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Happy Old Year
It seems to have become fashionable — even de rigeur — to observe the end of every year with “Good riddance!” It’s a trend I’ve noticed for the last several years, but it has doubtless been going on longer than that. Every December 31, we’re all inundated with online commentary insisting that the year now ending has been a terrible one, and we’re glad to finally see the back of it. Often it’s just a throwaway comment in a story about something else, repeated as if it goes without saying (“It was an awful year, but there were some interesting phones released!”). It’s predictable, and it’s tiresome.
I’m not claiming that every year is a good one. But it’s no less reasonable to say that every year is a bad one, and that’s the impression one would get by surveying the online chatter from each December. My bet is that most of these comments come from people whose lives are actually going fine, but it’s a knee-jerk reflex to sound disgruntled all the time. I suppose the reasoning must be that contentment results only from ignorance, so griping and complaining are a badge of intelligence and awareness. But words have an effect, and I find it depressing to be surrounded by so many people who are so determined to be unhappy (or at least to portray themselves as unhappy).
If you’re someone who has genuinely had a bad year, then I understand. (I’ve been there; for me, 2002 was my Year of Hell, a year I don’t ever want to see repeated in my life.) I hope the end of the year brings you some sense of turning the page, and that 2020 brings better things.
But to the habitually disaffected Internet commenters who just parrot the received wisdom that it was a lousy year, I would say this: Give it a rest. Why not go for a little originality, and say something about the things that were good about the year? I bet if you try, you can think of something.
Published in General
Funny, I have never really compartmentalized my “year”. I think I really have it strongly impressed on my psychology that the year begins in September as in a school year. I also was born in September and that might have something to do with it. In any case it always seems arbitrary and to say I had a good or bad ‘year’ almost doesn’t make sense to me.
I began to notice this. I do work where I see different sets of people once a year at different times. So people would commonly say, in June for example, “how was your year?” And it always stymied me for a bit. They must mean, since last June, and then I would find myself trying to asses that period of time.
I also wonder the worth of rating a somewhat arbitrary period of time. We can only know whether it was good or bad after the fact.
Certainly the idea of a new year with a new perspective is positive, and people can declare that “ bad” year over, or resolve to start anew as though the clock or the dropped ball in Times Square absolves the past. But we can do that every day if we want. We just don’t collectively do that.
I was a navigator for a long period of time. Navigation is the art of finding out where you are, where you are going, where you want to end up, and finding the difference between where you are and were you are going and where you want to be. To me rating a somewhat arbitrary period of time is automatic. That is the only way to figure out how fast (or slow) you are going.
And finding out where you were and where you are now tells you if you are going in the right direction. And very often, if you can even get to your destination. So, yeah, to me using a fixed day each year as a waypoint is what I do. It lets me know what corrections I need to apply to my course, or – if I cannot reach a desired destination – an opportunity to pick one I can reach. Seneca the Younger wrote “No wind blows in favor of a ship without direction.” Without a destination I have no direction.