Happy New Year, Mr. Sisyphus

It’s that time of year again. We’ve been in the cold for a few weeks now and the winter has become something not only blatantly present but expected for the foreseeable future.

I find December interesting for a few reasons. First because it’s a month where we spend copious amounts of time with folks we might not otherwise see. Second, because it marks an end to the calendar. This time of year tends to pair our feelings of grief and excitement tightly, like we’re stuck in a revolving door for the month. Let’s talk about that second part.

Now, as usual, we have failed to fully introduce the topic, but I’m hoping you’re used to that by now. I want to talk about this time called New Years because it’s culturally significant— the idea of ending the calendar year is something we orient ourselves around on a wide scale, and we have rituals and artifacts to match. 

Like all cultural phenomenon, we are subject to the implementation of values and practices at the micro level. It’s important to note that culture and societal values are replicated by masses of individuals and do not exist as some sort of separate entity from the individual behaviours of those who make up our communities. We learn cultural mores or how we engage with cultural phenomenon through the process of socialization, and as we get older we accumulate the means to approach cultural practices in a way that makes sense to us.

A few essays ago I spoke about sacred space, but this time I’m going to briefly talk about sacred time. If we remember from a few weeks ago, sacred is really just a property designated to what diverges from the ordinary; they don’t have to be religiously or even culturally significant. Holidays are sometimes both, but in an increasingly secular world, they tend to locate themselves among the latter (even with religious origins).

What I didn’t talk about in the last essay is a characteristic of sacredness which involves our motivations for obtaining or connecting to the holy. This motivation is essentially the desire to experience what is called a “reversion to source”. 

Right now, you’re probably like what the fuck? but I promise it’s not as abstract as it may seem. A reversion to source is another way of saying that we aim for a connection to a feeling of familiarity, sometimes tied tightly to feelings of home, belonging, connection and purity. These are all feelings we associate with divinity, but also friendship, beauty, nature, and family. “God” as a feeling can be so many things. So New Years, despite its equal sense of ending, can be presented as a cultural shift into what we deem to be a new slate, or a reversion to a perceivable origin. We get to start over. That might be what makes it most attractive, don’t you think?

When we begin to talk about origin and purity, we can also talk about “New Years Resolutions”, or these goals we set for ourselves to improve. Rooted in part on a value judgement, we develop lists of behaviours or circumstances we’d like the change. We’ve decided because of cultural affirmation that January 1^st is the day to finally get our shit together. Now, my goal isn’t to suggest that this is morally wrong, I have an ongoing list of goals myself. Instead, I hope to point out where these drives may come from and identify our pushes/pulls so that we may more comfortably orient ourselves as we approach this new year.

Now believe it or not, I really don’t want to talk about New Years all that much. I only mention it because it’s a time that we foster feelings of reflection, we make evaluations based on what is important to us, and where we diverge from the versions of ourselves that we hope to be. In short, I want to nip any hard self-judgements in the bud, and replace these with perspective, self-appreciation, and celebration.

Since we’re leading up to this time, I figured it would be a good idea to also talk about dissatisfaction. If New Years, like all sacred time is tied to a sense of refresh, then we must also talk about what we are hoping to leave behind. This implied nature of the impure, ordinary and in part, undesirable time. This is a bit black-and-white, but you get the idea.

These are the inferences made through what seems to be an omission of status; we direct our language toward the unknown future of possibility; only what we hope to see. But what does this mean for our current lives? What credit do we give for the goals we've already accomplished?

If we do talk about what we want to change about ourselves or our lives, I imagine the language can be riddled with covert self-judgement or simply a weight of dissatisfaction. That’s also black-and-white, but it’s what our brains tend to do.

So, we like some things about our lives, but there are these other things we want to change. That’s fine, and I hope we give ourselves the space to grow as honestly and authentically as possible. But dissatisfaction is a malignant feeling that likes to latch onto anything. If we decide these possibilities are far better than our lived realities, we’ve done the present moment a great disservice, and funny enough, a disservice to the goals that haven’t been achieved yet.

Okay, so now we’re ready to talk about what I really came on here to say which is about this funny human thing called Hedonic Adaptation, or the proclivity to return to a baseline level of happiness after we experience life changes. Now, what the fuck does this have to do with New Years? Well, if we assume that there are a bunch of things we’ll do in in the new year that will “fix” us, or drive us to this permanent sense of purity, it won’t. Bummer, but I’m not here to bum you out.

I’ve been reflecting on this tendency for humans to inherit the inner Sisyphus and our perpetual reinvention of the rock and the hill. How many years in a row do I need to decide to get my shit together? How many New Year’s resolutions before I ask myself what it is that I’m really striving for? When can I forgive the rock? When can I explore the hill? 

In part, I think this tendency comes from the general awareness that we are not perfect people. This is where a lot of our push for purity, or moral perfection, comes from. We designate behaviours or states of being that are morally desirable. They don’t have to be blatantly moral attributes. They can, for example, be beauty standards which are assigned a moral status without clear statement. Anyways, we decide this is exclusive. We don’t let ourselves in.

