The optimists are convinced that a worse year than 2025 cannot come about. Pessimists, at the same time, are convinced that it can, and perhaps it will indeed prove to be the just-underway 2026.

As has been customary in recent years, you must always expect the unexpected from the new year. The biggest surprise may be that life suddenly gets unexpectedly better. Something that has not been seen, heard, or felt here for many years.

From January 1, the excise duty on tobacco and alcohol went up, and in spring this will be joined by increases in excise on gasoline, diesel fuel and heating oils, as well as on electricity. This in turn will lead to people smoking even less, drinking even more modestly, and walking more, as they use gasoline only for sniffing, as they no longer have the heart to pour such expensive substances into the machine.

All of this is very healthy and thanks to that we will see plenty of years added which are lived in health, albeit somewhat boringly. The more advanced households have in any case long since stopped using electricity, while thousands of farms, thousands of families, have to swivel on it, which is probably also healthy in some sense and entertaining in every sense.

Because tax changes have entered into force, they too will make life steadily better. The head of the Reform Party faction at the Riigikogu, Õnne Pillak, has confirmed that the universal tax-free income will rise to €700 per month, ie. €8,400 per year, and about 90 percent of working people in Estonia will benefit from this change, most of all the middle classes. As a representative of the lower classes, the improvement of the middle class's living conditions brings me nothing but deep joy.

Certainly there are many changes in place that will make all of our lives better to a greater or lesser extent, and most of these joyful messages were found by the attentive reader in the prime minister's year-end interviews, plus the Riigikogu speaker's New Year's greeting.

Unfortunately, good messages all too often collide into a wall of incomprehension. In our society there are still a lot, hordes, in fact, of people who simply cannot grasp that life is getting better in leaps and bounds.

What, then, should be done with people like that? How does one go about making it clear to people that in fact they are doing very well? These are probably the questions that the state's strategic communications department will seriously start dealing with in the new year. As has already been the custom with us, the first option is to create a grand national advertising campaign, not an expensive one; some couple of hundred thousand perhaps. In the course of this, placards could be put up on the streets with messages like "You're doing well!", "Life is not so bad!", "Children are starving in Africa, but you're eating a kohuke!", "Think life is bad? Don't think so, we'll get you!" and so on, all in similarly positive terms.

In order to propagate messages in our time, you must certainly make use of influencers, meaning content creators. Those people who tend toward pessimism are mostly older people, who do not know how TikTok is consumed. This makes it worth sending influencers out onto the streets, where they can gently whisper into the ear of every senior hobbling toward the village shop: "You're doing well, friend old person, you're doing better and better with each and every day…"

The Estonian people have managed with it all. The hardest years of suffering have been weathered, and we will also make it through the magnificent year 2026, when the money and health will accumulate so much that they will practically start overflowing.

If we finally come to terms with a positive worldview, then all that remains is to answer the question of how long the good times will last, as the future tends to be something like a rabid dog that bites you in the backside just at the moment when you have doled out another portion of caviar onto your plate.

I would venture to predict that for us, as individuals and as a people, things will go better than before for about 365 days, and then we will look back first and then ahead, and if we have reason to give the year 2026 the greatest Estonian compliment, namely a lightly sighed "all right," then it is indeed quite a good thing.

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