Making Use of the New Year

New Year, New Mindset: From Planning Paralysis to Creative Action

Welcome to the M3 BearCast! Malcolm kicks off 2026 exploring his relationship with New Year's resolutions and why sometimes they actually work.

In this episode:

• Breaking through planning paralysis - How overthinking keeps us from starting and why action is the best teacher

• The M3 origin story - How a 2013 New Year's resolution launched this entire creative journey

• Social media satire struggles - Navigating misunderstood humor online and the challenges of posting authentic content

• Evolution of belief - Revisiting ideas from your twenties with fresh perspective and openness

• 2026 creative goals - Using AI tools for deeper self-reflection, maintaining consistent content creation, and diving into personal creative pursuits

Malcolm shares his commitment to regular posting, learning from limitations, and forgiving himself for past hesitation. If you've been sitting on an idea for months (or years!), this episode might be the push you need.

Support the show and get exclusive content! Join our Patreon community at patreon.com/mailmediamind for just $5/month. Access VIP Telegram groups, book club discussions, NSFW content, and exclusive after-shows from our live streams!

Peace!

Transcript

 Ep 85 Making Use of the New Year

Ep 85 Making Use of the New Year

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Speaker: :Hello, and welcome to the M three Bear Cast. My name is Malcolm Travers. Male Media Mind is a grassroots organization dedicated to uplifting and unifying our community through dialogue, insight, creativity, and knowledge. And on the M three Bear Cast, I discuss issues that deal with communication, relationships, spiritual ideas, philosophy, and mental health.

And I do that as well on my live streams on YouTube. But on this episode, I like to get into details that are not like the conversations that I have online. And so I welcome you to join our conversations. I'm live every Wednesday at 7:00 PM Eastern and Monday at 3:00 PM Eastern. And you know, we often take questions from our audience and it's a, a great time, but I like to.

Go in depth on the M three Bear cast and truly try to figure out why it is I pick the topics that I choose. And today I'm [00:01:00] talking about the new year, and my relationship to new Year's celebrations and resolutions. It is ironic that the male Medium Mind blog that I started in 2013 was itself a New Year's resolution.

It was a way to get me to write. I had built the blog sometime in October or November, towards the end of the year, and when the beginning of the year came around, I tried to convince myself that I could write a new blog post every day. And I was writing with a partner and we were gonna go back and forth writing a new post, and it was a great accelerator for my writing at the time.

I we were pushing each other to our limits and we held each other accountable. And used the new year as a launching off point. And so from that [00:02:00] point forward, I think I've had a different view on the New Year celebration and New Year's resolutions because in that one regard, it worked for me and it's still kind of working 'cause it launched, a creative endeavor that I'm still engaged in.

And so. I think why I think it works is that for me, and I think for a lot of other people, we use planning as a way to shelter our fra fragile egos. We have in our minds this idea that if we plan for enough, the implementation of it won't fall short of our expectations. Of our standards and that we don't want to try and fail if we haven't given sufficient planning and thought about how to implement it.

This is really just one of those coping mechanisms [00:03:00] to hide our vulnerability, and it is usually. Just a way to shelter our fragile egos. And I think a lot of times we know that to be the case when someone points it out, we probably know it on a deeper level, but until we've actually started acting towards our goals, we don't realize that the actions itself is oftentimes the classroom for learning how to do the thing that we want to do.

Trying to plan it in your head just by thinking about what it might go this way or that way is a pale imitation of reality. It is never going to actually turn out the way that you think about it in your head, and that could be for the good or the worse, right? It may turn out in some ways to be much better than you had planned.

[00:04:00] And oftentimes it is much worse than you've planned, and you have to make changes. You have to adapt, and you have to be flexible. And that can only come through action and acceptance of your limitations and holding fast to your beliefs and your values as you are tested by reality, right? Like if you.

