The Turn of the Year

The turn of the year . . . what a joke. But a bad one. A depressing one. Suddenly, millions and millions of people feel the need to use explosives to celebrate the calendar changing one digit, and at midnight they go crazy with joy. I mean, they hardly ever smile so broadly as they do then, and they all hug and kiss, and some actually even jump with joy. What the hell are they so happy about? I look at them and feel half a fool for not understanding in the least.

“HAPPY NEW YEAR!” they will say two hundred times over the course of a few days, and I hadn’t even recovered from the nauseating “MERRY CHRISTMAS!” bombardment just last week. I only want to hide from their happy new years until finally they stop spamming that stupid sentence, but their happy new years slip through the cracks, just like their merry christmases did, and they bother me with that nonsense via mail and e-mail, and at the end of every damn conversation I am unlucky enough to hold just before the end of the year.

But I can’t tell them to stick their happy new years somewhere damp and dark, and that their best wishes make me want to vomit, because they ‘mean so well’. What they actually mean, probably unknowingly, is that they are regurgitating what everyone else is saying because it seems the normal thing to do. But it doesn’t mean anything to me, just like “How are you?” doesn’t mean anything to me. Say it a thousand times and it will mean hardly anything ever again. If I told people “Suck my balls” a thousand times they’d know I didn’t mean that either, so the ‘best wishes’ become only a collection of meaningless random words you say over and over because you ‘have to’.

And when someone wishes you a happy new year, you’d better wish them well, too, or you are an asshole for not participating in some meaningless custom you do not agree with. At least at religious holidays you can say “I’m not religious” when they wish you a happy whatever, and be done with it, not having to say it back. Somehow, “I don’t celebrate New Year’s” appears to be completely unacceptable, and they absolutely expect you to wish them well too.

There are and always will be those ignorant fucks that blindly cheer and party and go wild over December changing to January, a seemingly innocuous event oddly similar to eleven other events that take place during a year, none of them being special in any way whatsoever, unless you count having to make your tax declaration before the end of the fiscal year - sort of the Antichrist of New Years.

Why celebrate this ‘holiday’? If the earth was a little closer to or farther from the sun the year wouldn’t have lasted 365 days, so that’s nothing special. But if a year lasted 400 days they’d celebrate this nonsense too, and for what, the earth moving around the sun? What’s so special about that? It’s been doing that for billions of years. But they will cheer and they will hug one another and they will wish each other a happy new year until recording the sentence once and just playing all those fuckers a tape would seem much more efficient, and hardly anyone will stop to think why they are truly celebrating this event that is actually only an event because people are making it so. As with everything, ‘meaning’ exists only when people make it up.

What I believe is that the vast majority of people is so insecure about their lives that they want to believe in new beginnings, even when they’re made up, or at least arbitrary. Hence the idiotic New Year's resolutions that are expressed at the turn of the year (only to fail in most cases, and to be repeated for years or decades on end). They need to believe that things can get better for them, and that a new year means a new chance. Some may believe this so fervently that they are actually brimming with joy and hope at the turn of the year, and others are just along for the ride, since the wave cannot be stopped anyway, and they might get a good party out of it. Besides, standing still when a wave hits you, no matter if you hate the wave with all your heart and both your balls, doesn’t seem like the best of ideas to most people. Which is how you cease to be a thinking individual and become one of the masses, lost in the throng.

But there are more ways to get lost. Knowing that everyone is having a good time, thought through or no, and not wanting any part of it, really, but not wanting to be alone either while everyone is partying, is quite tormenting, to say the least. Everyone wants to belong, and feeling you are almost literally one in a million not to want to participate in what seems like global lunacy quickly produces a sense of loneliness not often rivalled. Thinking you have the right of it (as everyone does), feeling you possess at least one bit of wisdom more than others, does not mitigate the sense of being lost in an endless desert, with no one to understand you and no one to love, nor to love you.

It is then that you feel the weight of the milestone of failure that you are carrying through that wasteland: while people everywhere are celebrating the new year, the new beginning, you are aware only of the failures of the last - in my case, my failure to die. And every time I have to listen to “Happy New Year!” their easy ignorance reminds me of how unhappy the new year will most likely be for me. It is not easy, discarding hope. But if carrying around false hope feels all the more painful to me, how is it that the masses effortlessly let the hope of the good to come fill them with a delirious joy bordering on madness?