The Year in Binges

2025 was a year of emotional streaming and emotional eating. My husband and I are both despondent and outraged over what’s been happening to our country, which may be one reason why he always comes back from the grocery store with cartons of ice cream. We snack a lot at night to help ourselves feel better, plus nighttime is the only chance we have to indulge in our worst habits without letting the child see them. The kiddo gets his own dessert most nights, but we hammer him about not eating too much sugar and not filling up on snacks in lieu of meals, so to avoid the appearance of hypocrisy, we must hide our shame. Unfortunately our son likes to take unauthorized leave of his room in the late night hours, ostensibly to show us the fruits of whatever he’s been doing instead of sleeping, but also to sneak a look at what’s at the other end of the spoon I’m holding. “Hey Mom, guess what I drew? It’s … um … wait, what are you eating?”

This was not a great year for moderating my junk food intake. My weight has remained steady and my overall health good, so I’ve kind of just been letting it ride. I should do better, but I’ve needed a lot of self-soothing since, oh, about January 2025. There was, at first, a flood of news intake and protests and calls to my Congressional representatives. Trying to follow the destructive actions of this administration, and worrying about how I could or couldn’t help, was traumatizing and stressful. Have a look at this Sherrilyn Ifill essay for a perspective on the bygone year and what lies ahead. On top of all that, regular life has continued apace. My energetic son continues to alternately exhaust me, enrage me, and fill me with great love. I lost a friend to cancer this year. I traveled out of state three times. I got involved with a local political campaign. I had a few medical procedures and mild illnesses that gave me excuses to rest in bed.

Never have I been more grateful for the comforts of streaming shows and packaged junk food. Below are my recent favorites.

TV Binges

“Gilmore Girls” - The classic, the eternal, my most comforting show. I got through the bulk of the original series (for maybe the twentieth time), rewatched the revival miniseries, and revisited the “Gilmore Guys” podcast to go along with it. Nothing too terrible happens in Stars Hollow, and the dialogue is benign enough that I can watch it with my young kid around. The podcast companion was my favorite part, since I could call up old episodes on my phone and listen through my cozy headband earphones while falling asleep.

“The Hunting Wives” - I got sucked into this when I was sick with a cold in November. I don’t usually like steamy, lascivious dramas, but I enjoyed the acting and outfits of the women on screen, especially Katie Lowes’ frilly dresses with big belts. My enthusiasm petered out before the season ended, as it tends to do with guilty-pleasure shows that start out titillating and end up feeling gratuitous. Not that I'm a paragon of highbrow taste. I still wanted to know the fates of the characters, so I looked them up online rather than finishing the show.

“ER” - I'm revisiting this one while eagerly waiting for “The Pitt” to come back. I'm just on Season Four now, and giddy about still having nine long seasons of medical drama to go, enough to keep me sated in between new episode of “The Pitt”. Medical professions are fascinating to me, and I don’t know of many documentaries that take you into the realism of a hospital (RIP to the old TLC series “Trauma: Life in the ER”), so this show is the closest I can get to that world. I might back off when it starts getting too soapy.

“Friends” - Frankly I've seen every episode too many times, but it's still a feel-good background show. When I'm on the couch late at night and start falling asleep, I like to pause whatever I'm watching that requires attention, and switch to “Friends” so I can drift all the way off without feeling like I'm missing anything. This habit means, unfortunately, that sometimes I end up sleepwalking from the couch to the bed without brushing my teeth. It's been that kind of year.

“Frasier” - Another 1990s low-stakes, big-city hangout show, but with more erudite dialogue than “Friends”.

Food & Drink Binges

Coffee - Once again the classic, the eternal, an obvious corollary to “Gilmore Girls”. I go to bed at night thinking about the espresso that will be the highlight of the next morning. My husband and I have a running joke that when one of us fires up the espresso machine, the other will perk up like a dog hearing a can opener, and make haste to the kitchen to take a whiff of the brew. One of the many core values we share is that coffee makes everything better. Because we have such a “fancy” appliance at our disposal, we enjoy the occasional naughtiness of making espresso at a late hour. Yes, we are basically middle-aged and have to find thrills where we can.

Chocolate - I almost never buy ice cream that doesn’t contain chocolate; it just doesn’t seem right. I’ll take chocolate in almost any form: mochas, cookies, cakes, Franz Creme Pies, Hostess cupcakes. On a particularly hard night this fall, I scooped some cookie dough, which I’d made the previous day or so, into a bowl and ate it in front of the TV. This harkened back to my depressive college years, when I actually bought tubes of Nestle cookie dough for the express purpose of eating it raw. Then I’d scoop it into my mouth while watching “Gilmore Girls” on DVD.

Carbs - I got spoiled with fresh sourdough for a few weeks this fall, when a neighbor started baking some and selling it from a shelf in her driveway, accepting payments on the honor system. It was delicious. I started craving it, and getting sadder with each day I drove by her house and saw no fresh loaves. She has apparently moved away now, and my cupboard feels bare. We usually have fruit and cheese on hand, but I find those disappointing when I could have bread and sugar. On days when I work at the office, this predilection sends me to the vending machine, which has served me a number of Pop-Tarts and Fritos that I’m not proud of.

And a Purge

Like a lot of older Millennials, I’ve been looking for ways to claw back my time and attention from Big Tech companies, advertisers, chronically online peddlers of outrage, and similar forces that are messing with our brains. I got inspiration from the book Please Unsubscribe, Thanks, which I recommend. The author has stepped back from modern technology in a much bigger way that I’m willing to, but offers some excellent suggestions. Instead of downgrading to a “dumb phone”, I removed several social apps from my smartphone—Twitter, Facebook, Nextdoor, Goodreads— and installed a new launcher that makes the home screen more streamlined. I turned off most notifications, and made texts and calls the only events that send vibrations to my smartwatch.

Then I spent a lot of time in my Gmail inbox, unsubscribing from a lot of the political news I’d signed up for after the November 2024 election, as well as removing myself from mailing lists that had pestered me for years. Many of those had been funneled into the wasteland of the “Promotions” tab, which I disabled after learning that Google now requires opting into AI to use that tabbed inbox navigation. Every email now lands in the same spot, forcing me to make decisions on my relationship with each sender. It still feels like too much, but my email account is cleaner now than it’s been in ages.

As a household, we reduced our streaming options by canceling Hulu and Disney+ after the ABC/Jimmy Kimmel kerfuffle. Even when ABC reversed course, it felt right to cut back a little. We still have Netflix, my husband has Prime, and I signed up for HBO Max because I’m not willing to live without “The Pitt” and “Hacks”. When there’s nothing appealing on those platforms, I surf the hundreds of channels that are built into our Samsung television, which feels like the old days of cable or broadcast. How could I complain about having nothing to watch when I have a channel that shows “Mystery Science Theater 3000” twenty-four hours a day?

When TV fails, and when I reach a logical end to scrolling the remaining apps on my phone, I can always reach for a book. I’d like to do more binge reading in 2026. Since I don’t track my reads on Goodreads anymore, I can’t readily recall every book I finished in 2025, but I’ll end with a few highlights:

In My Remaining Years by Jean Grae
Feral City by Jeremiah Moss
The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers
Vacationland by John Hodgman
I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying by Youngmi Mayer