The Illusion of New Year's
Plato once stated that we live on a different realm to where perfect, objective ideas live. This means that with almost everything in this world we can only interact with it as an imperfect version of itself, as a more subjective recreation of the ideal. This is true for human experience such as love, justice, and so much more. But it also holds true for things that may come across as an objective experience, such as time.
Following in the lines of Plato’s theory, our understanding and experience of time is subjective. Time is an illusion (so we cannot really complain about “Spanish time”). One of the theories that backs this is Einstein’s space-time continuum. Not to focus too much on the physics (mostly because I don’t really understand it), but to dumb it down: the more you have of one the less you have of the other, meaning a moving object has slower time (so pro anti-aging tip: fly a lot). The experience of time is relative, thus not everyone experiences time in the same way.
So if time is not objectively measurable, why do we collectively make a big deal of the passage of time into a ‘new year’?
The key in the question is that it is a collective act. Through interaction and agreement, we give meaning to our experiences and realities. As humans, we oftentimes have to function under the assumption that something exists, and we use these ‘somethings’ in order to be able to coexist with others. These are the fundamental notions underlying the idea that the world is a social construct. Thus as a society we create the meaning and experience of time. We create time as a universal objective experience (which as aforementioned cannot really exist in this realm) to be able to work and function with others and to make some sense of such a confusing reality. As such we create something that does not exist, a new year. The reason why we go buy new clothes, scour to find a good party and spend on champagne on the 31st of December is because, not only did we create the idea of a new year, but we also created the significance of it.
Regardless of whether a New Year truly exists or not, I hope you had a happy New Year!
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