We’re on the other side of it now. But I’ll bet your celebrations felt considerably muted this year.
In fact, the only thing that felt more dead than the party energy, were the resolutions. As the whole internet is fighting to tell you, we’re finally past this hollow offering to our future selves.
That is, unless you’re on TikTok, where the 2022 personal rebrand trend is it’s own fresh hell that deserves a breakout deepdive (let me know if you want to hear it!)
Not to brag, but I’ve long resisted New Year’s resolutions. Partially because I never kept them, so it just felt like a pre-cracked promise. Also, they bummed me out.
While I’m all for a fresh start (I see you spring rain, summer solstice, hell even the Easter Bunny), the idea of starting a year by cataloguing everything I didn’t like about the last one (and myself) seemed like a drainer.
We so cheerfully ask: What’s your resolution? But really are probing: What don’t you like about yourself?
Babe, I’ll tell you. You’ll just want to pull up a chair.
Recently a journalist asked me for a Sunny Nihilist’s take on popular resolutions. It was an interesting, although difficult, request. But it made me appreciate how much my journey with nihilism has divorced me from this kind of thinking.
I’ve been doing a lot of press recently for the US release of my book, and encountering the same conversations again and again (not that I’m sore at the chance to talk about myself). It’s interesting to see what themes stick with people. One that keeps coming up is how much of our lives we spend considering the past and future.
I read once that we dedicate the bulk of our consciousness to thinking about things that have happened, or may happen. Leaving only a sliver of our actual existence to deal with, you know, our actual existence.
We treat the past and future as such solid, knowable things. Building our lives around memories and expectations of them. It’s wild to consider the reality that they don’t physically exist. They’re vapour, imprints, imaginings that completely obscure our real life.
New Year’s is a ritual dedicated to such distractions. It’s about what we could be and just were. But not this year. After so much reality, no one was interested in fantasies.
At the considerably quieter party I attended (after rapid testing), people discussed how they weren’t going in for 2022 resolutions. Years of destabilisation and chaos made the idea of planning anything (even that very party) feel naively optimistic. How could we promise each other (or ourselves) certainty when we were barely able to trust our bodies or the particles hanging invisibly in the air between us?
Writing that, it reads kind of grim. But weirdly, it wasn’t. For the historic record, it was a great party. Burned by the past, distrustful of the future, we were totally present. All we knew for sure was that right now we felt well and were happy. An event we hoped for had come together. Meals we planned had been served. Drinks chilled at home were shared. We had a night, a moment, a flash of joy. A second of pleasure within chaos that we had no idea of knowing if or when we’d have again.
Of course this is true for every New Year’s. We’re never guaranteed another. Yet we approach them with so much bravado and arrogance. There will always be another year, another party, another fresh start, another opportunity. Now we recognise that hubris. Accept the past and future as misty illusions. The present, as challenging as it is, is all that exists.
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