And now for “27 ways to feel bad about yourself while the last piece of Christmas pudding you’ve ‘indulged’ in is still making its way through your intestinal tract…”

As the new year dawns, you’ll notice that without ANY space to breathe whatsoever, what was once a newsfeed saturated with sequins, pints and party platters becomes one bursting at the seams with resistance bands, Nutri Bullets and all manner of “New Year, New You” rhetoric.

If that works for you, great. If it doesn’t, keep on reading…

If you find all of this relentless (and, at times, negative) then join the club. I’ve decided I’m over it. I’ve clicked the “unsubscribe” button and it’s incredibly liberating.

“New Year, New You” regimes are framed in such a way that they seem motivating, uplifting and encouraging. The reality is they’re designed to sell gym members and juice cleanses at a time when they’re most marketable and we’re most vulnerable. The sheer volume and velocity of this kind of content coming at us from every angle — while we’re still polishing off the last of the mince pies — can make us feel as though we’ve already failed within the first few minutes of the new year. 

Image: Claire Gillo / PhotoPlus Magazine via Getty Images

Add to the mix, the pressure of New Year’s resolutions — which suggest that regardless of our current situation, we have much to improve upon; that we need to be better. We’re encouraged to set out a new set of goals, towards which to move to in the hopes of finding what we all want: happiness. We’ve barely finished the last verse of Auld Lang Syne and already, we’re exhausted, defeated and riddled with festive guilt. 

But here’s a thought: instead of subscribing to what’s become a very tired narrative, this year, let January be yours. There are so many reasons why you might consider this.

1. You can start anything any time.

While the first month of the year offers us a convenient fresh start, it’s still as arbitrary as the beginning of any other week — aka Monday. January doesn’t need to be *the* specific month where we all make massive changes in tandem. I began exercising regularly two years ago in the month of November. It was irrelevant to me that Christmas was coming. I knew that if I pursued it in January (when the whole world of social media is competing to out-do one another) I’d feel unnecessary, added pressure.

2. January is grim enough.

Unless you’re reading this from the Southern hemisphere, January is the most miserable month of the year. If we were bears in the woods, we’d be deep in hibernation, smuggling comfort food to enjoy between naps. Can we at least pick a less grim time of year to insist on being so hard on ourselves? Here’s an idea: How about reframing January as the month to be kind to yourself. Instead of a “New Year, New You”, how about a “New Year, perfectly-fine-as-you-are you”?

Image:  Vickie Flores/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

3. Wave goodbye to social comparison.

It may feel like everyone else is getting up at 5am for yoga seven days a week while you can’t drag yourself to the gym even once. Or people’s bowls of porridge look like a Pinterest-perfect work of art while yours looks like something the dog threw up. But this way of thinking isn’t unusual. From the beginning of time, we’ve been comparing ourselves to others to get a sense of how well (or not) we’re doing — or as a measure of our self worth. The arrival of a new year gives rise to that type of comparison in even greater doses. I call it “social comparison on speed”.

The thing is, with social comparison, someone will always come out on top. And that also means someone will be at the bottom — you or the person you’re comparing yourself to. It creates a culture of one-upmanship, which will inevitably have a negative spin on it. Nothing good can come of this; I assure you. You either come away feeling inadequate or with a sense of being better than someone else. 

4. Become acquainted with temporal comparison

Yes, someone else may have climbed Mount Everest before you’ve even taken down your Christmas tree, but you are you and not them. Instead of comparing our reality to everyone else’s highlights reel, this January choose something more positive and realistic: temporal comparison.

According to renowned American psychologist Leon Festinger, “temporal comparison” is when you compare yourself today with yourself of another time, rather than yourself now with someone else. It’s more “look how far you’ve come” than “look how much better they are than you”. It encourages you to settle into your own lane, at your own pace, on your own route, taking into account all that is relative to you and you alone.

Having struggled with crippling anxiety a few years ago, to the point where I couldn’t leave my own home for fear of having a panic attack, I now see it as a personal improvement — and achievement — that I can go about my life without hyperventilating into a paper bag. To someone who has never felt the faintest flutter of anxiety, feeling good in a packed shopping centre wouldn’t even register as a small victory, but for me it does. It’s all relative.

5. Goals aren’t everything.

For all the self-help books in the world, and all the philosophers and poets who try to answer the question about what happiness is really all about, it can basically be distilled down to this: It’s about the moments. The in-betweens. The here and now. With that in mind, I’m reconsidering this whole January goal-setting business. Hear me out.

Instead of being driven by achieving a certain goal — which for one person might be getting a promotion, and for another might be getting a certain amount of followers on social media — I have decided to be driven first and foremost by the kind of life I want to live: my lifestyle. Not what I want to have, or where I want to get to, but how I want to spend my time, right now, next week and so on. If more money means a job that comes with more stress and no time for doing that things I enjoy, then I’ll be asking myself: Is this a goal that will have a positive impact on my happiness? I don’t think so.

