If 2025 felt disorienting: like time sped up, rules dissolved, and reality itself became unstable, you weren’t imagining it. Disorientation wasn’t a side effect of the year we just lived through. It was the strategy to flood the zone.
But survival has a way of clarifying things.
As we enter into 2026, the question isn’t just what happens to each one of us, it’s how do we all stay grounded enough to stop whatever is coming next. The good news: people have faced this and worse before. Autocracy is not new and that means neither is resistance.
That’s where organizer and strategist Daniel Hunter comes in.
In late 2024, as the election outcome settled in, Hunter published an essay titled “10 Ways to Be Prepared and Grounded Now That Trump Has Won.” While written in the immediate aftermath of the vote, the framework reads a little differently now. Less like reaction. More like instruction.
Hunter, is a longtime trainer with roots in climate justice, nonviolent resistance, and movement education. He argues that authoritarianism succeeds not just through force, but through fear, isolation, exhaustion, and confusion. And the antidote, he says, is not constant outrage, but disciplined grounding.
To start 2026 of on a grounded foot, I’m sharing Hunter’s ten principles for staying sane to you can stay engaged and active. You can also read his original article here.
10 Ways to Stay Grounded and Effective in 2026
1. Trust Yourself
Authoritarian systems rely on gaslighting and flooding the zone until you doubt your own perception of reality. Hunter urges people to rebuild trust in their instincts.
You don’t need total certainty to know when something isn’t right.
2. Find Your People
Isolation weakens resistance. Community strengthens it.
Hunter stresses the importance of real human connection, not just group chats or comment threads, but people who can reality-check, support, and move together.
3. Let Yourself Grieve
Grief isn’t indulgent. It’s necessary.
Hunter is explicit here: people must grieve what they have lost personally and what we have lost as a country; expectations, stability, imagined futures. All of that must be given space to be grieved before we can move forward.
“You can’t accept reality if you’re still fighting the fact that it exists.”
Grief is how shock loosens its grip.
4. Don’t Obey in Advance
One of the oldest authoritarian tricks is getting people to self-censor before they’re told to.
Hunter warns against shrinking yourself preemptively; morally, professionally, creatively.
“Find your line. Be clear about it. And don’t let them push you past it.”
5. Release What You Can’t Control
Not everything is actionable and pretending otherwise leads to burnout.
Hunter invokes a lesson rooted in history and theology: focus energy where it matters locally.
“Small things really matter. Autocrats fall because people organize where they live.”
6. Pay Attention Without Drowning
There’s a difference between being informed and being consumed.
Hunter cautions against letting chaos dictate your nervous system.
That discernment is a survival skill now.
7. Stay Human
Cruel systems try to make people smaller, less curious, less generous, less alive.
Hunter urges engaging in intentional expansion: mentoring, creating, helping, basically anything that resists dehumanization.
“They want us to be automatons. We refuse that.”
8. Choose Engagement Again and Again
Participation is not all-or-nothing. Engagement can ebb and flow without disappearing.
The key is choosing and not resigning.
9. Protect the Visionaries
Every movement needs people who can imagine beyond the present crisis.
Hunter warns against the kind of fatalistic cynicism that shuts down vision before it’s born and we could end up missing out on some timeless inspiration and advice.
Artists, elders, organizers, their words might sound strange at first but in time they make sense. These voices need shelter, not scorn.
10. Remember: This Has Happened Before
Hunter’s deepest grounding comes from history, taught to him by his mother, an African American historian. And from that history, he says it’s well documented that people who have faced adversity, oppression and inhumane injustice over and over again can still be resilient.
“Backlash follows progress. Always.”
People have faced worse. They organized anyway. And they won.
Now That It’s a New Year
2025 didn’t just test our politics. It tested our nervous systems, our relationships, and our sense of reality.
If autocracy thrives on fear and fragmentation, then the work of 2026 is connection, clarity, and courage; practiced daily, locally and yes, imperfectly.
Surviving last year wasn’t failure.
It was training.
And now, the path forward while still hard, is clearer than it’s been in a long time.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.