Over the past decade, the 34-year-old billionaire chief executive has welcomed in the new year with a range of different pledges and projects, including, but not limited to, building his own AI-powered robot assistant and a promise to only eat meat from animals he killed himself for a year.
However, this bizarre tradition seems to have come to an end, as on Thursday Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post on Facebook that he is abandoning his New Year resolutions to "take a longer term focus," writing a 1,500 piece mulling over how the next decade may look for technology and society and what he plans to work towards.
"Rather than having year-to-year challenges, I've tried to think about what I hope the world and my life will look in 2030 so I can make sure I'm focusing on those things," he wrote. "By then, if things go well, my daughter Max will be in high school, we'll have the technology to feel truly present with another person no matter where they are, and scientific research will have helped cure and prevent enough diseases to extend our average life expectancy by another 2.5 years."
Over the years, Zuckerberg has attempted to evolve his annual challenge to reflect the trying times, from wearing a tie every day and reading more books to a promise to "fix" Facebook in 2018 and a pledge to do a series of interviews in 2019. However, the scandals around the platform in the past two years, from the Cambridge Analytica's misappropriation of more than 80 million users' data to the platform's role in spreading hate speech during the Myanmar genocide, have left the company’s reputation damaged.
"When I started these challenges, my life was almost all about building the Facebook website. Now there's so much more to learn from," he wrote. "At Facebook, we're building lots of different apps and technology — ranging from a new private social platform to augmented and virtual reality — and we're handling a lot more social responsibility. And outside Facebook, I'm a father now and I love spending time with my family, working on our philanthropy, and improving at the sports and hobbies I've picked up over the years. So while I'm glad I did annual challenges over the last decade, it's time to do something different."
The Facebook CEO also offered his predictions of how technology and the world might evolve over the next decade. For example, he suggested that by 2030 “more institutions will be run by millennials” focused on problems like climate change, education, and healthcare. He also suggested that in the next decade "we will get breakthrough augmented reality glasses that will redefine our relationship with technology."
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