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Hellooooooo and Happy New Year, readers!

After two weeks of barely knowing what day it is, we’re back. It’s officially 2025, and what better way to kick off the new year than with a question for you fine folks:

What are your plans or goals for 2025, and how can I help you achieve them?

Seriously, please reply to this email and let me know. I want to help you achieve your goals this year, and I’m pulling out all the stops to make it happen. So shoot me a reply, and let’s chat.

For me, 2025 is all about putting myself in a better place mentally and emotionally. 2024 was chock-full of stress, anxieties, too much consideration about others’ opinions, and worrying about outcomes rather than enjoying the ride.

So it’s time to switch things up.

From actively putting myself in a better headspace when I’m feeling down to creating content that feels right to me, I have to make these shifts to retain my sanity and continue building my life in the right direction.

So, readers, while I’m not sure if I can ask for your help right this very second, I’m positive that I will need a hand at some point in 2025. It’s my hope that this year we can bring the entire Cmd+Shift+Create community closer together, and help to support each other as creatives, entrepreneurs, and like-minded individuals.

But enough of the sappy New Year sentiments, it’s time to get back to the juicy stuff: My rants.

-Luke

New Year Purge

I’m going to kick this off by saying I’ve never been a big New Year resolution kinda guy. While I enjoy the sentiment, I’ve never personally been the one to say, “This year, I’m going to change x, y, or z.” It’s never been as specific as that.

I usually take a more roundabout approach after reflecting and dissecting to understand how to improve my life more generally. Things like changing environments, swapping mentalities, or improving business are the big-picture things I like to think about.

But this year, I’m actively changing things up to try to reach one of my overarching goals of improving my mental health. This year, I’m doing a purge.

I guess I should have worded that better… I’m purging any negativity from my feeds. Ok, that verbiage feels better.

In recent months, I’ve found that negativity, or negative emotion-eliciting content, has completely taken over my feeds. Whether it’s people arguing with each other, a sad story, rage bait, or beyond, negative emotion-driven content is a poison to my timeline, and it’s messing with my mental health far more than I realized.

It’s no secret that algorithmic negativity drives views and views drive ad dollars for platforms. With things playing out this way, it completely makes sense that socials are ever increasingly pushing negative content. But negative content doesn’t have to be a constant on your feed if you don’t allow it.

This year, instead of straight up deleting socials like I have in the past, I’ve decided to fight back. My plan is simple: mute, unfollow, or block anything/anyone whose posts bring more harm than good into my life.

So on to the actual goal… This year, I’m trying to recreate the internet I knew as a kid. A space that inspires me to be more creative. A space that makes me interested and hungry to explore and learn. A space that uplifts me, or at the very least… doesn’t drag me down for more clicks and views.

While I’ve only been doing this for a few weeks, I’ve already noticed subtle but meaningful shifts. My feeds feel “quieter”, and with that, my mind genuinely feels more at ease. Through actively unfollowing or blocking anything that elicits negative emotion, I’m starting to see the things that bring me joy again start to fill my timeline. Things like friends’ successes, passionate creators exploring topics or hobbies that I love, and even just stupid and funny lighthearted moments that remind me the internet isn’t all doom and gloom.

I’m not saying all of this to sound like I’m going into hiding. There’s a difference between staying informed and letting a constant stream of negativity weigh you down, so I’m choosing to focus my energy on things I can control by surrounding myself with content that aligns with the mindset I want to carry into 2025.

But this shouldn’t be just about me.

I’m sure you’ve felt this feeling of negativity, too. Social media’s influence on our mental health is undeniable, and if you’ve put your phone down after a long doom scroll and felt tired, you might want to consider this as a sign to do a little purging of your own.

Although this may be a gonzo sentiment, if more of us curated our feeds to be more positive, inspiring, and empowering, the ripple effect could be immense—for us individually and for the broader online community. This shouldn’t be about ignoring reality or world news. It should be about reclaiming our headspace and our power to choose what we engage with rather than being spoon-fed Sweet Baby Ray’s flavored negativity by the Big Zucc.

The internet we engage with reflects the lives we live—or at least the lives the algorithm thinks we deserve. By curating a more uplifting digital space, it feels like I’m taking back a little bit of control from the algorithm. Maybe I’ll rediscover the internet as it once was: a weird, wonderful place where the biggest pieces of negativity lie in a passive-aggressive AIM-away message.

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Hope you enjoyed this week’s post. See you next week ✌️