Our culture affirms our desire for purity and encourages rituals of resolutions and new behaviours to mark this change. New year, new you. We celebrate the incoming year with a type of anticipation that brings people to the streets to commemorate this shift among strangers (which might be my favourite part). We celebrate the uncertain year ahead; we disconnect from the year behind us. 

It is hard for me to view this celebration in a way that absolves our wishes of the weight of our fantasies. We want something different; our minds are excited by expansiveness of a world we haven’t met before. In my communities, I hardly hear about the year behind as much as I hear about what we want instead. What a perfect unseen world we can invent. What an imperfect world we reside in. 

I’m not in any way suggesting that goals are a waste of time. In fact, goals rely on fantasy and faith to come into fruition just as much as active participation. Instead, I am wondering how we can celebrate the past, our accomplishments, the strides we’ve made without coming back to this pattern of hedonic adaptation. 

So, New Years comes around, and we’ve spent the whole year accruing the debt of our imperfection and now is the time to pay your dues, so that they can be wiped clean for 2025. Despite the odds that you've accomplished quite a bit this year, the mind will lean more heavily on where we went wrong, or how we hadn't reached a goal "enough". This is a generalization, but it’s a reality for some folks who are especially hard on themselves and use goals and personal development as instruments of control. I think we all do this to some degree.

I want to challenge this, selfishly because in my reflection I’ve decided what I want life to look like and become somewhat resentful of the areas of my life that don’t look that way. I’ve curated a list of goals and behaviours to shift my circumstances, to get me closer to what I think will be the perfect life. That’s all fine and well but if I know that my level of life satisfaction is going to return to where it is now, that’s a real piss off, don’t you think? 

I think back to where I was January 1^st of last year. Despite the fact that I was humiliating myself on the streets of Toronto only 2 hours into the year, I had a wealth of ideas as to what I needed to do to fix my dissatisfaction. Yet here I am nearly a full year later with a totally different list, all with the same goal: to fix the dissatisfaction.

Now, I’ve accomplished a lot this year, and I risk sounding ungrateful when I present the honesty of my internal world, but this dissatisfaction is, as I said earlier, malignant. I’ve adapted to my new circumstances, increased wages, new opportunities and experiences. I want more. 

But when the more comes, I won't be there. At least if I stay in that path. I will be back with new expectations which will exclude my present reality from the status of perfection, and I will wish again next new years that I take on changes to get to where I want to be. The goalpost will move again. The rock will fall down the hill.

I took this free Science of Wellbeing course provided through Yale and they mention this sort of concrete list of things we tend to associate with increased levels of life satisfaction. Money, love, new house, better car. Statistically, we increase our level of life satisfaction momentarily when we receive these things, and then we return to our baseline. We want more again. How rude.

So now it is the end of another year my dear Sisyphus, your rock has returned, and you make more money than you ever have, you have love in your life, you got a new car. Now what? Why are you still unhappy? Are you stuck here forever?

The short answer is no. The long answer involves reminding ourselves that this is a human phenomenon. It’s not inherently ungrateful, it just lacks perspective. So how do we fix this? 

Well, the course goes into a number of methods to foil Hedonic Adaptation but I won’t dive into it too much. However, I will mention the one that stuck out to me the most which involves our most powerful and often offensive tools: our imagination. 

We love to compare our lives with this unidentifiable sense of purity, of our best versions outlined by ourselves and ourselves alone. But where have you been? What have you gone through?

The benefit of looking backwards (in short periods) is developing an appreciation for our current lives. We know through tremendous research that recognizing growth has an actual impact on where our baseline life satisfaction resides.

I house myself inside the archetype of a starving artist, working essentially three jobs to keep my head above water as the economy squeezes us out and I feel bummed about it. But then I think about last year.

Now the trick to this is not to consider that version of ourselves as a whole, but to instead imagine our current selves or our circumstances embedded in those of the past. Could I handle these situations with the same money I made last year? Could I cope in my current life without the tools I’ve learned or obtained since then?

I’d be fucked if I was in the same economic situation last year. My dog wouldn’t have been able to receive the surgery I’m still paying off. My debts would be out of control. My tight budget would be more suffocating. In thinking this way, I’m increasingly grateful that I’m working three jobs (despite being fucking exhausted). My dog is healthy, and I have breakfast. Good enough for me.

Now look, I’m usually averse to praising labour, because it’s fucked that I must work the amount I do to afford living. I’m not saying this is the appropriate state for my life to be in, or even where I want to be long term, but it’s good enough for right now. Especially compared to where I was.

Things have changed, our goalposts have moved. But we are not doomed to dissatisfaction especially when we are able to see where life improvements have been made. We must momentarily look to our toolkits. We have to walk around and see what we’ve built. 

So back to New Years. As you set your goals for the upcoming year, try to forgive yourself for not being where you want to be. Odds are, you’re where a past version of you wanted to be. You’ve just adjusted. Look genuinely and with curiosity at the person you are, at your circumstances. Look at how far you’ve come. Place yourself in the past for a moment, find appreciation for the differences. Remember you’re on the way. We cannot be where we hope to be without gratitude, perspective and compassion. Start there.