Have a difficulty writing a certain passage in the way that you want to write it. The only way that you can find that out is if you actually attempt to write it and it doesn't turn out the way that you want. And when you're faced with the struggle of it not turning out the way that you want, is this something that you want to give up on or is it important enough for you to hold fast and actually learn what the problems of that are?

And you can't really focus your attention on the problem spots until you've actually [00:05:00] run into difficulties in the real world. And so I think that is my case for just going ahead and starting and trying. I will give you an example that I am doing this year, and that is my social media strategy. I have wanted to.

Be a regular content creator for a a a minute now. But my problem has been this, planning as paralyzation. You know, I want to. I have these ideas, but instead of instead of getting to

a prototype, I just think about it over in my head and think about what I might want to say or do. I've had some ideas in my head that I could have implemented in. 30 minutes, but I have been steaming over it for six months in my head. Completely ridiculous thing to do. And of course, I'm starting to implement them.

Now that the New York has rolled around, I've decided [00:06:00] that I am gonna commit to posting regularly, and so I created a schedule that is already wrapped around my regular schedule for content creation. And even when I don't feel like doing it, I set up a time to create content and it doesn't turn out the way that I want it, it hasn't.

However, the fact that it exists in the real world is just motivating me to learn more, like learning how to do transitions and green screens and getting the. Little details that I didn't even think to try to plan for came into play and I'm starting to get better already after just a couple of days.

And then there's this idea of accepting my limitations and also accepting the fact that I could have done this a [00:07:00] while ago and forgiving myself for having been afraid. Of trying, because that's part of the process is getting the courage to face my limitations. And so if that can happen on a New Year's resolution, I'm here for it.

I want to encourage you to try to expand your horizons on any projects or endeavors that you have been thinking about doing for a while. Use the new year as an excuse to try it, see it as an experiment, and if it doesn't work, it's okay. Experiments are fun and can show you something that you may not want to do, and you can focus your energy on something else.

You know, in your head, it, it's a lot of things that probably live rent free in your head that, you know, could move out if you, if you're not gonna try it, you know, you can move on to something else that you may wanna fantasize about. So take that into [00:08:00] consideration.

 It can be incredibly difficult to decide what to post online, and I think this has to do with the theory of other minds. How will other people take what you're saying? And I think the most explicit version of this deals with satire, and I was coming into July of last year, I posted a picture of a police officer holding his hand up.

And saying Stop being gay. Pride is over. You can resume being straight now, and obviously this is satire considering I'm gay, the channel that I'm on talks about LGBT issues, you know, constantly, even though you, all of those factors are playing into it, I got people who are genuinely mad at me for posting it and in fact.

On one of the platforms, I wanna say it was TikTok. The post was removed for hate speech. I'm like, what the [00:09:00] hell? The Post was trying to make the point that we don't stop being gay just because Pride month is over. You know, I get the idea of there being a pride month and you know, there's been a lot of conversation.

Around the idea that Pride got corporatized and some, some people called it rainbow washing different companies because even though they were out and proud for Pride Month, their actual policies for protecting L-G-B-T-Q people in their companies or you know, using representation in their advertising and media was.

S you know, sparse to say the least. But then they're out there, you know, selling Rainbow T-shirts during pride month. You know, I think Target got a lot of that ire and for good reason. You know, as the Trump administration came into full effect, they folded like a lawn chair when it came to [00:10:00] DEI initiatives, you know, so all of it was pretty performative and people could tell.

And there was kind of a black backlash against pride, and so I was kind of playing into that on one of my posts. Another post I did was talking about the Medicaid vote,

and I can't even remember which one it was. It was sometime this year that there was a. A deadlock in Congress about, an extension of Medicaid.

And the the funny thing is just as I am politically savvy, I even have forgotten about this Medicaid vote for the reason that so much other shit has happened over the past year. And so I was making the point in this post that, rep Republicans were going to regret, voting to cut Medicaid benefits because so many people within MAGA and Republican Red States rely on Medicaid for their healthcare.

