My Favorite Things of 2023 + What's In and Out for 2024

Plus: a few small victories.

Happy New Year, friends! This time of year is one of my favorites — certainly more so than Christmastime, even with its warm glow and family togetherness. I like how austere January feels, as if the clutter of life is stripped away, revealing the bones of what it is, has been, and could be.

Photo by Nolan Issac on Unsplash

By “could be,” I don’t mean to sound like a lifestyle coach, whose ilk descend upon us on January 1, urging us to adopt personal improvement plans as the key to a hashtag great life. Sure, eating less sugar or going to bed earlier or giving up doomscrolling would probably reap tangible rewards. But part of the self-help machine is to get us to believe that our lives can be fixed with this One Amazing Trick — that multilayered internal problems can be fixed with a single, external solution. And when the trick inevitably doesn’t work, we go out in search of one that will, thus greasing the wheels of the self-help machine.

What ails us is far deeper, more complex, and mo…