There’s a particular species of well-meaning interpersonal pablum – a kind of linguistic airbag – that has been growing increasingly common since the Covidiots started demanding everybody wear masks all the time.  It’s a verbal plague – a contagion of concern-trolling that has somehow become the default sign-off for every human interaction – that really descends upon you the moment the calendar even thinks about flipping to a new year.  It arrives in texts, in emails, in the brittle small talk of relatives who haven’t had an unsupervised thought since the Obama administration.  “Stay safe,” they chirp, from the checkout clerk to your own mother, their faces arranged in masks of earnest, suffocating care.  “Have a safe New Year.”  “Be safe out there.”

And I find myself, with a frequency that is becoming frankly alarming, wanting to grab them by their responsibly-sourced lapels and scream, “No.  Absolutely not.”  My goal is not safety.  My primary directive is not the careful preservation of this mortal coil in a hermetically sealed container until its warranty expires.  What, precisely, is the grand prize for accumulating the most days lived without a single scratch, a solitary misstep, a glorious and ill-advised leap into the unknown?  A slightly longer stay in a little room, waiting for the Jell-O cup?

Because here’s the thing nobody seems to want to admit in polite society: safety is boring.  Safety is the beige carpeting of human aspiration.  Safety is the spiritual equivalent of lukewarm tap water.  Safety is the bureaucratic memo stapled to the front of your soul reminding you to please refrain from doing anything interesting, alarming, or remotely alive.

This relentless, wallpaper-thin mantra of safety is a uniquely modern sickness and demonstrative of the wristslittingly depressing pussification of the entire culture.  It’s a linguistic anesthetic designed to numb us to the glorious, terrifying, and fundamentally unsafe business of being alive.  Every jagged edge of existence must be sanded down.  Every exhilarating risk must be mitigated into a spreadsheet of predictable outcomes.  We are encouraged, no, commanded, to wrap ourselves in bubble wrap and float gently down the river of life, avoiding all the sharp rocks and thrilling rapids where the actual living happens.

And yet, this holiday season, I was bludgeoned – rhetorically, repeatedly, and with the kind of  passive-aggressive cheer that should be classified as a misdemeanor – by people insisting I have a safe New Year.  As if the highest imaginable human achievement is to tiptoe through the next twelve months like a Victorian governess afraid of scuffing the parquet.

Well, fuck that.

I don’t want a safe New Year.  I don’t even want a safe Tuesday.  I don’t want a safe anything.  I want a year with teeth.  A year that lunges.  A year that leaves claw marks on the drywall.

The entire reason I do the so-called “unsafe” things I do –  the impulsive road trips to failed narco-states, the all-night creative benders, the questionable home-improvement experiments, the general refusal to live like a laminated instruction manual – is precisely because they’re unsafe.  Because they remind me that I’m not a domesticated appliance humming obediently in the corner.  Because they jolt the nervous system awake in a world that keeps trying to sedate it with ergonomic chairs and HR-approved slogans.  The entire point of doing anything worthwhile involves a calculated, and sometime not-so-calculated, dance with disaster.  The best stories don’t begin with “So, I conducted a thorough risk assessment.”  They begin with a bad idea, a shot of questionable liquor, and a magnificent disregard for the probable consequences.  They are forged in the fires of imprudence.  I don’t know about you, dear reader, but the memorable moments – the ones that flash behind your eyes when you’re horizontal with a tube in your nose at The End – are not the times you successfully followed the safety instructions.  They are the moments you threw the manual into the fire and Went For It.

The very concept of a “safe New Year” is an oxymoron of the rankest vintage.  A new year should be a wild, untamed frontier, a 365-day stretch of pure, chaotic potential.  It should be a minefield of opportunity and beautiful mistakes.  It should be dangerous.  It should be something you survive, not something you merely endure.

I think 2026 is going to be amazing – but only for the people who understand that “amazing” and “safe” rarely occupy the same sentence without one of them choking the other to death.

So here’s my counter-blessing, my anti-benediction, my heretical toast to the coming year:
May your 2026 be dangerous.
May it be unruly, ungovernable, and uninsurable.
May it terrify the people who think “safety” is the apex of human ambition.
May it leave you breathless, scraped, exhilarated, and unmistakably alive.
May it violently reject the soft, padded prison of a life lived in perpetual caution.
And if someone tries to tell you to stay safe, smile politely, nod once, and then go do something that would make them clutch their pearls so hard they leave dents.
Because safety is for appliances.
Danger is for humans.
And I intend to live like one.
I’ll take being alive.

N.P.: “In the Hall of the Mountain King” – Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross