A birthday is a good day to ask: if this year repeated forty more times, would I like where it goes?

Any single year feels roughly neutral while you are inside it. Run the same one forty more times and it stops being neutral, because habits compound and direction ends up mattering far more than speed. That is the entire use of the question: it turns a shrug into a destination you can look at directly. Skip it and a decade can pass in a direction nobody actually chose.

Run it on your next birthday, or on a random Tuesday if that comes sooner. Write down one thing the repeated version would make worse and one it would make better. Change the first slightly and protect the second.