It affects a lot of people's premiums, whether or not they're even on Medicare or Medicaid. The reason being that the entire system is dependent upon the poorest of. Those receiving medical care, getting their needs met. Right. The system of healthcare that [00:11:00] we have requires that healthy people pay for sick people is a, is a way of distributing the cost because some people's healthcare, by their nature of being sick, is gonna be so enormous.

That they can't afford it. And the idea is to distribute that, that cost throughout the economy, throughout the, healthcare system. And Republicans, I think on an ideological level, don't want to do that specifically because the, of the types of people who will be benefiting from that, which are people who are not like them, you can say whatever it is, race, religion.

Ethnicity. You know, people not like them are gonna have to be paid for by them and for them, that is morally reprehensible. You know, they feel it in their bones to be wrong, and [00:12:00] that response is being, that bigoted response is being capitalized upon by shrewd right-wing politicians. Right? And so yeah, there are, there was a TAA meme that I posted about it. It was from Game of Thrones and it was king Joffrey being poisoned. In season three, if you remember. It looks like in the photo. That he's, you know, clutching his pearls and just saying like, it looks like he's clutching his pearls. And it's like, oh, I didn't know that.

You know, conservatives had you know, Medicaid, I had no idea. But in, in that, in that photo, he's actually just about to die. Right? So it's kind of a nuanced meme. I don't know. Nobody got it. I thought I was the only one who, I didn't think I was gonna be the only one who understood what the, the meme was about.

It's this idea that, you know, republicans were going to regret their vote against Medicaid. Now, mind you, our political memories are [00:13:00] short. And so that's what a lot of people just said in the comments was like, they're not gonna regret it. You know? No one's gonna remember this a year from now. And you're right, because I I, in the moment, I was just like, huh, they're gonna, they're cutting off their own nose, you know?

And yeah, no, not anyone. No one's gonna remember that people's healthcare costs are going up. You know, the Medicaid. Cuts, the Obamacare subsidies are getting cut. You know, people are going to struggle. And you know, the Democrats are going to tell the Republicans that the Republicans are at fault for this, but they're not gonna believe them because it's coming from a Democrat.

The Republicans are just going to lie about it, even though it's clearly on the record. And so it's, I think things are just gonna continue to go. As usual, you know, along ideological lines. You know, the question for me, however, [00:14:00] is those of us who are in the know, can we at least get it? You know, like, I know I'm talking about memes and posting on the internet.

Like, you know, people on our side do, are we gonna get the joke? And I guess maybe in that case, you know. They were right to point out that Republicans aren't going to figure it out. But I don't know. I'm just hoping that people on our side will have a sense of humor about things. So I'm saying this now because I am trying to reestablish a presence on social media in 2026.

You know. I want to say that I don't make New Year's resolutions, but I do. M three was a New Year's resolution back in 2013, so you know, it kind of stuck and I can't, but help think that sometimes it works. I don't think you have to wait till the New Year's to do that. January 1st is a [00:15:00] just another day, but it's kind of like, because everyone else is doing resolutions on January 1st.

It is kind of like, why waste an opportunity if it appears why not use this momentum that a lot of people are giving you and the solidarity in, in trying to change something in your life to, give you a little bit of boost towards any goals that you happen to have. So for my, for me, I think that's gonna be, posting on social media on, on a regular basis.

Creating content, whether or not I post it or not, and my own creative pursuits, I, I want to dive into those specifically. I want to learn more about AI and get more comfortable using some of those tools in my workflow. You know, learning how to dive deeper into my own mind, not necessarily trying. To generate content [00:16:00] using ai, but to generate questions that I can then answer.

I find that sort of prompting myself to, you know, prompting it to prompt me back, you know, asking me deeper questions you know, putting in work and having it criticize it and point out its flaws and even, you know, teaching. Pathways as well. There are, you could ask it to teach you a certain subject and to quiz you on, on certain ideas and guide you in a certain subject matter to improve your learning capabilities.

