At the end of the year, we make the same promises: to be healthier, more active, more patient, more productive, more present. The problem is that we usually don’t achieve everything in the first few weeks; Carnival arrives and resolutions fall apart. The literature on well-being suggests a much less heroic strategy: instead of trying to reform your entire life, choose one change at a time and stick with it until it becomes routine.
If the question is where to start, what I propose for 2026 is to look at the way we use our time and attention. Hunt Allcott and colleagues tracked nearly 3,000 Facebook users and randomly selected half to deactivate their accounts for four weeks, while the rest carried on as usual. At the end of the month, those who left the network reported higher well-being, and more time with friends and family outside of the screen, in addition to reducing their use of Facebook even after the experiment. The treatment group knew a little less about the factual details of the election, but they were also less politically polarized and said they had better humor. The income, the city and the job were the same; What changed was just a part of the exposure to the feed.
Matthew Killingsworth, with an app that asked people several times a day how they felt, found another piece of history. In the group of more than 30 thousand North Americans, experiential well-being continued to increase with the logarithm of income throughout the observed range, including well above the number that is usually circulated as the “happiness ceiling”; There was no clear plateau above US$75,000 per year.
In parallel, Andrew Jebb and co-authors, using data from 1.7 million people in 164 countries, estimated “satiety” points of around US$60,000 to US$75,000 annually for emotional well-being and around US$95,000 for general life evaluation. After these levels, much lower returns, especially in richer countries. Taken together, these results suggest that money remains important, especially for those who have not yet achieved basic comfort, but that the happiness of each extra dollar shrinks significantly after a certain level.
For a large part of the urban middle class who can already pay bills, eat out occasionally and plan vacations, the problem is no longer just income and becomes the daily life that this income is financing. The jump between one and two minimum wages is huge, but between 20 and 21, not so much. The next promotion is unlikely to have the same emotional impact as the first signed contract or the first rent out of the parents’ house. If the salary already guarantees the basics and a little more, how many hours go to commuting, how many to short videos, how many to relationships or rest.
Allcott’s experiment shows that removing a single app from our routine already produces a measurable difference in our mood and the way we engage with news and politics. Disconnection here doesn’t have to be a radical gesture of throwing away your cell phone. , but also less emotional involvement with the news cycle, less habit of opening the portal every half hour, less willingness to get into every fight of the day.
In December, I ran a home version of this experiment, working normally but treating the column as a break from the news cycle. Instead of commenting on using some political crisis as a hook, I wrote about gifts, literature, family fights and practical uses of evidence. By adjusting time and attention, even with everything else constant, the experience of the day changed. One hour less of networking or emotional engagement with the news tends to turn into an hour more of sleep, conversation, reading or leisure, and this weighs more on happiness than adding .
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