As 2025 draws to a close, many cultures across the world share a familiar ritual: pausing to reflect on what has passed and quietly establishing hopes for what the year to come. Whether it’s a conversation around the dinner table, or a New Year’s resolution you are hoping to keep (this time, surely), delving into a place of reflection is commonplace as the year comes to a close.

This month Square Holes conducted a survey that asked three key questions of the general public from South Australia:

• How would you sum up 2025?
• What are your expectations for 2026?
• What’s on your Christmas wishlist?

Some key themes were represented across the questions, giving an insight into the things that mattered this year, what we are hoping for next year and gifts we want to receive in the present.

How would you sum up 2025?

The three top recurring answers for how the community would sum up 2025 centred around health and loss, cost of living stress, and resilience.

The strongest recurring theme centred around health. Both dealing with physical and mental illness, acting as a carer for loved ones, and processing loss.

Key insight: Health challenges became the defining measure of the year — many people assessed the year not by achievements, but by whether they survived, coped, or lost loved ones.

Another dominant theme is financial strain, often linked to rising costs, housing insecurity, medical expenses, or job instability.

Key insight: Rising costs shifted people from thinking about progress to thinking about endurance, with financial stress often intensifying health and emotional strain.

Despite hardship, many respondents frame the year as a mix of highs and lows, emphasising endurance, learning, adaptation, or personal milestones.

Key insight: Despite hardship, people framed the year as a balance of highs and lows, showing a strong tendency toward meaning-making and resilience rather than despair.

What are your expectations for 2026?

The top hopes for 2026 once again centred around health, financial fears, and the desire for a better quality of life.

Health is frequently paired with words like hope, peaceful, calmer, and stable, indicating fatigue from prior years and a strong desire for relief.

Key insight: Looking forward, expectations narrowed — people were no longer seeking transformation, but relief, recovery, and a return to basic functioning and calm.

The second dominant theme is money-related pressure, with many respondents focusing on survival, debt reduction, and affordability rather than wealth.

Key insight: Financial hopes were cautious and practical, focused on stability (paying bills, reducing debt) rather than wealth, reflecting diminished optimism but strong realism.

A strong aspirational theme centers on living better rather than bigger. This theme reflects a shift toward meaning, balance, and fulfilment, especially after years of disruption.

Key insight: People increasingly defined a “better year” as one with balance, time, and personal fulfilment, signalling a shift away from productivity toward wellbeing.

What’s on your Christmas wishlist?

The strongest themes for people’s Christmas wishlist centred around the desire for connected time with family, a healthier 2026, and financial security.

The most dominant theme is the desire to spend time with family and loved ones, often framed as more important than material gifts.

Key insight: At moments of ritual and reflection, people prioritised human connection over material goods, revealing relationships as the core source of meaning and comfort.

Health—both personal and collective—is a major recurring concern, often paired with wishes for peace, safety, and calm.

Key insight: Health was repeatedly named as the “only gift needed,” showing how deeply uncertainty and fatigue have reshaped what people value most.

Many responses reveal underlying financial anxiety, even when framed humorously or briefly.

Key insight: Even within festive wishes, financial anxiety persisted, indicating that economic pressure is now a constant background concern rather than a temporary issue.

Taken together, these reflections show a community quietly recalibrating its values. The year that was is remembered as demanding — physically, financially, emotionally. The year ahead is not imagined as perfect, but as better: calmer, healthier, more stable, more connected.