So that's something that I want to be doing in 2026, learning more, as well as my maintaining my reading and, yeah, just doing all the things that I know I should do. 'cause there's so many, I, I don't even really need to name them really. It's just using this new year to [00:17:00] push me forward. So I am doing that and hope you are having a positive experience, you know, pushing yourself forward in 2026. 

 So it was sometime around September 11th, 2021.

It was sometime around the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001 that I became an atheist, and it was somewhat leading up to that point that I had been reading some.

Freethinking atheist literature here and there, but nothing really stuck for me. I was open to the possibilities of religion. I had had religious experiences and I enjoyed the theology and the the more sane left-leaning Christian fellowship that I received from my church. But what I would have had to recognize in the terrorist attacks on September 11th was the [00:18:00] idea that religion, just because it's deeply held, doesn't make it valuable or right.

You know, that those. 19 terrorists who committed the attacks on nine 11 were deeply held religious people. And something about that disturbed me and woke me up to the idea that, just because someone believes something fervently doesn't mean that it's necessarily good. I certainly have. Some distance now from that timeframe where I became sort of a combatant atheist at, after nine 11 and I posted memes and jokes about religion.

The one that I remember getting some heat over was like this. These two girls sitting in a field, one with a Bible, one with a Quran. And it says, Hey, my book says you're going to hell. Hey, you too. My book says, you're going to hell. And and there was this is a [00:19:00] lot of, there was a, a, a account on Facebook called God, and I think he was a comedian.

I don't remember who, but it was a lot of like, religious memes that were. To me at the time. Hilarious. You know, pointing out some of the ridiculous beliefs that occur now I'm thinking 25 years later, or how many years has it been? What, 20, yeah, 25 years. I look at those same memes and I laugh, but I don't share them, if that makes sense.

I think that the harm that it causes peoples. In people's relationships and in their own experience isn't worth the laughs that I get from it, you know, that I, or whatever attention I might get from it. There was recently a TikTok video of a woman who was honestly trying to explain the reason why an all [00:20:00] loving God would sentence you to hell.

And it was. It's supposed to be serious, but it was hilarious the way that she, it was explaining it. I shared it privately with a few people a few people who I know to be religious and you know, their response was somewhat dismissive, you know, because what she was saying was theologically accurate.

To a certain degree. There were certain aspects that were a little, you know, off base. But the major point that she was making was that you know, God loves you so much that he wants, he will burn you up in hell if you don't love him back. I mean, that was the line that. Circulated on TikTok quite a bit and people would play the audio as they're pretending to be in Bible study.

And they look like side eye, like, you know, why am I here? Why am I, why am I worshiping a God that would burn me up if I don't love them back? [00:21:00] That seems like a abusive relationship, like some sort of, you know, really bad relationship. But. That being said, I have picked up some appreciation for some of the new age philosophy that I read after becoming an atheist.

So, one of the things that was really popular after I lost my faith was the secret. And it's, it still makes me chuckle a little bit. I was, introduced to The Secret by a friend and it was all over Oprah, I think. You know, she was really popular then and you know, people were taking manifestation and the law of attraction really, really seriously.

Making vision boards. I think I did a vision board at some point, which was actually kind of fun. I'm not gonna lie. It was, but you know. Now that seems really silly, especially considering, I saw when I saw some of the [00:22:00] other products and seminars and things that they were selling based on a really simple idea that was just positive thinking, you know, and mood boards are great and everything, but sort of the magical thinking that went around manifestation and law of attraction even then seemed ridiculous.

But now from with some separation, I realized that I am not so identified with my beliefs anymore, and so I don't feel so fervent in my need to reject an idea like the law of attraction. Like to me, it's on its face, patently absurd that there's some sort of magic involved in, you know, looking at a picture.

