“My New Year's resolution is to simply remember to write 2013 instead of 2012,” read one of a billion Facebook memes, our only real demonstrations of culture. The human condition, confirmed with 21,000 likes and 26,000 shares, is a little problematic. It suggests the twin possibilities of a collective, generation-wide plunge into attention disorders and the sad truth that no one really cares.
The passage of time is mockery on the wind. But it isn’t meant to be so bland a punctuation. The lifelong acceptance of New Year’s Day has caused it, and the following information shift, to occupy some unexciting portion of our brains. Current pop-stars will lip synch on TV. People in New York will kiss. We’ll drink and go to sleep: same-old, same- old.
But now comes the time to let out, like the last gasp of gas from flat Coca-Cola, a timeworn, hopeful message. The New Year brings opportunity. Time absolves the sins of the past and asks us to forget and be reset. We take this as a reason to say we’ll grow thinner, we’ll read more, and we’ll help others. Or, like the noble meme says, to just remember the basics in an age of tenuously balanced spinning plates. We win some; we lose some and, if we are fortunate enough to meet the next year, start over again. It’s human nature at its finest, this New Year’s deal, and destined for the flyover territory of the mind. But is there any life to the blasé expectation of change?
The truth lies somewhere – just not where it’s expected. Truth is a little coy, you understand. It wants to impress you after repeatedly letting you down. It’s vindictive, catty, and wants nothing to do with what you think. The unknown can be scary because we don’t know what to expect, but this is the beauty of new experiences.
On the micro-level of a single life, it will always be a sort of changing of the rounds in a pinball machine. One lever lifts, and the other drops with chaos theory steady at the joystick: looking for a high score. In short, expect to gain jobs and lose jobs, fall in and out of love.
On the macro-level, it’s more of a pseudo-science. Seven billion plus undulating persons create a mosaic of difference. The daily news does its best to catch up. Advances come in the fields of technology and war mongering. A Martian rock falls to the Sierra desert, a roving spacecraft maps peculiar dunes on the same red planet, and there is a re- calculation of the casualties in Syria.
We dance with a chubby South Korean to his unintelligible song or imitate Jackie Chan in the face of our debt ceiling. If given a choice, everyone would just rather dance. But the New Year brings the addition of new tiles to the mosaic, some of which we think we can predict. Will the job market improve? Will the next tablet computer dissolve our capacity to wear down, to bore or forget?
If you just take a sick day from your job and flip through channels in the pink bunny slippers of an analyst, the New Year and the open questions of the Old Year will show their beauty. You wonder, at the very least, if we will pretend to ride elephants in 2013.
