The dawning of a new year is and has been marked by the world’s cultures as a special occasion, meriting frivolous celebration and joviality for thousands of years. Across the globe, not always on the same date, but always every 365.25 days, people rejoice in the opportunities and excitement that awaits them in the coming year, waving banners, holding religious and cultural ceremonies, setting off fireworks, just on this one eve. The past is now over; the present is now the future. For this one shining day Earth’s huddled masses can allow themselves to be optimistic, because with the purchase of each new calendar comes the ability to fulfill long pondered goals and dreams. Right?
Well, the thing is, I’ve got some bad news – the new year means nothing. Did you think that your credit card company was going to send you a letter telling you that, since it’s a new year, they’ve decided to lower your rates? Do you think that warlords in Darfur will let their child soldiers go and have a nice dinner with their mothers? Is someone’s cancer going to recede, just because of such a special occasion? And I would assume that the ticking of a hand from one second to another on a clock somewhere in Greenwich will in some way cause world peace and end poverty (just give it a year)? While these admittedly facetious rhetoricals paint a grotesque and seemingly unrealistic portrait of our naïve expectations regarding the new year, they are not far off the mark. As the new year comes, I look around me and see nothing but excitement about the things the future of 2010 has in store for us. Excitement that I found absent in most people throughout 2009.
The problem that I have with this reactionary optimism to the new year is twofold; on the one hand, I dislike having to witness people almost deliberately dupe themselves (rest assured, that is what they are doing), and on the other, the sense of victory some people feel at the beginning of the year causes in them a debilitating elation that in many ways can hamper the social, scientific, and other progress that they are so prematurely celebrating. The problem is even more pronounced this year(though not as bad as 2000), since this is the beginning of a new decade, the first new decade in 10 years! It seemed like every day for almost a month my media smorgasbord was full of firsts of the decade, bests of the decade, things that happened in the last decade, etc. Hell, I could even say that this is the best essay I’ve written all decade, and technically I’d be telling the truth; it’s the only one so far.
But the real truth is the only reason this specific place in Earth’s orbital path around our star is in any way remarkable is because we arbitrarily label it as such. There is absolutely no noticeable change in such a small time frame that could change anything. The new year is just an excuse, something upon which to heap our unfulfilled prophesies, aspirations, fears, and adoration. The passage of a year is a great reason to give someone a medal, or buy a new car, or make a list of the top ten of something, or “turn over a new leaf”, and we want, need, to do that, because it makes us feel good, feel like accomplished human beings. But in reality, we aren’t incredibly sincere about these thing when we do them around this time, and we don’t like to maintain such a healthy optimism throughout the entire year – that would take too much effort, and we abhor effort. Instead, we use the time around the new year, the new decade, the new era, to let out all of our positive thoughts, so that they don’t get in the way of our lazy cynicism for another 12 months.
Now I don’t think that committing to a new diet, or breaking up an unhealthy relationship, or quitting your dead end job, or being nicer to your mother-in-law, or telling someone how great they are at what they do, are bad things to do. I just think that by waiting to resolve to change ourselves until a period when we can easily forget and fall off the wagon, we do ourselves and the world a huge disservice. When there is a time that everyone uses as a starting point for such large enterprises, failure is always an option – it’s not looked down upon, or mocked. In fact, it could be argued that it is more of an American tradition to drop off our New Year’s resolutions than to maintain and fulfill them. And the thing hindering us from making such great changes has nothing to do with the difficulty of the tasks, or our ability to carry these things out. It is entirely because of our outlook that we fail, and this outlook is inexorably bound with the passing of each year.
Really, all I wish is that we could make New Year’s resolutions every single day of our lives, because in reality every single morning, when we wake up, and every single step that we take as we walk to the bus, and every bite of our morning everything bagel, marks the beginning of a new year, a new decade, a new millennium, and every one of these moments is a moment in which it’s worth it to put our best foot forward. I don’t want the New Year’s celebrations to end; I want them to continue, to carry themselves out unto their final fruition, until through maintaining hope and determination to change, we can do all those things we saved for the failed resolution season, and we can really change the world.
