Why New Year makes no sense

I am going to say something very controversial. You’re free to agree or disagree with me. These are my personal thoughts.

While I was working on some interesting ideas this evening, I realized something . It’s New year’s eve and I’m sitting in my room, working away and it’s surprisingly making me very happy. For a while I was confused. Why was I happy when I am working while I should be partying or spending time with people talking about how the year went? Have I become so lonely? Maybe I have, but that should have me sad. It didn’t. So there has to be some other reason. I started getting curious about this weird sense of comfort I was feeling on New year’s eve.

I turned off my phone, lights and any other possible distraction except the gentle music of flute in the background and started thinking more about this situation. The thinking led me to a very strange realization. Why should I be celebrating the new year in the first place?

Let’s look at it scientifically. What’s a ‘year’? It’s a concept of date and time, that we have created. In the nature, it is the time taken by the Earth to go around the Sun. And this, the earth has been doing for the last 3.6b years of its existence. We have realized this fact only in the last few thousand years. That brings me to the next question, what exactly does January 1st represent? It’s certainly not the date the earth started spinning around the sun. It’s an arbitrary point of time in space that our planet passes through every 365 days. Now what’s so special about this point? Nothing. Think about it, the new year is just another point in space like any other. It’s one among the 364 other points around the Sun that the Earth passes through. And the fact is, whether we want it or not, the Earth will pass through this point every year like it has been while we or our concept of date or time didn’t exist or when it ceases to exist.

This is what makes me question our idea of celebration of the event. What exactly are we celebrating here? What have we done for this moment to happen? Nothing. It’s not like we are putting effort to make the Earth spin around the sun and we celebrate one year of pushing the planet. It’s just a random day we all choose to go out, drink, burst crackers and wish each other for no logical reason. I mean, what makes January 1st so special that February 1st or March 1st or any other day of the year does not enjoy? It’s not like at 12am on January 1st the stars in the sky glow brighter or the trees start talking. We’re simply celebrating something we never really achieved.

If you’re still reading at this point, I appreciate your patience. Since I have made such blatant accusations on the humanity for celebrating New Year’s day, let me explain what I think we should be celebrating. We should be celebrating progress and success. We should celebrate events that mark a positive change we make in our personal lives or to the world. Events that bring joy or happiness in someone’s lives, be it our own or better, someone else’s, that’s something that deserves a celebration. And that way, we get an opportunity to celebrate way more. It frees us from the social obligation of celebrating on a particular day of the year whether it makes sense to celebrate or not. Till now I was trying hard to come up with a plan for the new year when I was not being sure about why I had to celebrate. Being comfortable about this idea has made me feel much more relaxed.

This idea holds true for another overly hyped day — the birthday. Truth be told, I do not understand what makes birthday so special. It’s just another day in our lives. It’s not like a major significant biological change happens in our body on our birthday. And we definitely didn’t make an effort to move to that day. The day just happened like any other day. The whole idea of celebrating it is just an arbitrary social concept that as a society we have constructed. And most of us feel obligated to celebrate the day by spending time and money when that time could be spent towards making some meaningful progress, which deserves a celebration.

And that’s when I got the answer to the question I first had. I was being happy working because I was making some progress in my life. I was learning something new and doing something I enjoyed doing. I was celebrating whatever I was doing by being happy and I did not feel the need of a fancy ‘New Year Party’ to be happy. If I was good enough, I can be productive everyday and be equally happy.

This brings me to set fire to the third and final random concept, the ‘New Year Resolutions’. If the new year really held a major significance, then all our resolutions would’ve stayed true. It doesn’t because a lot of us aren’t too serious about our resolutions. We just make them because it’s a socially accepted norm. It’s ‘cool’ to make a list of things and put it on our Facebook page to tell people all the cool things we ‘plan’ to do. We would probably do them if someone kept track of it for the next 364 days. But since it realistically doesn’t happen, most resolutions drop like dead leaves. Making a resolution on the New year’s day is just the same as making one on March 18th or September 7th or any other random day. The concept of January 1st being a special day, is just our mental conception and nothing more. For resolutions, 365 days is too far apart to keep up and when we can’t keep up our resolutions, we end up getting demotivated.

(In case you’re wondering how to break out of the invisible social forces that forces us to do things we don’t want to do, here’s an excellent article that talks more on this topic — http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html)

I instead propose we focus on making each day, a day of resolution. Waking up everyday and setting ourselves goals and targets that improves someone else’s life or our own life, puts us in a better position to achieve our goals and be happier. If we’re able to do this consistently, we do not need a random day to have a fancy phantom celebration to be happy or make one-time-resolutions to become better versions of ourselves. And that, is probably my new year’s resolution.

That said, I do like one thing about this time of the year. The discounts and offers that come up across stores. ;)

If you still think I talking BS and you want to celebrate the new year,I encourage you to go ahead. My startup will even help you with your party. Just ping me or go to www.eventosaur.com. You have every right to do whatever makes you happy. If you agree with me, thank you. Let’s spend time doing things that make sense to us.