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Is the turning of the New Year a meaningful event?

#Poll #EvanPoll

  • Strong yes (12%, 71 votes)
  • Qualified yes (36%, 214 votes)
  • Qualified no (28%, 164 votes)
  • Strong no (23%, 134 votes)
583 voters. Poll end: 1 year ago

Evan Prodromou reshared this.

"Of course it's all in your head, but why would that make you think it's not real?"
Define “meaningful”
I don’t think it’s meaningful to define New Year in terms of meaningfulness 😉
Only the meaning that we give it. But hell, that’s true for everything else with meaning, isn’t it?

Anyway, the idea of there being cycles to our existence is meaningful to me. The fact that this is an arbitrary point that doesn’t have any meaning doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful to observe it. You know what I mean?
As others have said, it's meaningful if we give it meaning, and I do. Qualified yes.

One meaning is we'd better proactively deal with computers failing to deal with calendar dates correctly, e.g. the Year 2038 problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem. We recently survived the Y2K22 bug, in part due to coders' hard work.

Another meaning is the clock ticking on the climate crisis. We're another year closer to the IPCC's 2030 and 2050 goalposts, and not on track to reach our goals.
Love this question. The New Year is in fact a social construct (if there were no humans, there would be no New Year, New Years have not been marked for all of time, it could be otherwise such that we started counting years at a different point or chose some other marker than rotations around the sun).

It is meaningful because people have agreed upon this system for marking time. Therefore, all sorts of observable things change. Taxes are owed. Date fields increment.
Which new year?

Chinese new year is in about a month.

Jewish new year is around September or October timeframe.

I'm easily confuddled.

😊
It's just another day, the specifics of which were decided arbitrarily by the creators of the calendar.
I always say strong because my opinions are way stronger than they are qualified. I've spent a lot of time over at Twitter.
another nail in the coffin
It marks the "last chrismas acceptable" barrier. It is accepted to fight back everyone who still plays it
Qualified yes. It's arbitrary to be sure, but there's something beautiful about everyone in the modern world celebrating making it through another year, and putting out hopes and wishes for a good year to come.
It is the cross-over of majordomo day and the day when all the copyright dates on static sites are out of date...
This is an interesting result. I'm a qualified yes; years are real but the year boundary is imaginary.

Our year boundary is arbitrary but there aren't very good alternatives.

Arbitrary boundaries can have rich social meaning.

I did a little investigation a few years ago.

http://evanp.me/2019/12/31/year-boundaries-are-imaginary/
Perihelion Day is on 4 Jan 2023.
Im not used to seeing/hearing about this term. But, i really like the perspective it gives. Thanks! 😃👍
I was just talking to a friend yesterday about how rituals are important for creating space for feelings, memories and to process events and how this only really becomes apparent as one ages and accumulates memories (and how they reside in the body). How the memories of big events, particularly traumatic ones like deaths, live in the body and arise annually whether we mark them with rituals or not and how having a ritual is a way to create conscious space for that memory (and allows us to be consciously prepared for how our bodies remember it).
Qualified yes from me. I think there is an energy - a realness - to the agreement between people that this is a thing. Perhaps because there aren’t good alternatives. It’s also generative. