Pressing Start Yet Again

After 2025’s critical errors, 2026 is a year to reboot

I’m normally one of those people who make New Year’s resolutions. This year, though, my annual reflection and goal-setting practice was interrupted by a message from my year-old laptop: Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart.

That message led to three days of troubleshooting: cold restarts, checking event logs for errors in Safe Mode, Googling hallucinogenic AI answers, calling my brother-in-law for help, and even searching through my pile of old laptops to see if any could be resurrected.

It reminded me of my working years, when I frequently had to outsmart technology to update websites and send out email newsletters. Sometimes there was an IT person to help, but many times there was not. It was just me, with my determination and ability to suffer adversity.

Like most of us, I hate it when things aren’t working. Plus, living up here in Canada in the middle of winter, my computer is my lifeline to keep in touch with friends, my writing group, make progress on all my writing projects, and during the long evenings, binge-watch Netflix.

Being without a working computer for several days filled me with anxiety. It also made me reflect on my technology dependence. I could have dug into Margaret Atwood’s 580-page memoir (a Christmas gift) and resorted to writing in longhand, but I wanted to go forward, not back.

Yesterday, as the errors on my failing laptop mounted, I took it to the Geek Squad at Best Buy. When the technician told me it was probably a failing motherboard that would take more than a week (and hundreds of dollars) to fix, I just bought another laptop. A day later, it’s all set up—and though I lost some files and am still miffed that computers these days have such a short lifespan—harmony has thankfully been restored.

It seems like a metaphor for something—I’m not sure what. Maybe it’s that things can be counted on to sometimes break—relationships, political systems, ideas about democracy. Maybe it’s that we have to suffer as we seek solutions—find new trading partners, new elected officials, new political ideas. Maybe it’s that there’s always a solution. And that we can’t lose hope of harmony being restored.

Personally, 2025 was fairly uneventful for me. Most of the year’s chaos happened in the external realm. A year ago, you know who threatened to annex Canada and enacted tariffs intended to bring Canada to its knees. Canadians elected a new prime minister, boycotted US products, and a year later, we’re still here.

As we all know, the political chaos wasn’t restricted to Canada. War has sort of ended in the Middle East, but continues in Ukraine and Sudan. The geopolitical map has been redrawn, with Europe now worried about Russian incursions. The US has blown up Venezuelan boats and seized oil tankers to pressure President Nicola Maduro to step down.

Oh yeah, and the Arctic is warming four times as fast as other places and extreme weather events (the Texas floods, the LA fires, the Midwest tornadoes, the Jamaican hurricane) continue to cause catastrophic damage. Reminding me of the messages on my laptop: Preparing auto repair, attempting repairs, and finally, your device could not be repaired.

The world’s current state is a lot to process, so it’s no surprise if error codes are popping up (depression, exhaustion, overwhelm). It’s been a rough year for many (people whisked off to detention centers by ICE, families afraid to leave their homes, universities and scientific researchers and media all under threat).

If I can continue my fragmented metaphor, the new year is like a new laptop. An opportunity to start fresh. Keep those files organized and not forget to back them up. Rebooting hope and determination and faith by pressing the Start button yet again.

For the first time ever, I bought the extended warranty on my new laptop. And for the new year, I’m making a pot of lentils. They’re supposed to bring good luck.