After the Countdown: Time, Pressure, and the Myth of the Reset
By late January, the fireworks have faded. The glasses are washed. The resolutions — if they were made at all — are already fraying or quietly abandoned.
Last month, I wrote about fixing — the urge to rush, to intervene, to tidy or resolve discomfort in ourselves and others. Fixing often arises from urgency: the sense that something must change now. In many ways, the pressure we feel around New Year’s — the expectation to reset, improve, or emerge lighter — is a cultural expression of the same impulse.
Every December 31, the world performs a shared ritual: the countdown. Fireworks flare, optimism is summoned, and the Gregorian calendar — that centuries-old system of counting days — declares the year complete and a new one begun. With it comes a subtle demand: that we reset. That we emerge improved, lighter, more resolved.
But by now, the spell has worn off.
Late January reveals something New Year’s Eve often obscures: life did not reset. Grief carried on. Entanglements remained entangled. Long projects stayed unfinished. The calendar moved, but lived experience largely ignored the instruction to begin again.
New Year’s Eve is a strange ritual. It asks us to perform closure — to believe that midnight can tidy what life moves slowly with. Psychologically, this can create pressure: to feel renewed on cue, to measure ourselves against a date, to interpret continuity as failure. When change doesn’t arrive on schedule, the problem is often assumed to be us.
But the Gregorian calendar is not neutral. Rooted in European Christian reform, it privileges linearity, punctuality, productivity. It structures commerce and planning — and frames January 1st as a socially sanctioned “fresh start.” Other ways of knowing time tell a different story.
In cyclical time, life moves in seasons and returns rather than progressions.
In event-based time, common in many Indigenous systems, change unfolds through relationships, land, and circumstance — not dates on a page.
In thick or layered time, the past continues to shape the present, and the unfinished remains alive rather than overdue.
From these perspectives, the New Year reset looks less like a universal truth and more like a cultural insistence — one that often clashes with how change actually happens.
Late January can be a relief because it exposes the fiction. The pressure has lifted, but life is still here, asking for attention rather than reinvention. Not a reset, but a noticing. Not optimism, but presence.
So perhaps this is the quieter invitation of this moment: to stop evaluating whether you’ve “started the year well” and instead ask how you are inhabiting time. What continues? What lingers? What is slowly, imperfectly unfolding?
The year has moved on. Life has not leapt forward. And nothing has gone wrong.
The calendar doesn’t own the moment. You do.