What are my ins and outs for 2025?

and furthermore, what ARE ins and outs!!

Some beloved readers asked me to write “ins and outs” for 2025. Why not? I thought. But I couldn’t just sit down and do it. Because of course, I first needed to understand what ins and outs even are. I’ve been seeing them all over the place — on social media, in conversations, taped to people’s fridges, in articles — but what are they?

In case you haven’t seen any ins and outs yet, here are a few examples, generously shared by friends:

one —

two —

three —

ins: eating pomegranates
outs: pomegranate metaphors. that’s all you can come up with?

Like New Year’s resolutions, ins and outs lists allow their creators to set intentions for the upcoming year. But they’re not resolutions, are they, not exactly.

Formally, resolutions prioritize completeness and rigidity while ins and outs lists favor kaleidoscopic openness. New Year’s resolutions tend to start with a literal or implied commitment: “I will go to the gym 3x a week” or whatever. Even if you don’t include the “I will,” it’s there. A resolution requires that you have resolve, after all! The form of a resolution provides more space for the creator to fail; as soon as you don’t go to the gym 3x a week, you’ve failed.

Ins and outs lists, however, forgo active verbs in favor of disjointed nouns and gerunds. The equivalent of the resolution “I will go to the gym 3x a week” might be “IN: going to the gym”. The only way you can fail the in of “going to the gym” is if you just, literally never do it. Go once and it’s in! If resolutions are a commitment, ins and outs are a vibe. There’s still a commitment with ins and outs, but it’s a commitment to the feel or the concept, rather than the exact execution.

But there’s more! The verbiage of “in and out” encourages the creator to think not just about behavior and activities, but also about aesthetics; “in” and “out” are words we use to describe what’s cool and trendy and what, well, isn’t. So frequently trends are dictated to us — by celebrities and our societal preoccupation with them, by media, by whatever the fuck The Algorithm chooses to prioritize — rather than by us regular people.

But in an ins and outs list, we decide what’s cool and what isn’t. Actually, it’s not even “we” that decides — it’s each of us, individually. It’s kind of an amazing oxymoron to use the language of trends here; trends are inherently collective and built on multiplicity, while ins and outs lists are hyper-personal, hyper-specific, and often only truly understandable to the person who wrote them. I love this inversion! Build your own aesthetic! Dress however you want! Give your clothing style a name and start using it like it’s referenced in magazines! (I used to call my style Circus Frump, fyi, which is still, for better or for worse, a pretty accurate descriptor. What’s yours??)

The other thing that strikes me about ins and outs lists and their variations (keep and cut, more and less, etc.) is that, unlike new year’s resolutions, they are binaries. Resolutions don’t have outs; resolutions only identify what you do want to do. Ins and outs lists, on the other hand, identify both what you want to call in, and what you want to dispel. The language here — out, cut, less — implies that the out list is composed of activities and traits that are currently part of your life, but that you no longer want. That’s why they are on the out list, because you want them out! If they weren’t in your life in the first place, they wouldn’t have to be pushed out.

So there is an active directionality to the outs list — it’s a person saying, I don’t want any more of this! I don’t want to do this anymore, I don’t want to think like this anymore, I don’t want to feel like this anymore.

Some things are easier to dispel than others.

In theory, if you and you alone brought something into your life, then you and you alone can dispel it, right? Like, let’s say you dyed your hair red, and now you’ve decided to put “dyeing my hair red” on the outs list. That should be doable! You can dye your hair a new color, or simply wait for the red to grow out, and leave it that way.

But what if it wasn’t you and you alone that brought this thing into your life? What if other factors were at play? What if you dyed your hair because you were feeling stifled and controlled, and you wanted to do something to free yourself and luxuriate in your own choices? Maybe what you felt was a desire to direct your own life, and the only form that presented itself was dyeing your hair. You found what felt like a solution. In that case, perhaps what’s “out” isn’t dyeing your hair; what’s out is feeling stifled and controlled. How do you dispel that?

Another way of asking that question is — how do you release the qualities, behaviors, habits, and dynamics that stick to you like glue, no matter how hard you try to leave them behind?

A friend told me she wrote “hemming and hawing” on her list of ins and outs because of a conversation we had a year ago. Guess what I wrote on my filling in the blanks exercise literally just a few days ago, for what I’m leaving behind? HEMMING AND HAWING! Guess that’s a perennial “out” for me! I think I’ll be trying to leave behind hemming and hawing every dang year. Maybe one year I really will leave it. Then who will I be? I literally don’t even know!

The attempt to evolve and grow yourself is more than just admirable; it’s necessary in order to enjoy being alive. There’s pain and tension in stagnation, like a bruise that keeps getting pressed. Sometimes it’s pleasurable to press the bruise, especially when the sensation is so familiar it feels synonymous with being alive. But if you ever have that moment where you wonder, could this be better? then you know, this is a movable thing, this is a bruise. And if it’s a bruise, it could heal.

I think you try, and try, and try, until maybe, one day, you realize you’re doing it without trying. There’s no guarantee, none whatsoever! Maybe you spend your whole life trying! That’s fine! Nobody has to even know! If it doesn’t work, take a break, and come back to it later, or not!

When you write something on an ins and outs list, you imagine a life and a world that doesn’t exist yet, but that you dare to strive for. Imagining a future that does not exist yet, but that you think is worth existing, even if you don’t know how the fuck you’re gonna get there, is something I think is extremely worthwhile, as I’ve written about before. You gotta start somewhere. Imagine a world in which you not only do not dye your hair, but also free yourself from the feelings of anxious control that got you to the salon in the first place.

An ins and outs list is a promise to try, either to keep or release. A promise to yourself, and when shared, a form of accountability with others. The list — whether it includes many ins and many outs or just one of each — is a sign that you want to codify and record this attempt. You want it written down. You want it discussed. You want it entered into the collective lexicon of whoever you told it to.

And so I find, I want to share my ins and outs with you. I’m giving them my own names because, well, you know me and my obsessive need to be different. Here we go:

I usher in:

confidence
heart racing activities
staring into my cats’ eyes when they stare at me
spontaneous art projects
unimaginable growth
bodies of water
reading during lunch
letting the theme song play
dark brown hair
allowing myself to sit in sorrow when I need to

I lovingly release:

hemming and hawing 🙂
avoidance
the stories I tell myself about my relationship to exercise
heart racing thoughts
basing decisions on fear
being so fucking serious
the need for a conclusion

If you’d like to share ins and outs for the year, feel free to share them anonymously in this Google doc. I’ll share these out on July 1st, 2025, so you can see how they feel halfway through this year.