How to Remain a Reality-Based Human in 2025

Well, January has been interesting. If the first month of 2025 with its blazing fires, bitter cold snaps and pilot episode of “Trump Gone Wild” is any indication, the coming year is bound to challenge anyone trying to hold fast to the norms of basic human existence.

But however broken your brain may feel, there’s no need to pass the steering wheel entirely to GPS. Herewith, some meditations to help moor you to a fact- and human-centered world.

Remember artificial isn’t always better. Every time you start to worry about A.I. taking over your world, think about maraschino cherries. While those neon-red “fruits” may be occasionally welcome on the tip of a plastic sword atop a cocktail, nobody wants an entire bowl of them. If the bot that has started summarizing emails — e.g., “expressing excitement and appreciation of Pamela,” “expresses shock and well wishes” — on my iPhone 16 is any indication of how emotionally intelligent A.I. is, natural intelligence still has a significant edge.

Refuse to react. Your emotional landscape does not follow the laws of Newtonian physics and therefore your brain does not need to have an equal and opposite reaction to everything Donald Trump does. If you think that most maximalist positions on the right sound unhinged and inhumane, consider that their corresponding positions on the left may be zany in their own special ways. Whether your spiritual guide is a yogi, the Stoics or the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean, you can still engage in nuance, complexity or indecision.

Reject all vibes. Whatever is supposedly emanating from TikTok according to six people you know from a group chat, you can let it waft by like a bad smell. Remember that these are synthetically produced moods created by online influencers and there is never any need for you to be demure or brat or trad. That’s their hustle, not yours. Feel free also to reject anyone who tries to theorize about vibes. Yes, that includes vibe shifts.

Stop being social online. Now that social media has splintered into the shrieking horcruxes of Bluesky battiness, fact-free Meta and the shambolic X, and with TikTok possibly heading back to China, you might reconsider whether allowing the algorithm to dictate your experience of the world is a sensible habit. You need neither hold space nor take up space on one of these platforms. Nobody will look at you if you give them nothing to see.