going full galaxy brain to say that we only have calendars at all because at a certain point a long time ago some (not even all!!) societies decided they needed a way to organize their experience of time to better coordinate with one other
but happy “new” “year” anyway

It can be helpful to think of a “year” as something we pack up and move on from, and a “new year” as something we look ahead to. But it can also feel arbitrary, and make you feel weird, cut off, like you have nothing to “show for” this parcel of time

marking time can be a powerful meaning-making ritual, it’s good we do it, but it’s only as meaningful as you want/need it to be. if it feels better to wake up on new year’s day the same you as the day before, halfway through some process you’re only halfway through, that’s fine

I think we all tend to participate in a delusion that the “new year” is something that we wait to happen to us passively rather than something we create. the “new year” is just an idea that can be as useful to you as you want it to be, no more & no less

“2020” is a concept that a lot of us freighted with a lot of meaning and bad juju because we want to be able to have something to point to to explain how bad everything feels, something we can then cast off and expel when the sun sets on Dec 31. we do it every year

“2020” is conventional label that we used for a conventional unit of time that was full of more visibly turbulent events than usual
but obviously “the year” did not have some kind of will or agenda to ruin our lives

“2020 jokes” are an ok way to blow off steam but we shouldn’t let them reinforce a sense of casual fatalism. The world is what it is and our lives are what they are because of a complex cocktail of chance and choice, new every day, every moment, irrespective of a “bad year”

this actually makes me hopeful. I’m looking forward to 2021 not because I think it will be a “better year,” ontologically, but because the present is all we have, and that’s the new word we’re going to use for the present, the reality we’re going to keep creating together

(I realize it probably sounds like I’m high, I promise I’m not)