A year ends and another begins — but is this pause meaningful, or just a habit we have collectively agreed to follow?
Perhaps a more appropriate title should be How the Current Year Ends. Do we really need to review the year gone by? Should we recollect what happened during the year, look at what went well and what did not, review the goals and expectations we had, and compare them against actual outcomes? Should we extract lessons from the year and let them form the basis for how we want the next year to look?
The ending of a year and the commencement of another is not a natural phenomenon. It is a construct, largely created by the Western world, and not even one that humans across the globe have uniformly followed through history. From a terrestrial perspective, what importance does it really hold? Or does it matter at all when some people decide to call it a year-end?
Should this moment be treated as just another arbitrary point in the larger scheme of things — a convenient pause to look back roughly one year, take stock, and plan ahead? Is such an exercise necessary? Is it even useful?
One philosophy urges us to live in the present, moment by moment. If that is the case, should anyone bother with reviews and plans at all? If we are meant to respond to events as they happen and live in the now, what benefit do reviews and forward planning actually provide?
Events unfold regardless. Someone, somewhere in the world, does something — or responds to a natural or celestial occurrence — and that action creates ripples. Others respond in turn. Those responses trigger further actions. And so life continues, percolating from one to another, sometimes looping back to the very point where it began.
We are often responding first and continuing habitually thereafter, as one event triggers another in an almost endless chain. Take Covid, for example. Not only during the crisis, but even now, long after it has subsided, actions continue across the world to respond better should something similar occur again. These responses are not limited to medicine alone. Financial planning, both at personal and corporate levels, is still shaped by the possibility of such events repeating.
All of this is a ripple effect — of something that may or may not have been triggered by human action.
So does it all reduce to this — that we are merely responding? Is there anything meaningful we can plan or prepare for that has never happened before? We do not prepare for the Earth shifting to a different orbit, or the moon drifting away. Nor do we seriously plan for a society with no governance, where everyone has complete freedom to live exactly as they wish.
So what, then, are we really planning or preparing for?
Should we instead focus on upgrading ourselves — technologically, strategically, or emotionally — so that we respond better when events arise? Would that, in turn, make our lives better?
If that were true, then each year of our lives should have been progressively better than the previous one. Our lives today should be far better than they were, say, forty years ago — not merely in financial, technological, or societal terms, but in how content or happy we feel.
I do not know whether the burden of school homework and examination stress in my childhood was ten or a hundred times harder than the loss of stamina I feel now, or the emotional stresses of family and society that come with adulthood.
If problems arrive like waves in a sea, I am not convinced that preparing for the future truly helps. At least from a review of the past several decades, it does not appear to do so. Experience anyway helps us do better from past events, but we continue to be equally unprepared for the future.
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