The human lifespan is both short and long. It’s short when I look at my Kindle library. It’s long when I file travel expenses. Time’s pace varies. Each semester of undergrad was an epoch, any four-year chunk off the thirties a mere moment.
Time is an unforgiving, giant, meandering, shape shifting river. We must impose our will on it. And we do, with all the signposts. The birthdays, the quarters, the financial years, the anniversaries, the annual plans, the three-year strategy roadmaps. All arbitrary. All essential. Impose boundaries. And the flow that is time is tamed, contained within still little lakes.
And then there’s the New Year.
It should be a time of quiet reflection. But the world gets in the way. Sometimes there’s a construct called the ‘end of year’. It carries the same dark foreboding as the end of days. At such firms the 31st is spent furiously uploading documents and checking signatures on contracts. It’s an hour to midnight. A deal might come in. One watches the screen, wondering if yet another follow up would push the client over the edge. It gets to 15 minutes to midnight. There’s a conspicuous lull outside before the fireworks go off. Our hero refreshes the screen. The DJ slows the tempo. The hero counts to 10, pauses, and scans the room. The child is doing and undoing ribbon knots; one resumes counting…to 100. The contract doesn’t come through. Capitalism is organised masochism.
There are industries where late December is allowed some stillness. But life outside work is often just work without all the clarity that money brings to human interactions. Should we be spending the year’s last weekend with cousins…his or hers? Or, with friends from a workplace left a decade ago? Who knows. There is no NPV for relationships. There is no unit of social value analogous to money. But one must know which proposition to argue for — cousins, or former colleagues. What is an evening with a sharp wit worth? To what degree is said evening offset by the wit’s prying spouse?
We tiptoe around such comparisons, make the final call in a fog of incomprehension, and call it love. Or friendship. Or, not being a psychopath.
The year 2023 was the morning after a wild night. Not the usual wild. Think absinthe. Think death. The previous two years made the world hopeful for some. And inexplicable for others. I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe. HR heads up at 3 am. Candidates trained in Oracle technologies with the manners of movie stars. Being told a pointer to a JPEG in a distributed database was an asset. Let’s take a moment to savour the silence of the graveyard. If 2021 was success, maybe we didn’t want it.
There are two wars raging. A globalising world can no longer be assumed. Our species’ infinite capacity for pettiness must find expression in engineering quarrelling with marketing. Not ethnicity versus ethnicity, passport versus passport. On this planet, that’s how we measure progress.
Here’s wishing you a fabulous 2024.
