By Pamela Paul / The New York Times

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 artificial intelligence 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 AI 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.

Disregard Musk. While it’s tempting to analyze Elon Musk’s simultaneously robotic and chaotic facial expressions and bodily movements, it will offer no spiritual benefits. Like those infernal word logic puzzles involving seven sisters named Sue going to the supermarket, you will never find the solution and will only be left demoralized.

Engage in mini-rebellions. We know that Resistance is Out or at least cowering in a corner clutching its Hydroflask and alternating between ASMR and a Theragun. But that doesn’t mean you must submit entirely to the current order. Take a card from Roz Chast’s comic on “mini-rebellions,” which offers examples of satisfying micro-revolts like paying rude cabdrivers with “very old, torn, dirty money.” Personally, I avoid using favorite Trump words like “beautiful” and “huge,” which nobody else notices but which brings quiet satisfaction. Make whatever adjustments you need to prove that you neither approve of nor participate in what is happening.

Let go of 2020. Like skinny jeans and bucket hats, not everything that appealed five years ago looks as good in the cold harsh return-to-office lighting of today. Feel free to retire any residual circa-2020 flourishes like the compulsion to virtue-signal your progressive bona fides, whether it’s wearing an N95 mask to meetings despite having no underlying medical condition or attaching italicized pronouns to your email signature like an ancestral signet or fancy job title.

Remember fun. Scowling your way through the next four years isn’t likely to be a good time. I spent several months after Trump’s first inauguration trying to manifest a presidency-ending faux pas at the White House Easter Egg Roll and when that didn’t work out, segued into hours of listening to legal podcasts that dissected Russiagate. Neither sparked joy.

Break up with your tribe. Belonging to any group that requires ideological, behavioral and even aesthetic commitment isn’t necessarily the best way to connect with fellow humans in a highly pixelated and polarized world. You can be a singular individual while still forging community with the people around you — preferably in actual geographic space rather than an imagined cyberspace — despite your disagreements. Technically, it is possible to embrace people who differ from us and still stay true to who we are.

Remember, we are all, every one of us in our own imperfect way, simply trying to hold onto a swiftly tilting planet without letting ourselves go.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.