Image: flickr Editorial/Getty Images

6. It’s true what they say; it’s all about the journey 

The journey towards an elusive goal is every bit as important as the destination. When you strike a goal off your list, you might experience a temporary surge of happiness or satisfaction, but then you will inevitably settle back to a level of contentment — or lack thereof — dictated by the quality of your day-to-day lifestyle as well as your perspective. In the psychology world it’s known as “hedonic adaptation“. Netflix’s Happy documentary from 2011 makes a compelling argument for this.

It’s about the moments. The in betweens. The here and now.

I know too many people who are so goal-focused that they struggle to enjoy the lulls in between these peaks and troughs. When they achieve their goals, they don’t know quite what to do with them. And just like that, they’re onto the next thing.

What will make the most of your moments? At what cost will you achieve these isolated goals? Goals certainly have their place, and they can be a great motivator, but instead of hurtling towards what you think will make you happy, let your goals be informed by the kind of moments you want to have.

So, if you insist on resolving to do something, do this: go easy on yourself, be your own benchmark for success. And think about the kind of lifestyle you want to live. Happy New Year.

Caroline Foran is a journalist and a best-selling author of “Owning It: Your Bullshit Free Guide to Living With Anxiety” and “The Confidence Kit: Your Bullsh*t-Free Guide to Owning Your Fear“.

Stranger Things is kicking off the New Year in style. 

At the stroke of midnight (East Coast time) on New Year’s Day, Netflix dropped a video announcement for the next season of the series.

The teaser looks like an old Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve clip, but distortion quickly sets in, and a date is revealed: July 4, 2019. 

Ultima Thule — an uncharted world over 4 billion miles away — is coming into view.

On Monday, planetary scientists released a fuzzy image of Ultima Thule, snapped the day prior by the New Horizons exploration spacecraft from some 1.2 million miles away. Previously, New Horizons swooped by Pluto in 2015, capturing the icy, mountainous world in unprecedented detail.

Increasingly rich, detailed images of Ultima will start arriving on January 2, but already the deep space object looks elongated, not round, said New Horizons deputy project scientist John Spencer from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the Maryland headquarters of the New Horizons program. The program is a collaborative effort between NASA, the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where scientists navigate and control the spacecraft.

“It’s the first glimpse of what’s going to get rapidly better from here on — it’s our first taste,” Spencer said. 

Whether Ultima’s surface is heavily cratered and if it has a rich surface geology — like that of Pluto — remains to be seen. 

“Anything is possible out there in this very unknown region,” he said. 

Ultima lies 1 billion miles beyond Pluto, in a ring of icy worlds known as the Kuiper Belt. Planetary scientists believe the objects out there have been frozen in time for some 4 billion years — preserving what happened during our solar system’s early formation, long ago.

“The Kuiper Belt is just a scientific wonderland,” Alan Sterns, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, said on Sunday. 

“We’ve never, in the history of spaceflight, gone to a target that we know less about,” Stern added.

Already, Ultima has proven mysterious. As New Horizons travels closer to the object, the pattern of light reflecting off of Ultima, or its light curve, is inconsistent. With most other objects, these light patterns repeat as the objects spin. 

“It’s really a puzzle,” said Stern in a statement last week.

But much of Ultima’s mystery will diminish in the next few days. Just 33 minutes into the new year local time, New Horizon’s will swoop some 2,200 miles above Ultima, capturing detailed snapshots of the uncharted world. But because Ultima is so far away, these rich images won’t be immediately available. The data will be transmitted back to Earth, and on January 2 the first detailed snapshots will emerge of this elongated, though still largely mysterious, object.

Ultima will soon become the most distant world humanity has ever visited.

2018 was a year that cried out for a simple, effervescent throwback tune we could use to forget our present troubles. No one could have guessed we’d find it in a movie that was all about the successful eradication of 50 percent of humanity. 

But that’s exactly what happened this May when Avengers: Infinity War topped the movie charts, and sent a 42-year-old track bouncing up the music charts in its wake. With Infinity War newly available on Netflix as of last week, we’re just a-movin’ and a-groovin’ to it all over again.

The track, of course, is “Rubberband Man” by the Detroit Spinners (full name, please, lest you confuse them with a contemporary British folk group). It’s in the movie for less than 30 seconds, but leaves a hell of an impression — partly because its 1970s bass-twanging  intro perfectly announces the Guardians of the Galaxy, but mostly because Chris Pratt so utterly throws himself into TikTok-like lip syncing. 

Some 1.2 million music streamers clicked on the song in the week of Infinity War‘s release, a 700 percent rise on the previous week. At the same time, even without it being on the movie’s official soundtrack, enough people bought “Rubberband” to send it bouncing back onto the Billboard R&B sales charts. 

And what a throwback it is, in every sense. Right from the opening line’s inclusion of two objects we rarely use any more — “hand me down my walking cane, hand me down my hat” — the lyrics hearken back to another time, a pre-internet age when we were more easily and joyously amused. 

