To be perfectly honest, most of them have lost their lustre as I enter my 50s. Everyone acknowledges that they made it through another year of challenges and talk about what they want to do that’s “new”.
Why are we doing this stupid ritual? It’s a mark on a lunar calendar. The solstice is already in the bag and we are going to get closer to the sun. What kind of pagan shit is this? It’s twenty fucking twenty-three. We’re not going to crash into it yet or be cut adrift from it. No mature human save for the religious should be making a huge deal about the planet moving, and no one at all should be connecting it with some kind of personal renewal, much in the same way we only have Christmas as the impetus to be giving. I thought by now we would have been done with this kind of New Age crap, but I guess it’s still the New Age and I will just have to get used to the idea that many of us are still participating in some small way in this flaky shit without the drugs and cults and fucking. Some fun this is. I guess it’s just been that way and there is no point in resisting.
Yes. We are all getting older and a year closer to dying. The planet didn’t get hit by an asteroid. Maybe we didn’t catch a possibly fatal disease that has killed millions. For some reason, celebration of these things seems strange. But, I suppose when times are troubled, this is just normal human behavior. Being missed by Death is something we fixate on as the only animal on earth that knows very well it is going to not be alive someday and that really gets into our high functioning, neurotic monkey brains and causes us to hope for more life, more and more of goddamned life, which can be much, much worse than death for the brave and the afflicted. How greedy of us, those who are intact and pain-free.
I guess it comes down to another old-timey belief, that of being lucky. I suppose our dipshit European ancestors brought that idiocy with them to land that was not New at all. To the people we killed and subjugated to live here, New wasn’t even a thing, I think. Time wasn’t worth much to Native Americans, although that may be too much a blanket statement given how many tribes were here and I suppose their beliefs were manifold. But I guess when your life is fraught with danger, on a ship whose destination the sailor isn’t quite sure of, these are things you believe in. When you make land before lack of food and potable water and disease wipe you out, it’s not surprising that each succession of European immigrants fell to their knees when we got off the boat and thanked whatever the fuck they thought helped them make it.
Lucky is horseshit-chance, however, is not. No one is watching over us. Sorry to burst your bubble.
When you get right down to it, anything can happen, which sounds like I’m scraping up against a version of Murphy’s Law without the fatalism. And perhaps that’s why we gird ourselves for the next 365 day long block of time in our lives by overlaying hopes and goals over the fact that we are alone, unless we have people who love us. We want order, because the chaos makes us want to throw up. If there is any god or goddess, it is Eris-our lady of perpetual confusion. She’s the closest I will ever come to acknowledging the supernatural-her fingerprints are all over this place, whatever it is, after all. Only on Earth does the universe look like there’s a purpose to it. You don’t have to look far to know that is simply not true. Look at your own life. That shit is fucked the fuck up.
In closing, roll with the punches, don’t think too much about oblivion, go crazy if you need to, I guess. I do not generally recommend it, because it’s a bitch to get it under control once you have lost said control. I won’t advise you, it’s a bad idea to listen to a sick person about sanity. The apple is yours. Don’t get a big head about it. It’s above your station to think of how favored you are too much.