articles I read, somehow? is this a notebook thing or a digital thing? if it's a digital thing how do I prevent it being write-only-memory?
• logging books I read on kobo will improve markedly now that storygraph added 'sync-from-kobo'
• I've been gardening less than I'd like but more than some.

I got my eyes tested. They're not any worse, but the web shop I used 3 years ago refuses to do the 1.6x plastic now and wants £70 for the 1.74x plastic. I emailed them & their chatbot answered with a long rephrasing of the question so I'm going to use a different shop.

I recognise that it's a privilege to be able to detach like this. I do. Without inheriting a house-price I would not have been able to be cold & badly dressed & keep our household costs under £8k. I would have died in the rent trap. Nobody is served by my silence about my luck, though - I do have this chance & I will enjoy this life.