The year of 2026 has officially arrived, and with it, people are vowing to change themselves for the better.
These people are idiots.
I mean, come on, you all have to have put the pieces together by now, right?! Every year, we all swear to change for the better, and every year, the world gets mysteriously worse. This is a balancing of the scales. The total good in the world has to remain the same at all costs. This is why, if we ever want to fix things, we need to begin utilizing our collective renewed senses of vigor to become worse as people.
Think about it: the people in charge, world leaders, all those types are too busy supporting Fortune 500 companies and participating in insider trading to try to actively change for the better, unlike us common folk. Our individual senses of justice are only fueling them to become worse. Like I said, the total good in the world needs to remain the same at all costs. This is why I am going to begin stopping in the middle of the atrium between classes with no real purpose. I am going to become someone else’s evil boyfriend who all of their friends hate. I am going to get into arguments about completely senseless topics in the comment sections of TikToks with less than 500 likes. These small acts of pure evil will force the government of the United States to implement universal healthcare. This attitude of completely selfish carelessness will get us a better color of the year than Cloud Dancer. Pantone and the shareholders involved will have a change of heart; 2026 can be a year for Space Cherry, or Party Pink, or perhaps Cockatoo–the color of an optimistic 12-year-old’s bedroom.
More ideas for 2026 include: parking badly, owning a rolling backpack, showing up 15 minutes late, doing that half-raised hand thing that guys do while trying to seem nonchalant in English classes, cheating at Wordle, and forcing your acquaintances to watch a YouTube video you thought was funny. It cannot be your close friends, and it cannot be a TikTok or Instagram Reel. It must be someone you only kinda know, and it must be 15 minutes long. Do you hear me, soldier?!
Listen, I’m not asking you to abandon your moral compass. I’m not asking you to do anything drastic, like asking ChatGPT to summarize a book for you instead of using the tried-and-true method of a SparkNotes page and a prayer, like a sane person. I’m asking for you to remember the human condition at its purest: kinda crappy, but motivated with pure intentions. That’s right: nothing is more human than saying something mildly rude and then claiming you were just trying to be honest. That sort of thing will return the world to a state of balance. The Powers That Be don’t care about your “radical kindness.” They want blood, and the only way to satiate them is to be so normal that they have to become normal about everything as well.
We must swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. We must place the forces of evil in the hands of the common man, and in doing so, seize them from the oppressing class. We must make it the year 2016 again. We must wear far too much makeup to normal places, like Enloe High School or a Harris Teeter. We must have hyper-edited profile pictures on Instagram. I want to see the worst graphic t-shirts ever manufactured. I want them sold at Kohls. I want to see the most embarrassing middle schooler ever conceptualized, and I request–nay, demand–that every middle schooler is like that. We will, as a society, defeat low-rise jeans. Woke is back in a Big Way.
2026 is our year, Eagles. We will be able to buy weekly groceries as adults for less than $60. The groceries will be name-brand. This will only happen if we all start posting TikToks filmed at 2x speed for 15 likes. We will prevail!
