History is better than self-help when it comes to facing another year.
The first of January is not exactly an arbitrary date to start the next show, but it is a date that has moved, and it isn’t celebrated as a new year by all cultures. The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, falls on the new moon of the seventh month of the Jewish lunisolar calendar—at the end of September or start of October. The Chinese New Year falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice. That’s 17th February in 2026.
How does this help? Humans are always finding excuses to do battle and to argue, nationally as well as personally, and with a relentlessly negative mainstream media and clickbait social media, it’s easy to focus on the fights. How could we not get depressed by everything that divides and destroys us? Yet, when I look at the extravagant new year celebrations of so many cultures—past and present—I see that while the dates may be different, our feelings and impulses are not. Whatever our circumstances and beliefs, a deep instinct to mark the passage of time connects us.
Humans love to party. This is not trivial: it matters that we come together—and not to fight but to celebrate, especially around a date that calls us together, not pushes us apart.
Wherever you travel in the world, people like to mark the new year. To draw a line under the past, to have a sense of beginning again. A feeling that next year could be better. That we can do something about what is unsatisfying in our lives. That we can work towards a more peaceful world, especially following the message of the Christmas season, a message of peace and hope, love and faith.
You don’t have to be a Believer to believe in these things.
New year is a pause point. A moment in time to reflect and consider, but also to celebrate. To celebrate the good things that we want to carry forward, and to be determined to change what holds us back. Is that self-help or history? Maybe it’s both.
In 46BC, Julius Caesar declared that New Year’s Day across the Roman Empire would fall on 1st January to celebrate the Feast of Janus. Janus is the god of beginnings, but also the god of gateways—a lovely image—as we pass through time.
Janus has two faces, one that looks to the past and one that looks to the future. It is impossible to live a meaningful life if we are unable to face up to the past—what we have done, what has been done to us—yet we must still be prepared to go through the gateway. To let things be over. To let the past be the past. Psychoanalysis has a phrase, “the old present”, which describes those who cannot live in the now, but only in the past and according to its effects. In cases of trauma, this is obvious. It’s why it takes so long to recover from terrible things that have happened to us. We can’t forget those things—suddenly being airlifted to a different life doesn’t rewire our brains. Our hope is to untangle the past from its stranglehold on the rest of our lives. This applies just as much to a sentimental attachment to time that is gone. That golden age. We can’t let go. We have to be able to let go.
For those who have lost loved ones, where life now seems utterly meaningless, facing the future can feel impossible. And we can’t do it alone. We might not be able to celebrate a new year that is our first year of loss, but we can hold hands with others—family, friends, community—and find some comfort in that connection, because we will all, at some time in our lives, suffer a similar grief.
Humans are social creatures—even the introverts, like me. I often have to force myself to join a gathering, but with those who care for us, it’s the living experience of what remains, as well as the acknowledgement of what is lost.
We know there is a loneliness epidemic in our society, especially among young people, who are trying to find friendship and love online, who go out less, who often work from home. Building a worthwhile life can’t happen in solitary confinement. That’s a method of punishment, not a lifestyle choice. For those who are prisoners of conscience, belief can sustain them. For those who are forced inwards, whose normal connections with others are absent, paranoia and mental illness follow. The loneliness epidemic and the mental health crisis we face in much of the west are connected. Connected by our disconnection from the ordinary life that ordinary humans need. A life that starts with each other.
The hatred whipped up by the likes of Trump and the Maga megaphones, and the Farage barrage in the UK, is cynically intended to turn us against each other. To sow discord. To claim that nothing is true except the party line of the party faithful. To view the stranger with suspicion. That movement is unsustainable and will, I believe, lead to global war. Unless we are ready to tell and ready to hear a different story.
And that’s where history gives me hope. Homo sapiens isn’t so smart right now—we seem intent on destroying the planet, our only home, and destroying each other. But, through all the atrocities and disasters of the past, we are still here. We made it. The future can’t be predicted by the past, but history is how we learn. That’s how it should be taught in schools: a history of the human back-and-forth. Progress here, regression there. Great gains and terrible loss. Not facts and figures that stand alone, but people’s lives. Feminism used to call it His Story, which has a lot of truth in it, but history is all of our stories—some told, countless not, and when we face our past we can renew and reclaim what is valuable, and start to change what is not.
The way we live is not a law, like gravity, with nothing to be done about it. The way we live is propositional; we make it up as we go along. That’s how societies change. It’s how progress happens. It’s also how we fall prey to conspiracy theories. How we detach outward reality from whatever conviction is filling our minds.
But it is, too, how we find meaning.
Meaning comes out of what matters to us. Small things and big things. At home and in the world. If nothing matters, there is no meaning. That humans create reality should be obvious by now. It’s not fate. It’s not a god. It’s not inevitable.
We have choices. Above all, we have a choice over our values. We don’t have to shrug and turn away. We don’t have to be cheats and liars. We don’t have to make our little world a worse place. We can make it a better place. History is packed with people like that, who refuse the selfish, cynical life of surfaces, where nothing goes deep and nothing matters, where it’s all about money and power and the ceaseless need for distraction.
There is something reassuring about millions of people acknowledging the significance of a moment
If some architect of unrest were designing a world guaranteed to make people mad and miserable, it would be this one.
Jean-Paul Sartre was wrong when he said, “Hell is other people.” It’s a good slogan for a welcome mat or a T-shirt, but it is fundamentally false. Hell is hating other people. Hell is having no connection with other people. Hell is using other people. Hell is destroying the lives of other people. There is plenty of that in the past. Do we want to carry it forward?
You may say, well, what I believe and what I value make no difference. That’s not true either. When life is impossible we make the effort, perhaps because only the impossible is worth the effort.
New Year has moved around in the west. Shakespeare would have celebrated it on 25th March—the Feast of the Annunciation (Mary gets the news she’s pregnant), otherwise known as Lady Day. Agricultural rents often still fall due on that day, not long before we in the UK end the financial year. It’s all connected to the spring equinox around 20th March—the renewal of life for Mother Nature in the northern hemisphere.
There is something reassuring, though, about millions of people acknowledging the significance of a moment, even though it is both changeable and cultural. The cliché of moving on can be cruel. It is also part of life, and necessary.
Humans are a strange mix of what we have inherited—including what we reject from that inheritance—and where we are willing to start again. We do not live from day to day as animals do. We live outside of time as well as inside it. We can see far back, even if we can’t see far ahead.
But perhaps we can see further ahead than we recognise. We are more than biological realities caught in time. We are patterns of information too. The pattern that is you is bigger than your CV or your achievements or failures. More than the family album. If we could understand ourselves as pattern and process—a changing flow of self that is only partly caught by the net of details and statistics that track us—then perhaps we could see that meaning isn’t a “thing” or even a destiny. Meaning is what we create in the course of a lifetime.
Every thought, every feeling, every action, makes or unmakes a meaningful life.
At the turn of year, alone and with others, there is always another chance.
