If the New Year doesn’t change your life, maybe that’s normal

Every year we celebrate it as if it were an act of freedom.

The countdown, the toast, the collective promise that this time it will be different. The new year arrives loaded with moral expectations: improve yourself, get back in shape, work harder (or better), love better, finally be “enough.” New Year’s Eve has become the great secular ritual of our time: an illusion of control over time, over the future, over ourselves.

And yet, if we stop for a moment, a less comforting truth emerges: the time we celebrate is not natural, not neutral, and not even ours. It is a social device. And today more than ever, it is one of the most effective tools through which we are governed.

But it wasn’t always this way.

For centuries, time was not something to be “optimized,” but something to be inhabited. It followed the rhythms of the body, the sun, the seasons, agricultural labor. The day was not a straight line to be filled, but an elastic substance. Historian E. P. Thompson explains this clearly: it is with the Industrial Revolution that time becomes abstract, measurable, standardized. The clock is born as a moral authority. The idea emerges that every minute must produce something. Time becomes debt.

From that moment on, we no longer lived in time — we began to live against it.

New Year’s Eve is a direct product of this transformation. It is not a real pause, but a symbolic suspension meant to restart the machine. An emotional reset that never questions the system that has made us tired, dissatisfied, perpetually “behind.” It tells us: start again. But never stop. Never reconsider.

This is where the discussion becomes urgently contemporary.

We live in an era of constant acceleration: work, information, relationships, even rest. We reply to messages while watching Netflix, listen to voice notes at 2× speed, binge series with terrible endings just so we don’t “fall behind.” We are given tools that promise to save us time, yet the outcome is always the same: we have less of it — or rather, we feel we do.

Sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls this phenomenon “social acceleration”: the faster the world moves, the more we lose our sense of what we are doing. Experience thins out, the present becomes a mere passage toward something else. We never live here — we live after. After the holidays. After graduation. After the right contract. After summer. After next year.

In this context, New Year’s does not mark a beginning — it marks a handover. It returns us to time as the system wants it: measurable, productive, competitive. Not by chance, it is immediately followed by lists: goals, performance, self-improvement. Even well-being becomes a task. Even happiness becomes a deadline.

And if you fail?

If you are tired, confused, stuck?

Then the problem is you.

This is perhaps the most subtle violence of our time: it has ceased to be a collective structure and has become an individual responsibility. If you are unwell, if you do not “grow,” if you fail to achieve what you should, it is because you have failed to manage yourself. The system remains intact, invisible, innocent. You do not.

Yet today more than ever, it is clear that this is not a crisis of individual will, but a crisis of meaning. The idea that each year must move us further ahead than the last has become unsustainable. Growth, progress, continuous improvement — words that once promised emancipation now produce only chronic exhaustion.

Perhaps the problem is not that we don’t change enough.

Perhaps the problem is that we change too much, too fast, without ever allowing anything to settle.

Recognizing time as a social construct does not mean denying the value of the future. It means refusing the idea that the future must always be a race. It means understanding that not everything that does not accelerate is failure. That slowing down is not falling behind. That stopping is not surrender.

In a world that measures everything — productivity, relationships, even rest — the most radical act is not making promises for the new year. It is withdrawing, even briefly, from the logic that turns time into a performance.

Perhaps the real issue is not becoming better, faster, or more efficient at the stroke of midnight. Perhaps it is learning to distinguish what truly depends on us from what is merely presented as such. In a society that promises equal opportunities without ever truly distributing them, the new year often becomes less a beginning and more a reminder of the inequalities that persist.

If the new year is to have any meaning, perhaps it lies here: not in another list of resolutions, but in the ability to read time for what it is — a construct that organizes us, disciplines us, and often overwhelms us. And maybe, once we do that, we can also quit smoking, finally go to the gym we’ve been paying for for three months, and — with a little more honesty — stop believing that everything depends only on us.