Welcome to 2026 – No Time to Slow Down
Human History is ploughing on; this is not the time to slow down. Never before has progress been faster and despite all the doom and gloom, if you look at things properly, never before in human history have things been better. We all eat, most people have a roof over their heads and for anyone in any walk of life anywhere on the planet, there are the elements of a support network or system.
We might feel like things are tougher, but are they? Access to travel, hobbies and sporting activities has never been greater. Our children generally have a better education, see more than we ever did and want more from the world than ever before.
We can really follow this theme and dig even deeper; never before in human history have so few died from a violent death, neither war nor crime. Sadly, more people commit suicide than are killed.
The Happy Factor
As we move forward, we’ve come to realise that potentially money isn’t everything and money doesn’t necessarily bring happiness; our health, family, community and pets are more likely to dictate our happiness. As a result, we’ve seen a huge leap in attempts to measure happiness, with happiness indices springing up around the world.
The trouble with trying to measure happiness is that it is somewhat circumstantial; are we truly saying the Romans were less happy or some medieval peasants couldn’t be happy? How can we possibly tell if we’re happier than the Greeks or some tribe in the jungle? We can’t.
But that’s not stopping humans from trying.
Where are we going
I started by suggesting there is no time for slowing down, and that is the truth of it, whether it’s an argument about space travel or just trying to make your business better, it’s constant pressure to move forward.
I’m trying to think what is causing it, the human curiosity factor, the desire to problem solve. We talk about AI stealing all our jobs, yet we’re totally unwilling to go back to manual labour on a farm to produce food. Just what do people want?
As we hurtle forward, we have to take a small leaf out of Buddhism and just take a step back every now and again and accept things, in particular, we have to accept the progress. Accept the change. Because only then can we see the benefits. I often think it must be so difficult for a new business to start today and now, but actually, it should be easier than ever. If there is a problem that needs solving, there is probably a market of customers that will buy into it.
Our own Example
Reflecting a little on the last year, as we all do every year, I can look back and say two things: a lot has been the same and equally a lot has changed. One feels coming into work each day, dealing with email, dealing with customer requirements, it is all the same. In reality, though, we’re using WhatsApp and other newer tools for communicating with clients, we’ve built some of our biggest websites to date (in an age where one might think websites were starting to be redundant) and we have invested in a CRM management tool.
For any business, fairly major shakes, some involved a lot of data, some of these things were big issues and none mentioned the ongoing weekly or daily tasks, jobs and requests we ahev had to keep up with. NCompass is definitely a growing business, but we’ve hardly noticed.
Even right now, writing this article, I am thinking of the changes coming for the next year, a new Website, a Newsletter (which I would love to do), and more embracing of AI to perhaps more truly understand what it is all about. We have plans.
No Time to Slow Down
With all that in mind, this is not the time to slow down and we’ve no intention of doing so. But I am imagining that we’re all the same on this score. Certainly, anyone reading this blog, and I appreciate it may not be many, will by default not be thinking of slowing down. If you produced 6 songs last year, this year it will probably be 8. There’s no stopping.
And that is largely a good thing; we’re solving problems all the time and that means, despite feeling as if things are getting worse, when we look back, that won’t quite be true. Things are getting better all the time. And the really nice thing about this is that they are getting better for everyone at the same time.
I’ve no idea where we will be next year – but it certainly won’t be in the same spot.