Happy New Year
The calendar flipped. That was the clean part.
Everything else came with us — the noise, the backlog, the unresolved messes that never quite ended, they just lost their headline slot and waited to reappear. Political exhaustion isn’t something that suddenly arrived in 2025. It accumulated. Day by day. Alert by alert. Deadline by deadline.
Last year felt less like a sequence of events and more like one prolonged interruption.
2025 Was Loud Without Being Productive
Big things kept happening. Wars stayed on the screen. Domestic crises cycled through. The federal government shut down — not briefly, not hypothetically, but for more than forty days — and then reopened without fixing the mechanics that caused it. Life resumed, thinner.
That pattern showed up everywhere. Something breaks or stalls. Everyone argues about it. Nothing structural changes. We move on.
You could see it in how stories were covered and then dropped. Immigration is again framed as an emergency; there needs to be a change in our borders, but arresting people on Christmas? Court decisions are previewed months in advance. Congressional deadlines are treated like weather — inconvenient, but inevitable.
None of this felt shocking. That might be the most telling part.
Government That Mostly Didn’t Govern
United States Congress didn’t just posture in 2025 — it stopped working for more than forty days. The federal government shut down. Workers were furloughed, fired or told to show up unpaid. Agencies stalled. Permits froze. Courts slowed. Entire parts of the country just… waited.
When the shutdown ended, it didn’t come with reform or resolution. It ended the way these things do now — abruptly, begrudgingly, with the same funding mechanics left in place to fail again later.
The rest of the year followed that pattern. Hearings without outcomes. Statements without consequences. Temporary funding bills standing in for planning. Long-term problems managed just enough to avoid collapse, not enough to solve anything.
More than 50 members announced they’re leaving before the 2026 midterms. Not after a scandal. Not after voters weighed in. Just opting out early, while the institution was already stalled.
It didn’t feel dramatic. It felt procedural. As if the job itself had primarily become symbolic — a lot of motion, minimal traction.
Everything Costs More, Pay Doesn’t Grow
Inflation slowed on paper. Prices didn’t come back down in real life.
Groceries stayed expensive. Rent didn’t soften. Insurance, utilities, repairs — all locked in at higher levels. Wages hovered below the line where things start to feel manageable again.
The most tiring part wasn’t the cost itself. It was being told that the problem was exaggerated. Or misunderstood and or already solved. Affordability is framed as a perception issue rather than a math problem.
People noticed the gap. They always do.
Zero Compromise, By Design
Somewhere along the way, compromise stopped being treated as a tool and became a marker of failure. Agreement became suspicious. Concessions became liabilities. Getting part of what you want was reframed as losing.
That’s a strange turn for a system built on shared space. Most people don’t live that way day to day. You adjust. You take less than perfect. You meet people where they are because you expect them to do the same for you.
That’s not weakness. It’s how things keep moving.
In politics, though, that logic has been flipped. Any overlap is framed as betrayal. Any restraint as surrender. So nothing moves unless it can be branded as total victory.
Problems linger. Deadlines slip. Systems age in place.
The system still runs — it just doesn’t go anywhere.
The Constant Distraction Layer
One thing 2025 did exceptionally well was keep attention fragmented—cultural fights, political stunts, emergency framing — all competing, all urgent, all temporary.
This site has repeatedly circled this pattern: how everything is framed as existential while outcomes remain incremental or nonexistent, how noise fills the space where solutions should be. How outrage cycles burn energy faster than they build leverage.
The effect isn’t apathy. It’s fatigue. There’s a difference.
Carrying It Into 2026
We begin a new year already facing the next election cycle. The 2026 midterms are close enough to shape behavior, far enough away to excuse delay. Messaging ramps up. Compromise retreats further. Everyone positions. Few resolve.
Nothing about that promises relief.
Political exhaustion isn’t despair. It’s heavier than that. It’s waking up already braced. Already skeptical. Already conserving energy because experience says you’ll need it again soon.
January usually offers a pause.
This one offers no pause.
P.S. Today is the 107th anniversary of the passing of my great uncle, Malcolm MacLeod, as his transport ship back from World War 1 struck rocks in the Stornaway Harbor in Scotland. 205 men died as family members found their loved ones washed ashore. Click to Read More