Of something that you really want badly and telling yourself that you, you have it already in the timeline that you're trying to manifest. I do feel like there is a serious benefit in knowing what you [00:23:00] value and when you have choices to make in life, that you make choices that affirm your values. And so making a mood board or you know, a manifestation journal or something is beneficial in the sense that it influences the decisions that you make, if you wanna call that magic, you know?

Sure. Consciousness is magical. It is actually. I mean, the fact that we experience anything, as a subjective experience is itself magical. So whatever can change your mind and focus you in the right direction is, is own form of sorcery. And that's the way I look at it now. And so when I'm looking at some of this stuff, I did not read The Secret again, but I did read some Deepak Chopra.

The Seven Laws of Success and some of his lectures and things. And I can remember back in the day feeling like he was a huckster, a scam artist you know, a snake oil salesman. [00:24:00] And all of that is still there, right? Like there is a lot of you know, trying to make you feel hopeful about certain, medical remedies. But one of the things I've noticed now as a much more a mature adult is how much hedging he would use in his language when talking about these research findings. Right? He say, you know, is none of this is confirmed. There's things that lead us to believe that, you know, he would hedge a lot.

And I, you know, and when I was younger I didn't hear the hedging so much. It just, the hedging sort of went over my head and I just absorbed what possibilities could exist if these studies were confirmed. But now, as you know, a more well-rounded red person, I recognize these studies to be what they are, which is, you know, [00:25:00] anomalies that.

Open your mind to the possibility that we don't know all that we know. And I appreciated it. Actually, I, I appreciated the idea that there were people who were looking into different ways of fighting cancer, for instance, he was talking about, you know, a different type of chemotherapy. One where, you know, it was trying to fight the way the cells replicated rather than to kill the cells, you know, which was a less invasive, less toxic you know, way of dealing with cancer cells.

'cause chemotherapy typically, is so toxic that it is. Sometimes more debilitating than the cancer itself, at least at that time. Right? Obviously if cancer is allowed to metastasize, it would be more deadly than the chemo. But at the time of the administration of the chemo, sometimes it's worse than the, the [00:26:00] current state of the illness, you know, and so finding different ways of treating cancer.

You know, actually made a lot of sense, even though I, I heard this time about how premature it was to say that this was going to be a useful treatment. Just something a useful way of looking at alternative therapies. Right. And so I don't know what I can say I learned from this, which is sometimes we skim over the warning labels at our own risk and also.

Being open to hearing an alternative idea without absorbing that idea. You know, just maybe learning what you can learn from their incorrect information, right? Learn what, people in the new Age movement, or talking about in certain ways without feeling threatened by this information, which you believe to be wrong.

Right. And I think that's what it was when I was younger, is that I was threatened [00:27:00] by someone trying to sell me, non-factual information. And now I just don't feel threatened by it. And I was able to listen and hear the caveats a lot more clearly. So it was an interesting experience. I, I don't know if I would recommend it, but it was good for me.

Like maybe the recommendation I can make is. You know, if you thought you have read something when you were in your twenties and you thought it was dumb, you know, maybe in your forties reread it, you may be, you know, pleasantly surprised that you have a different perspective on it. And maybe some time has settled and you know, it's a lot more interesting now, which is what it was for me.

So it was, it was cool. 

And that'll do it for this episode of the M three Bear Cast.

I want to thank you for listening, and I wanna wish you a new Happy New Year. If you want to support Male medium Mind, consider becoming a patron. Go to [00:28:00] patreon.com/male, medium mind there For $5 a month, you can become a patron and you will get access to our. Telegram groups. We have a VIP room, we have a, a book club.

We have not safe for work content. And we also have after shows for our live streams just for our patrons. You get, get some inside info about what's going on with M three. And of course we always appreciate our patrons for their support. It makes so much more possible. With a small financial contribution it allows us to actually, you know, up our game and we really appreciate your support.

Again, thank you for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode piece. 

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