The new year often comes with an almost military-like response to do things, become a better you. Gym memberships go up, and with them sometimes even visits to the actual gym.

But new year’s resolutions are firmly rooted in a sense of optimization, and if the events of the past year have you less eager to improve yourself, well, we applaud that and suggest another direction:

Pick up an instrument. Get an inexpensive (often maligned) recorder and give it a whirl. This is not about having a goal to be First Chair Recorder at Carnegie Hall in five years, this is about the joy of being a curious learner well into adulthood. Yes, what we’re suggesting is a hobby, but more than that we’re suggesting doing art for art’s sake.

Art is always an act of resistance (consider maybe why it’s always the first to have its funding cut) but what does that mean? And what does it look like? We’ve grown accustomed to big acts, bid ideas, big protests but the small act of jamming out with other non-professional musicians could be the key to humanity.

Daniel Levitin, the author of I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music As Medicine, comments in an article on The Atlantic about the benefits of learning a musical instrument at any age, that playing music together has additional benefits: “We become more trusting; we feel more connected to others—maybe even more connected to the world at large,”’

So to this we say, Happy 2025. Learn to play something. Start and do it just for yourself.