Groundhog Day Resolutions 2026 Kickoff Part II: Big Questions

⊕ show captionThere is a lot of emotional regulation burden that I manage every day. Some days it’s overwhelming. But we persevere! This picture of my VW buried by a recent snowstorm is a good metaphor for that.

Continuing from The 2026 Groundhog Day February Kickoff

Welcome back to the continuation of my strategic planning for 2026! The plan is to wrap it up by February 14 as a valentine to future self 💞

Recapping February through July

I had ended 2025 with what I called Act 4: Massive Career and Personal Goal Changes from August through December. The positive outcome was that I regained confidence in my ability to design and share my own ideas online with updated tools. Before that, I wasn’t sure just how rusty I was.

Despite the success of Act 4, doubts remained.

In hindsight, 2025 was a year split into two separate explorations. Acts 1-3 were about developing understanding as my freelance contracts expired. Act 4 is a sudden shift to execution on my design business. As Act 4 was the last thing I remember, I naturally remember 2025 as ending with success. The first three acts of the year, though, should be examined as a separate concern.

Here are the three acts from the start of the year, before the big switch to execution in Act 4:

1. Testing “Values-First Productivity”
2. Defining “Sentiment-First Communication”
3. Reconciling Cognitive Differences

Each Act answers a big question that is only clear to me now. I’ll summarize what the questions were and how my understanding developed.

Revisiting Act 1: Values-First Productivity

I had started with the question whether a values-first approach to productivity was a better fit for me than what is commonly assumed with goal setting, with the “values” being authenticity, transparency, and curiosity as the drivers of both my work and daily interaction with others.

EVALUATION

My feeling is yes, it felt much better because I was not trying to twist my sense of “what’s right” to fit other people’s ideas. However, that doesn’t make the need to make a living go away. Finding a happy balance between my values and other people’s values occupied much of my time through July.

Revisiting Act 2: Sentiment-First Communication

There were several stressing events that gave rise to Act 2:

• Managing pre-trip anxiety from a month-long family trip to Taiwan as a transgender person who can’t speak or read the native language
• An unexpected and surprising breakdown of communication with a respected acquaintance

The way I coped was to create a new set of guidelines that recognized that a lot of human communication is about expressing sentiment, not dataThe working hypothesis can be found at Sri’s Theory of Sentiment-first Communication. And this hypothesis led directly to a re-evaluation of my cognitive differences as a neurodivergent person that communicates by sharing data first so other people can make their own conclusionsTo illustrate the difference, consider the casual greeting, “how are you?” when you meet an acquaintance. I, like many other neurodivergent people, will actually try to tell you what is going on in my life (data-first). The desired response is really just to acknowledge your social familiarity in a friendly way (sentiment-first). It took me decades to learn to hold in my data-first response and just say, “I’m fine!”. Emotional good will was already assumed to be present, but sentiment-first communication needs to include it explicitly to maintain positive connection.

EVALUATION

As someone with autistic traits, I seem to lack sensitivity to social conventions. Like many neurodivergent-identifying people, social conventions seem arbitrary and poorly documented. It had never occurred to me that people talk to each other to primarily express positive sentiment rather than explore data relationships. Recognizing that I was communicating with a different intent is helping me play nicer with others!

Revisiting Act 3: Reconciling Cognitive Differences

Despite coming up with these mechanisms, I felt a lingering unease. I found myself becoming more sensitive to events involving rejection or failure to make connection that became a severe depressive spiral.

To get out of it, I applied my usual overthink then simplify process, weighing observable habits against strongly-felt emotion. While I didn’t blame myself for the unpleasant events, I did hammer on my “failures” and “ignorance” from different parts of my life without mercy, looking for patterns.

EVALUATION

I think that the core of my depressive cycles can be described as two unresolved core feelings:

• suppressed anger over social barriers caused by cognitive differences with others, and having to twist myself into knots to accomodate those differences.
• persistent anxiety about these barriers is a major cause of feeling rejection, which has led to me chasing independence and demonstrable competence to be seen as having high market value.

I would very much like to not feel like that anymore. What is the solution?

Even Bigger Questions

After reviewing the four acts, I think there are two big questions that I have to ask myself.

There is a lot of lived experience that seems to support this.

• I haven’t been particularly successful in implementing what I think is possible, and I am constantly fighting myself to do the mundane work that others seem to tackle without complaint. I have 19 years of Groundhog Day Resolutions tracking that document this. It is a damning longitudinal data set.
• I have been struggling with issues of identity to figure out “where I fit”, burning thousands of hours over my lifetime to understand myself and others. There have been a few bright moments of feeling camaraderie, lucky coincidences of time and locality with people who became committed project partners. Without the company of others, I have floundered with small moments of success, but it has felt fleeting and inconsequential.

EVALUATION

I don’t know if I have answers to these bigger questions today, or if I will have them in the future. But I do feel a desire to overcome them. Groundhog Day Resolutions, while simply being a way to coordinate review dates in a memorable way, has been my committment to trying to solve these problems.

I might be stupid to keep fighting, having nothing tangible to show for it other than a lot of self-indulgent writing and a handful of digital tools. I don’t think I have a choice but to keep going.

Practical Concerns

I think it’s a given that I’ll be continuing to work on my design business. This is how I support myself as an independent adult that is willing to compete on a creative stage. The more signal I put out there, the more likely I’ll receive a response.

I also want to continue refining my understanding values-first productivity. This needs to be renamed, though, as it is more of a life philosophy than a productivity system. At best, “values-first productivity” is an indirect approach; by meeting my neurodivergent-flavored emotional regulation needs, I hope for improved productivity as a natural byproduct.

EVALUATION

Heck, why not? The alternative is to join the hellish AI-choked job market without a history of recent corporate work history. I think there is more value to be gained by developing my skills/products as a portfolio building exercise.

That said, I should keep my eyes open for opportunities and become familiar with the current recruiting landscape as a last course of action.

I think I’ve outlined my main concerns for 2026. By answering questions, I hope to improve my sense of well-being that will support the continuing initiatives.

In the last part of this kickoff, I’ll try to put all my musings into an actual plan!

INDEX of GHDR 2026 POSTS