2025
- Anna Oposa
- Dec 28, 2025
- 4 min read
If I could offer you one tip for the future, to create would be it. Creating reduces stress and anxiety, boosts your mood, and promotes personal growth. Create things with your hands: register for a pottery class, assemble a bouquet of Lego flowers, put together a shelving unit. The mug's shape is irregular, some Lego pieces mysteriously disappear over time, and the shelving unit looks a liiiiiitle bit lopsided. But you made them, and they're yours.
Create things with your mind. Build new programs and breathe life into old ones. Develop content for social media, even if seeing your face and hearing your voice is cringey to you. Craft pitch decks for your favorite brands and dream projects. Think of each output as an exercise in storytelling.
Use A.I. to improve your documents, but don't let it do the actual creation for you. The three seconds between your prompt and its response often robs you from the frustrations and questions that lead to discovery. Besides, the number of em dashes, ampersands, and the words "leverage" and "blueprint" will be revelatory.
There is nothing more humbling than potty training a puppy. Invest in a dog trainer and stretch your patience. Keep in mind that your dog is living in a human world. There is nothing more rewarding than this bond.
Create memories with your friends by trying activities you've never done together before. Join a dance class and laugh when you mess up the choreo, make friendship necklaces, and watch an original Filipino play and debrief about it on the way home. There are lots of articles about tips to keep romantic relationships alive, but friendships need this kind of attention too. This effort makes your friendships so solid that there is never room for doubt. Time is extra limited in adulthood, so take the pockets of time between chores and deadlines and taxes.
Ah, taxes.
You wonder, more than usual, if the work you do makes a difference. The headlines on corruption, the entitlement of SK officials and nepo babies, and the streets that flood within minutes of rain gnaw at your optimism. You consider downsizing your ambitions because the doing and the hoping have been exhausting. So fucking exhausting.
Create space for your grief and helplessness. These are powerful motivators. Take time away from social media to seek peace.
Remind yourself to believe in the potential of the work that you do. This is easier when you’re creating a picture of the future with people who make Monday mornings exciting to wake up to. If the work you do matters to all of you, then it matters. There are corners of the government still worth working with. They are getting more difficult to find, but you find them. The size of your ambitions should never be proportionate to other people’s incompetence. Your ambitions are yours.
When you allow yourself to scroll mindlessly again, you will not know who Kween Yasmin is and why "Maui Wowie" became a ballad.
Create your own history. You are often told how "lucky" you are to be “following your passion.” Luck is the life you were born into and the opportunities it has afforded you. But what others label now as "luck" is the unseen hours of brainstorming, fundraising, rejections, fundraising again, report-writing, and the never-ending HR problems. Everything you create with your heart still needs systems, frameworks, memos, permits, and Gantt charts. "Luck" is made in the long, boring, repetitive early mornings and late nights drowning in Excel spreadsheets and the sometimes unhealthy obsession to excel.
You know you need to listen to your body and you wish you could. But there are reports to draft, workshops to deliver, and meetings to attend, so you show up, day after day, until your body violently shows you through a dry cough, cold sweats, and nasal congestion that you have to listen to your body.
When you’re finally recovering, ask A.I. to create a workout program for you.
Accept that you love pastries more than your desire to be thin. Buy that box of croissants. (Then split each one in half and keep most slices in the freezer. Moderation is key.)
Gather the courage to have difficult conversations with your parents. Each of you carries the weight of unresolved issues from your respective childhoods to the present. Go into these dialogues with talking points, but prepare to let them go. Inhale. Focus on the intent to express how you feel, not to change their minds. Exhale. How they react is not up to you. Only what you say and how you manage their reactions is up to you. And that, for now, is enough.
It is heartbreaking to witness your parent's memories start to fade. Find ways to create new ones.
Stay in love with nature, even the urban kind. Notice how sunlight touches the rooftops of buildings differently at different times of the day. Watch wildlife in silence.
You are living the life you dreamt about in the pages of your journal 10, 15 years ago. You like who you are becoming. Write the next chapter.
And trust me on creating.
Original post inspired by "everybody's free to wear sunscreen."
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