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What Are Your Pop Culture Resolutions for 2025?

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Miscellaneous | January 3, 2025 |

Andrew Garfield Criterion YouTube.jpg
Header Image Source: YouTube // Criterion

A new year has finally arrived. We’re 25 years into this century. It’s a quarter over. The passage of time makes fools of us all. Nobody is safe from its icy ambivalence. So, we might as well make some resolutions that we kinda plan to fulfill, right?

Every year, I make my resolutions list and put it in the front of my diary so that I can be endlessly reminded of it. Amid the usual plans to fix my life, I make some pop culture-related plans, some fun goals that are usually easier to complete than anything of real importance but still make me feel like I accomplished something major. When it’s your job to cover pop culture, it’s easy to lose some of your initial joy in the material or let art for the sake of pure self-satisfaction fall by the wayside in favour of stuff I can use for work. I also just like setting myself goals. It’s nice to try new things, although I must admit that my plans for 2025 are a little more modest than previous years and their grand plans. So, please join me in setting some fun pop culture resolutions. It’ll be far easier than keeping up your gym membership or Veganuary, I swear.

Slow down with reading and try more challenging books

Typically, I set my annual Goodreads goal at 100 books a year. I’m a fast reader, and it’s one of the few things I always have the energy to do, so it’s usually a goal I can achieve with no issues. I finished last year with over 100 books done, but it didn’t feel as satisfying as it used to. I felt far more rushed with that lofty goal than I used to, and it felt more like homework than my favourite hobby for big chunks of the year. It sort of defeated the purpose of doing something for the sake of it, and when that Goodreads notification let me know how many books I was behind with my target, I’d get panicky and turn to novellas or manga to pad up the numbers. I enjoyed a lot of great novellas and manga in 2024 (Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys was probably my favourite thing I read all year), but still, I knew something needed to change.

So, my goal for this year is a book a week — still ambitious but far less of a race — and to focus on some longer, more challenging, and older books. Over the Christmas break, I read Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and was completely bowled over by it. What a phenomenal novel. It was a true pleasure to take my time with this one and soak in the language rather than give into my addled brain’s urge to skim. Nobody’s forcing me to read. There are no professors waiting on my opinion. Why not just slow down? Frankly, I need more of that energy in my life. 2025 will hopefully see me taking on some of those books I long put off reading because I was too concerned about a Goodreads goal. My first book of the year? Persuasion by Jane Austen.

Watch all of the unwatched DVDs I’ve bought over the years and neglected

I own a lot of DVDs and Blu-rays. I’m a firm believer in the value of physical media in the digital age and heartily encourage people to invest in the hardware if they truly want to preserve and respect their favourite films. I’m also a bit lazy when it comes to watching some of the stuff I get. Look, have you tried to resist the pull of a Criterion sale? The current market of boutique and niche distributors means I have a lot of amazing, beautifully restored and packaged films that I just haven’t been able to force myself to sit down and give my full attention. My default viewing material is often stuff I’ve already watched over and over again. I hope to change that in 2025. I own too many amazing films to let them serve as nothing but dust collectors in my living room.

FINALLY go to the opera

Look, I’ve been trying to make this happen for years now. I even bought tickets to see Benjamin Britten’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2020, then this whole pandemic lockdown thing happened and it was never rescheduled (they didn’t reschedule the UK tour of Phantom of the Opera either, and I continue to take that very seriously.) Things kept getting in the way over the years, but I got to see Met Live productions at the cinema and some cool YouTube stuff, so I felt like my goal half-counted. But now, there’s no excuse. It’s 2025. I turn 35 in June. I live in a country with an acclaimed national opera company. I’m going to go to the opera. In person. In a fancy dress.