Hurlstone In Progress: Trying to enjoy the impossible – New Year’s Eve

Every year, on 31 December, the world collectively celebrates something I have never enjoyed. Maybe I see the New Year as a step closer to death or the world being destroyed by climate change – a kind of boring Mark Corrigan-esque viewpoint of despair. Meanwhile, the real reset, I have always thought, is September, the start of a new academic year when life actually changes, arriving with no fanfare, but maybe a bit of the same quiet dread.

Still, this year I decided to embrace the event. I hosted New Year’s Eve (a rarity) and even made and bought drinks for people – a level of generosity frankly uncharacteristic for my usual New Year’s scrooge persona and a move away from the grumpy, solitary state I usually like to inhabit, as you can’t do that if you have people round, it’s unsociable.

I don’t fully know where my hatred of the New Year comes from. Probably the pressure: the universal insistence that you must have the best night ever or else you are a doomed loser. If something is meant to be a great night, it makes me hate it instantly. Birthdays and Christmas get the same treatment from me, just to a lesser degree. I’ve become so skilled at managing my expectations that I now glide through major events with the emotional intensity of a damp cloth.

What I cannot embrace, however, is the ritualistic intensity some people bring to the New Year. One of my relatives decided to write their intentions on scraps of paper and burn them – indoors

This New Year felt slightly different, as if I had the sense to make some changes and the relief that 2025, the year of the snake and general hell, was finally over.

I’m not a New Year’s resolutions kind of person. Yet, while clearing out folders from my laptop, as the cloud was apparently full, I found a Word document labelled “READ IN 2026” that I had written to myself at the end of 2024. I expected bleakness, knowing what 2025 turned into, but it was disturbingly optimistic. It warned me to stop doing certain things that I absolutely did not stop doing. If anything, I doubled down and became more annoying.

The only thing I actually achieved this year was to “start writing.” However, two months ago, I ran out of any form of inspiration because second-year theory-based essays syphoned away the last of my creativity. Still, because 2025 was so underwhelming, 2026 – even if mediocre – cannot be worse. There are some simple things I could change to improve my life dramatically, like not going to bed at 5am and waking up at 4pm, looking like one of those old bears coming out of hibernation.

What I cannot embrace, however, is the ritualistic intensity some people bring to the New Year. One of my relatives decided to write their intentions on scraps of paper and burn them – indoors. The kitchen smelt of burnt matches for about a week. I tried to be supportive, through tightly gritted teeth. I wish I were the type of person who felt like engaging in small positive rituals – I guess it’s probably easier to keep expectations low than actually try to do something.

New Year’s Day means different things to different people; I see it less as a grand beginning but more as a stopping point, a kind of ‘enough of that!’ moment

Despite my rambling, I’m trying to enjoy the idea of a New Year. Not by any kind of self-reinvention, as that always ends in weirdness, but by drawing a line under the questionable decisions of 2025 so I do less wallowing and fewer dramatic internal monologues. However, I will do no such burning of intentions, no matter what the year of the horse is promising me.

This was the first New Year’s Eve in my memory that I actually enjoyed. Maybe because I was surrounded by friends or because it was a final jailbreak from 2025. New Year’s Day means different things to different people; I see it less as a grand beginning but more as a stopping point, a kind of ‘enough of that!’ moment.

I know I’m not unique in my New Year scepticism. I’m trying to keep it simple: treat it as a vaguely meaningful day I should probably try to see positively.