Can we predict what 2026 will bring?

There's a lull built in between Christmas and New Year's. It's a week of suspended time, in a way: The rush and anticipation of Christmas is over, but most of us are still awaiting the next major holiday, just a few days away, before we get serious about clearing away the remnants of the season. If you are like the people living in my house, we mark the In-Between Times of no school and adjusted work schedules with contemplating our recent bad decisions (overindulging in food, sweets and eggnog like it's our job) and the soon-to-be decisions: our diet starts tomorrow. It's a fitting activity for the theme of the last week of the year, when we dart from nostalgia and memory-making on the 25th to contemplating resolutions and do-overs on the 1st. I'm certain the practice of trying to predict what might happen in the coming year started right along with the custom of recognizing Jan. 1 as the beginning of the new calendar year. No matter how advanced our cultures, I think we as a species are still lured in by prognostication. We want to know what's coming, whether it's to brace ourselves or to find something worth looking forward to. Security and hope are as vital to our humanity as food and water to our bodies. It can make good business practice to see what experts in the field say will come this year. According to my research, industry experts across many fields predict the hype about artificial intelligence — AI, or, if you're the head of the U.S. Department of Education, "A-one," as in the steak sauce — will temper, and its practical applications will be further explored. This will register little, perhaps, for those of us still struggling with our smartphone's latest update that shuffled our apps around. But I do wonder at other forecasters, who predict interest in "analog" hobbies — such as an upswing in musicians playing guitar while synthesized electronic music wanes in popularity — will return. In this house, my teen asked for two Christmas gifts: a Zippo lighter and a gaming system that was discontinued more than a decade ago. That's as close to "analog" as it gets, in teen years. The predictions for the coming year are not very comforting. Most predict Americans will still be grabbed by the wallet in an economy upended by job losses, inflation, rising costs of food, rent and utilities, and nonsensical tariff wars. On top of that, healthcare for millions is expected to end and costs for millions of others are expected to soar. These predictions are, well, pretty predictable for anyone paying attention. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, as Bob Dylan said, and so I turned my eye to less-concrete sources. Numerologists tell us 2026 will be marked by new beginnings — maybe not such radical thought for a new year — powered by its designation as a "Universal Year 1." Such a year will favor bold new leadership and fresh starts, they say. Astrologists, on the other hand, predict profound shifts coming. Planetary alignments that haven't happened since the Civil War and eclipses sparking change on the karmic scale sort of things. Even a casual read of various horoscopes for the coming year suggests, breathlessly, sweeping changes with global indications, if you believe. But those two worlds — economic leaders and astrologists — have historically overlapped when it comes to fortune telling, though economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said "the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." More than 100 years ago, celebrity astrologist Evangeline Adams maintained a luxury suite in Carnegie Hall, holding office hours with her well-heeled clients that reportedly included presidents of the New York Stock Exchange, King Edward VII of Britain and J.P. Morgan. Adams, coincidentally, claimed she predicted the catastrophic stock market crash on New Year's Eve 1928 — although, to be fair, she also said the stock market should "climb to heaven" just weeks before it crashed in 1929. Adams also predicted, in 1931, that the U.S. would be at war by 1942 and the next year she canceled her 21-night lecture tour after predicting her own death in 1933. She was both popular and regarded as a quack in her lifetime, but she was accurate about her death. At a New Year's party in 1909, Mark Twain famously made a startling prediction. "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year and I expect to go out with it," the author reportedly said. The comet returned that year as expected, and reached its closest point to the sun on April 20, 1910. The next day, Twain died of a heart attack. In the fall of 1960, Time Magazine published an article about a different sort of prediction, this one based on scholarly equations. Physicist Heinz von Foerster of the University of Illinois predicted that if the world continued on its predictable path of developing technology to yield unlimited food supplies and continuing its ever-increasing birth rate, that we were fast on the heels of a looming doomsday when we will reach over-population. According to him, that "doomsday" is when the "clever population annihilates itself. Our great-grandchildren will not starve. They will be squeezed to death." That date, according to his math? Nov. 13, 2026. I tend to think, like Von Foerster acknowledged, that much of our "destiny" cannot be graphed and charted out ahead of time. Time and chance play a part, but often our destination is predicted more on the direction we walk. I hope we all can choose a brighter path in 2026. Contact Chronicle-Telegram columnist Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.