What Keeps Us Going

By the end of the year, many of us feel exhausted by the news. So we asked the staff members of Times Opinion to share how they escaped it all this year. These are the habits we started, the ones we quit, the culture that brought comfort and the internet memes that made us laugh so hard that we momentarily achieved a state of Zen. This is what we’ll carry with us as we turn the page to 2025.

We’re highlighting a few in today’s newsletter. Read the rest here.

Phone a friend
My oldest friend and I do synchronized viewing of each new episode of the show “Shrinking” (which follows a rogue therapist and his patients) and text commentary and our fave quotes back and forth. We definitely want our own Derek. (IYKYK.) —Michelle Cottle, writer

Night-night at the museum
If my mind is too busy to sleep at night, I turn on the Met’s YouTube art lectures — the longer the better. The videos’ tone is soothing, and the content helps me connect with something beautiful and interesting from another time or place. Once my mind is immersed in, say, Greek vase paintings, I’m out like a light. —Jessia Ma, deputy editor of design

You are getting very sleepy
I have learned to relax the tiny muscles around my eyes. I visualize the muscles and gently tell them to let go, one by one. They do! And then I feel a deep calm. It’s a great way to go back to sleep at night. —Peter Coy, writer

Wake and bake
This year, as ever, I found distraction and refuge in the stalwart comforts of “The Great British Baking Show.” It won’t be lost on future cultural historians that a decade of unceasing global tumult coincided with the sturdy popularity of a TV series about a bunch of collegial normies in a tent in the English countryside, seemingly far from society, being nice to one another and baking pies. —Adam Sternbergh, culture editor