Flasz On Film

You get out of bed, shuffle along to the bathroom and look in the mirror. “New year, new me,” you mutter to yourself exactly as you did the year before. What’s changed? What have you achieved? How is 2026 going to be different than any of the previous years? And if it is going to be different, how much of this potentially forthcoming change lies within your control?

I sat down on New Year’s Day and opened my journal with a desire to write down some measurable outcomes I wanted to achieve in 2026. I wrote for a little bit—mostly guided by the spirit of Joan Didion who wrote entirely for the purpose of figuring out what she was thinking in the first place—and then I looked at what I produced.

Look, I’m not going to tell you right now what this was. Not the time or the place. But what I understood was that planning for outcomes for the most part is indistinguishable from setting yourself up for failure. I didn’t erase what I wrote. I just started a new paragraph and continued. Instead of listing milestones I would like to hit in twelve months, I chose to outline the direction of travel, behaviors and commitments to attitude adjustments that would put me on a trajectory towards these milestones. If I hit them—great. If not—at least I might be on the right track. I remembered that humans are terrible at estimating over short distances and hence committing to unreasonably optimistic timelines plucked out of thin air with little to no data to back them up is an adult equivalent of writing a letter to Santa in which you express your desire to get a pony. Forget that you live in an apartment or that your parents could not afford one. But you want a pony and hence on Christmas day you will be perfectly set up for disappointment.

Personally speaking, 2025 was a tough year for me. A lot has happened and in many ways my life has been flipped upside down in ways I never saw coming. Happens. Therefore, what I ended up committing to was not a set of outcomes and metrics I could use to guide my way out of this unforeseen dip, but rather a collection of personalized commandments guiding my attitude and geared towards ensuring discipline, perseverance and positivity of spirit. That’s what I can control. Behaviors influence mindset, not the other way round.

Therefore, when my mind shifted towards thinking about my future as a writer and the future of this place as well, I immediately recognized what I put in the title of this text—the futility of planning for growth.

This year I published my 500th piece here and in an act of introspective analysis I surmised that if you swing the axe for long enough, you will become a lumberjack in the process. You might not like it because you never saw yourself as one, but in the eyes of everyone who visits your place and sees you in the act of chopping wood with a combo of proficiency and enthusiasm that is uniquely yours, they will assume that this is what you do and who you are. 2025 was, among many other things, the year when I made peace with the fact that I am a critic and an essayist. So, what is going to happen in 2026?

Short answer: I don’t know. In the past year this place grew much more than I ever expected. Looking at the number of site visits registered in December 2024 and last month, Flasz on Film grew seven-fold in the intervening year. In terms of yearly numbers, it has tripled its girth. It is still a very small place with niche exposure, but it makes me smile to think that progressively more people find my little corner of the Internet and spend a few seconds with the words I typed. But what’s next? Can I assume the same rate of growth would be sustained in 2026? Can I increase it? Do I want to, even? And… how would I do any of that?

This is where I had to remind myself that I have a choice here: I can either continue doing what I enjoy doing and just see where this journey takes me or attempt some half-baked guesswork, reverse-engineer what possibly made this place grow, and do more of that. But this is where the problem is. I’ll be perfectly honest here and tell you that nearly 40% of the web traffic to Flasz on Film is aimed at one specific article I wrote in 2024. And I don’t know why that is. I have no idea what made it special or if it sees so many visits only because it is visited ironically or accidentally. Someone with a business mindset would probably try to decode why a piece on adaptations of Children of the Corn could see this much traction and try to engineer another one or two such pieces to make sure that growth would accelerate. But I’m not going to do that.

First of all, I don’t have the first clue as to why this article continues to resonate or why another older piece of mine about Travis Bickle has picked up some traffic in recent weeks. I’m not going to SEO-optimize this website because that’s not how I write. And tomorrow, the traffic to that one article could just disappear. What then? Plan for that, mister business forecaster.

Therefore, I can’t plan for growth. It’s delusional to assume that if I quadruple my output and write four articles per day, perhaps of dubious quality, then this place will grow accordingly. Maybe I could actively seek out other writers to join me here and morph into an editor while this place becomes an indie publication of some sort. I could do that. In fact, if you have an article that you’d like to show me because you think it would fit as a guest essay, send me an email and I’ll read it. But I’m not making any promises. I don’t think I want to be an editor, though. I like to swing the axe more than I like commenting on how other people do that.

But the point I’m making is that everything I can possibly control simply pales in comparison with impact of completely unforeseen events. Just like most of my financial planning and investment strategy, which can be logical, sound and diversified, becomes completely irrelevant the minute Donald Trump does something stupid and tanks the market with one social media post. I can’t plan for celestial bodies hitting the ground in my vicinity or plan my future around unicorn events and bolts out of the blue. What I can do, however, is keep on keeping on. Write more and write consistently.

Sure, there are some things I can try to do this year that are different, but I’m going to keep them to myself for now. I don’t want to blab about stuff I’d like to do. I’d rather tell you about them when it’s all done or at least seriously underway.

Therefore, if you’re here because you like what I do, you can rest assured that you will be able to read more of my work in 2026. Feel free to subscribe and follow this place, if that’s your jam. Listen to my podcast, too. In the meantime, I’ll continue swinging the axe. After all, this is what lumberjacks do. And when I have something more to share, you will be the first to know.

With that, I think I’m done reflecting and planning and the time has come to head back out to the backyard and chop some wood. Well, maybe I’ll sharpen the axe first.