In recent years, this game has become a meme. “Well, event xyz wasn’t on my 2025 bingo card,” is a common statement on social media. I have seen some version of this statement spouted often enough that I wonder if anyone has considered making a bingo card to play in the new year. After a quick Google search, I discovered that a LOT of people have thought of this. The list of TikTok videos of people discussing their 2025 bingo cards is impressive.
I considered what weird occurrences I might put on a 2025 bingo card:
- Aliens touch down on earth in full daylight and find the business end of a gun in their face.
- Coal makes a comeback.
- Mike Johnson loses his position as speaker of the house.
- Alex Jones sincerely apologizes for the hurt he caused by spreading hate and lies.
I think one of these things has a good chance of happening this year. I will let you guess which one.
Examples of the bingo card meme collected from TikTok.
I could also make a bingo card of the amazing things that I think (or at least hope) will happen in 2025:
- Congress cuts their pay and benefits to provide more funding for education.
- Churches band together and follow in the steps of Jesus to eradicate homelessness and hunger.
- No one ever again goes bankrupt due to medical bills.
- The US focuses on developing green initiatives to reduce our impact on the environment.
This is an uplifting, but losing bingo card. I also have no control over any of these things happening.
Rather than spinning on the negative or dreaming about lofty goals that I generally can’t directly influence, I have decided to create an aspirational bingo card that I can take regular, daily action to complete. Below is a list of actions I (or any one of us) can complete for this bingo card:
- Stop what I am doing and play with my cats.
- Pick up trash in my community.
- Write a heartfelt letter (not an email) to a friend and mail it.
- Donate money or food to a local food pantry.
- Donate to a cause I support.
- Volunteer for 1 hour in my community.
- Get involved with a local organization.
- Write my representative/senator about a topic I care about.
- Get to know one of my neighbors.
- Buy a cup of coffee for someone anonymously.
- Leave the quarter in my Aldi’s cart.
- Hold the door for someone.
- Take a friend out for lunch or a beverage.
- Write (and mail) a thank you note to someone.
- Donate money to support a local scholarship.
- Purchase something from a local store.
- Mediate for 10 minutes.
- Walk or bike to work one day.
- Spend an hour in nature with no cell phone/headphones on.
- Tip your server/hair stylist 10% more than I normally do.
- Buy a round for the kitchen.
- Spend 15 minutes really listening to someone else.
- Make amends with someone.
- Read a book from my local library.
- Explore the non-book benefits available at my local library.
- Listen to something or read something from a favorite teacher (i.e. Brene Brown, Dan Harris, Richard Rohl, or someone else who helps me become a better person).
- Tell someone I love what they mean to me.
- Call or visit a family member.
- Pay someone a compliment.
- Be kind to someone I don’t know.
- Share an uplifting quote or positive story on social media.
- Turn off or click away from a news story or article spreading hate, anger, or fear.
- Speak truth to a lie or misleading information.
- Learn more about media literacy and how to fact-check.
- Organize a phone-free gathering.
- Take a 24-hour (or 1-week) social media break.
- Practice the pause before responding
- Ask if what I are saying is true, necessary, and kind before I speak.
- Check-in on an elderly neighbor.
- Bake something and share it with neighbors/friends/coworkers.
- Invite someone I’d like to get to know for dinner.
- Pay off a kid’s lunch debt.
- Volunteer to walk a dog from my local shelter or rescue.
- Learn a fact that delights me.
- Pay off someone’s library debt.
- Donate a “luxury item” (like a box of cake mix) to a food pantry.
- Talk to a local school teacher and learn what supplies their classroom needs. Buy some of the supplies for them.
- Be a lunch buddy at a local elementary school.
- Donate to help pack backpacks for the local backpack program.
- Install and maintain a Free Little Library (or Free Little Pantry).
- Donate menstrual products to a food pantry (or the Packer Pantry).
- Donate baby supplies to a food pantry or other similar organization that supports new mothers.
- Write a thank you card to someone whose yard decorations I enjoy. Leave it in their front door.
- Tell someone with a new baby or young kids that they are doing a great job.
- Snow blow the walk for a neighbor.
- Visit a nursing home.
- Pay to have an animal spayed or neutered.
- Paint a rock with a positive message and/or pretty art and leave it in the park.
- Volunteer to coach (or help with) a youth league.
Above are the options some friends and I created. The list of positive things you could include on a bingo card is endless, most of these items take about 15 minutes to complete, and all focus around a common idea: kindness. Practicing kindness in our daily lives creates ripple effects that spread far into the world. Each time we practice kindness we feel better and we make someone else’s day better. In turn, that person is more likely to practice kindness and so on. It’s amazing how practicing an attitude of kindness can spread to make your area of the world a better place.
You can create a simple Kindness Bingo card using MSWord (or Google Docs) and a 5×5 table. There are also numerous free online bingo card creation websites you can use to create your bingo card. First, you type in the items you want to complete, then, you play black-out bingo. I suggest rather than making the center square FREE, make that square a nice thing for yourself:
- Take yourself to lunch.
- Sit in the sun and enjoy a cup of hot chocolate, coffee, or whiskey – whatever your favorite beverage.
- Buy yourself a new book (from your local bookstore of course).
- Treat yourself to a movie.
- Soak in a hot bubble bath.
There is no luck to this type of bingo game, but there are a lot of benefits to you, your family and friends, and your community. The benefits multiply quickly and are more valuable than $5 or $10 I won playing bingo as a kid.
May your 2025 bingo card be full of kindness.