“Rubberband” could not be written today. No one just walks out the door to “catch the latest styles” without heading to Ticketmaster, cursing the “convenience” fee, and obsessively researching the venue on Yelp. No one unironically says a show is “guaranteed to blow your mind.” We’re that much harder to please these days.   

The whole song, a word-of-mouth description of a stage act, would be reduced to a tweet and preempted by a viral video on YouTube. Who gets this excited about a guy stretching a rubber band between his toes and his nose, in an age when we can easily see snowboarders causing avalanches and dogs riding ponies, every day?

Perhaps you too became obsessed with this earworm of a late-era Motown hit this year. Perhaps you also searched and all-too-easily discovered the band’s peerless performance on The Midnight Special in 1976, in which singer Philippé Wynne single-handedly justifies the existence of mutton chops and flared pants. 

Going further down the rabbit hole, passing by the ill-advised Electric Six cover version from 2010, you may have also discovered this gem: Lynda Carter, the original on-screen Wonder Woman, performed this version of “Rubberband Man” on The Muppet Show in 1980. (Your move, Gal Gadot.) 

And so, improbably, singing “Rubberband Man” turns out to be one of the very few things that has united superheroes from the Marvel and DC Comics universes. If only it could unite the fractious tribes that follow them. 

In a world torn apart this year by fights between fandoms — musical, movie, and political fandoms included — it was also clear what kind of thing we need to connect us so that society stretches but doesn’t break. More rubberbands, man. 

As the holidays wrap up, so, too, do the constant deliveries. But not before one Reddit user got quite a surprise: Amazon’s picture-proof alert for his delivery captured his package in mid-air, flying toward his front door. 

That’s quite a toss, to be honest, and even better photo-capturing skills.

And for those skeptical that maybe the package is just wedged into the door for a unique perspective that simply makes it look like it’s been thrown, well, the same Reddit user shared this video to support his claim.

Thrown packages are a frequent problem that has gained attention from the rise of home security cameras, with plenty of drivers caught on tape doing their best tosses.

There’s even a whole new subreddit devoted to some of these more unique deliveries. 

Then there’s this beauty. 

Sadly, not all deliveries can be punctuated with adorable squirrel visitors and silly dances. 

If you spent anytime on the internet this holiday season, you likely saw friends and family sharing a photo matching their face with their celebrity look-alike. If they didn’t share the photo, it very likely was made publicly available anyway.

The app created by Popsugar has been inadvertently making the photos uploaded by its users publicly available via an unsecured web address where the pics were stored. 

TechCrunch the data leak on Monday when it noticed an Amazon Web Services storage bucket URL in the source code of the Popsugar Twinning web app. A real-time photo stream of users uploading pics to the app was viewable when opening the AWS address in a web browser. 

Popsugar has since closed the photo leak. In an email to Techcrunch, Popsugar’s VP of engineering Mike Patnode explained that “the bucket permissions weren’t set up correctly” on the app.

While the permissions issue has now been fixed on Popsugar’s end of things, many of the photos that were uploaded — shared by its users or not — are on Google image search.

The Twinning app by Popsugar was in February of this year. It recently went viral again these in December. Twinning allows users to snap a photo within the web app or upload a pic from their computer. The app then matches users with their celebrity twin and provides a shareable side-by-side image.

If you used the Twinning app and were unhappy with the photo you took or the celebrity look-alike you were matched with, you may have chosen to keep the results private. Popsugar may have accidentally made your image public anyway.

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Even our vocabulary needs a fresh start for 2019.

This has been a rough year in so many ways, even for the words we use — and particularly for those that President Donald Trump is constantly tweeting out. That’s why one group is proposing we ban the word “collusion.” 

Lake Superior State University has unveiled the 44th edition of their annual “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness” and while it’s heavy on cliches, it also features plenty of Trump-related phrases. 

The biggest one here is “collusion” which, okay, I can get with that. We hear it so much thanks to the ongoing Robert Mueller-led investigation into potential, well, collusion, between Russia and the Trump campaign in the lead-up to the 2016 election that it’s become almost white noise. The one caveat, given the context: it’s a damn serious charge and maybe we should wait for the final outcome before banishing it. 

Unless we’re talking about in Trump’s tweets in which case burn it with fire. 

Either way, you’re still going to hear it an awful lot as the investigation continues onward. Just as you’ll hear the abbreviated “-OTUS” words used as shorthand for the president, first lady, and Supreme Court (POTUS, FLOTUS, SCOTUS). 

The list was curated from submissions made via the school’s website and Facebook, narrowed down to a tidy 18 examples. Among some of the non-Trump and non-politics choices include:

The school’s list includes people’s comments about why they thought the word should be banned, so if you disagree with anything on the list, now you know who to grapple with on the platform of your choice while you try to wrap your head around the optics of eschewing words that are in your wheelhouse.