A number on the calendar

Posted on: 31 December 2025

In a few hours the number will change. 2025 will become 2026, fireworks will light up the sky, someone will pop bottles, someone else will kiss, and the world will pretend for a few minutes that this transition means something.

I've never been good at New Year's Eve. There's something I miss in all this collective enthusiasm for an event that, looked at closely, is purely arbitrary. The first of January is no more "new" than the fourteenth of March or the seventh of September. It's just the day after the thirty-first of December. The sun rises, sets, the Earth keeps turning. The only thing that changes is a number.

Yet here I am, like every year, trying to understand what others feel. In recent years I've spent these evenings at dinners at the homes of people I barely know, invited by friends of friends, inserted into groups where I'm the semi-unknown face. I do it as a kind of personal anthropological research: to see if others have the same boredom I have, or if I'm missing something.

The answer, so far, is that they seem genuinely to enjoy themselves. They laugh, toast, do the countdown with genuine enthusiasm. And there I am, glass in hand, trying to do the same. Sometimes I almost manage.

The subtle irritation

It's not cynicism, or at least I don't think it is. It's more a form of subtle irritation at the rhetoric surrounding this moment. The old year departing and taking problems with it, the new year arriving laden with promises, the resolutions that last until the fifteenth of January, the "new year, new life" repeated like a mantra by people who'll do exactly the same things they did before.

There's an entire industry built on this fiction: motivational posts, courses starting in January, gyms that already know seventy per cent of this month's members won't see February, coaches selling "transformations" as if changing were a matter of deciding to do it on the right day of the year.

The calendar transforms nothing. People change when they change, if they change. And it's usually not the first of January.

What the first of January actually brings is another year of unforeseen things. It will be the same for 2026: events no one is anticipating will happen, roads that don't exist today will open, doors that seemed wide open will close. Reality, as always, will surpass any prediction in imagination. For better and worse, but above all in ways we can't even imagine.

Perhaps this is what bothers me about new year rhetoric: the illusion of control. The idea that we can decide how it will be, that our resolutions carry any weight against the chaos awaiting us. It's a form of modern superstition, a ritual to exorcise uncertainty by pretending we can tame it.

What remains

If I must find something of value in this transition, it's not in change. It's in continuity.

The things that remain carry more weight than the things that change. Relationships that survive the years, habits that have settled, values you don't need to rediscuss every January because they've become part of who you are. These are the foundations. The rest is surface.

That doesn't mean change is negative. When it's real, when it's evolution rather than rupture, when it builds on what was there instead of demolishing it, change has value. But it must emerge from something, not be declared at a table because it's the time of year when you're supposed to change.

The difference between evolution and revolution is that evolution maintains continuity. You're still you, recognisable, connected to who you were. Revolution instead promises to erase everything and start from zero. It's an attractive promise, especially at midnight on the thirty-first of December. But it's almost always a lie.

Thinking about myself: ten years ago I was already more reflective than I was twenty years ago. Twenty years ago I practically wasn't at all. There's been an evolution, slow, non-linear, with steps backward and detours. Today I think I'm almost mature. That "almost" will probably stay forever, and rightly so. Complete maturity would just be another way of stopping growing.

The glass as company

Tonight I'll probably be at one of those dinners. Or perhaps not, perhaps I'll stay home with a glass of wine and my thoughts. It depends how I feel in a few hours, how much energy I have to feign enthusiasm, how important it seems to participate in the collective ritual.

The glass of wine, in these cases, isn't for celebrating. It's company. Something to hold while you think, a personal ritual that has nothing to do with the countdown. Good wine requires time to appreciate, attention, presence. It's the opposite of the quick midnight toast where no one even notices what they're drinking.

There's a pleasure in being with your own thoughts while the world outside celebrates. It's not loneliness in the sad sense. It's more a form of intimacy with yourself, rare and precious. The noise outside, the fireworks, the shouts of joy, and you inside, in silence, taking stock without needing to declare it to anyone.

The imagination of the real

One thing the years have taught me is that reality has more imagination than we do. Whatever you're predicting for 2026, it probably won't happen. And things you're not even considering will happen instead.

This can be terrifying or liberating, depending on how you look at it. Terrifying if you need control, if your wellbeing depends on things going as planned. Liberating if you accept that unpredictability is the norm, not the exception.

After a certain number of years, you stop being surprised by surprises. Not because they no longer surprise you, but because you've incorporated surprise as a normal state. You know there will be something you don't expect. You don't know what, but you know it will be there. And in a way, this certainty of uncertainty is more solid than any prediction.

It's nice to think you can still be amazed. Perhaps. That "perhaps" isn't scepticism, it's caution. The capacity for amazement isn't guaranteed, it must be cultivated, protected from the cynicism that comes naturally after you've seen enough. Every now and then I wonder if I still have it. Every now and then I discover I do.

Almost mature

Twenty years ago I was a different person. Not in the banal sense that everyone changes with time. In the sense that I wouldn't recognise myself. The priorities were different, the way of being in the world was different, the reflectiveness I now take for granted simply wasn't there.

Ten years ago I was halfway. Already more aware, already more capable of stopping to think, but still convinced of many things that later proved to be illusions. Still racing towards objectives that today seem irrelevant.

Today I feel almost mature. It's a deliberately imprecise definition. Complete maturity doesn't exist, or if it does it's just another name for rigidity. Remaining "almost" means keeping space for doubt, for revision, for the possibility that tomorrow I'll understand something I don't understand today.

These three year-end posts, the tea, the review I don't do, and this evening with glass in hand, have been a way of sitting with these thoughts. Not to resolve them, not to draw conclusions, but to notice them. Sometimes that's enough.

From tomorrow

And from tomorrow, or rather the day after because the first of January is sacred to doing nothing, we start again.

Back to watching the world, trying to understand mechanisms, observing how systems and people do everything possible to harm themselves. Back to patterns, analyses, the attempt to see what others don't see or don't want to see.

It's what I know how to do, it's what interests me, it's the way I'm useful. These days of pause were necessary, but they're not my natural state. My natural state is curiosity about how things work, even when, especially when, they work badly.

2026 will bring its surprises. It will bring crises no one is predicting, successes where no one expects them, failures where everyone was certain of the opposite. It will bring new dynamics and ancient patterns repeating with different actors. And I'll be here observing, connecting, trying to understand.

It's not a resolution. It's not a promise. It's simply what I'll do, because it's what I do.

In the meantime, this wine won't drink itself. And midnight will arrive whether I'm ready or not.

Happy new year. Or as I prefer to say: happy continuation.