2026
Essay

The past months, and even more so in the final weeks of December – whenever you’d open social media of your choice – the world seemed and still seems to be consumed with forecasts for the year that’s just arrived. Horoscopes, ‘tarot readings’, ‘trend forecasts’ and the like – are inundating our fields of view at the speeds that none of us can really keep up with. The old hopeless bibliomaniac that I am, having just come back from the refreshing cold embrace of the January air outside, this brought an idea to my mind. And, since I love sharing unsolicited thoughts, allow me to put this one into words for you as well.

These days, we live surrounded by forecasts, yet terribly starved of foresight. Among many reasons, I would highlight the decline in critical thinking skills as one of the major culpable parties, however another supporting character in this crime novel is the fragmentation of knowledge and the microview of the world that many of us possess.

Each day arrives with its own alerts, newsletters, and algorithmically sliced predictions, none of which survive long enough to become memory, and thus - to be acted upon. You can ‘claim your destiny’, save the post or screenshot a part of it, but in reality – the moment we do that, it has already been buried under the dunes of time. Once ceremonial, thoughts about the future now arrive in shards – endlessly updated, instantly obsolete and devoid of ritual or better say – devoid of flesh and bone.

Now, the question that I asked myself, and one that feels anachronistic as many of my reflections are – shall we bring the almanac back?

As always, in order to continue this thought, let us lay down some context. Historically, before prediction became a continuous digital feed tag, it was a seasonal event, and what marked such events were the annually published almanacs, a compendium combining calendars, astronomical data, seasonal guidance, practical advice, and short prognostications, intended to be used throughout the year rather than for short-term consumption. I would argue that they were not simply disposable tools for knowing what would happen, but rather tangible objects that grounded our search for prognosis. Published annually and read repeatedly, they offered a compact world-view – part calendar, part instruction manual, part moral commentary.

Their longevity and authority were made possible by a relatively stable perception of time and causality, one in which the year itself functioned as a stand-alone unit of prediction. And of course,it is entirely normal that the contemporary predictions have a shorter expiration date. As acknowledged in the beginning, the world we inhabit now is much more fragmented and moves at a velocity fundamentally different from that of the one in times of traditional New Year prognostications; political, technological, and social conditions mutate far too quickly for a year-long certainty of any type to hold.

Moreover, the authority of almanacs did not lie in accuracy alone, but in their stillness. They slowed the reader down to the scale of the year, something that many of us today might benefit from as well. What would be wonderful to change (at the very least for the sake of simple human entertainment), is to finally create something that is designed to remain.

Of course, we can but we shouldn’t indulge in the mystical side of what an Almanac was, least we are looking to give ground to figures such as Nostradamus, often remembered as one of the enigmatic yet highly problematic prophets. What should interest us the most, is treating Almanacs as large tangible collections of critical (and not) thoughts and analysis on a variety of subjects that might be pertinent to the year ahead in the light of the year that is about to pass. An object that covers topics from political predictions to horoscopes, from literary trends in publishing market to cultural critique, from film to developments in physics, from music to the most recent Nobel Prize in medicine and how that can change the future of auto-immune disease. An object that feels human, just like us, of flesh and bone, one that brings a macro, outlining view of the world we leave behind and of that which we enter on the 1st of each year.

Such an almanac will not be discarded in a week, it will demand a return. It will sit on a shelf or table, accumulating annotations, stains, dust and folded corners – a record of a year actually lived and a source of unexpected knowledge for some, either contemporary or in the future. Its authority will grow through scale, not novelty. In this sense, almanacs will be as before, less about predicting the future and much more about subtly training attention: teaching its readers to notice patterns, cycles, and consequences.

An Almanac of today need not aim at creating deeper or better meaning at all. Instead, it could re-emerge as something tangible: an aesthetic and cultural object. To be conscious of our society, we might even imagine almanacs produced not annually, but biannually – aligned with the winter and summer solstices for symbolics’ sake – more modest in scope, limited in ‘mystical’ ambition, yet anchored in seasonal transition. Such objects, I wish to believe, would not promise fortune telling, but grounded foresight and presence. The result would not be a better prediction, but a renewed relationship with our time and scale of our civilization, as something we still occasionally choose to mark, hold, and return to.

Now, with my cup of tea slowly cooling and a blanket slipping from one of my shoulders, I will attempt to structure a possible system for this body of knowledge. I genuinely believe this could be an interesting – one among many – response to the de-intellectualisation of our collectives, one that might even restore a sense of wonder to the unsuspecting, and a sense of meaning to those who choose to participate in its creation and dissemination. The only question that remains is this: would we all be curious enough to indulge in it?


Image to the left: Henry IV, part 2; What says the almanac to that Act II Scene IV (1900), Byam Shaw (English, 1872 - 1919)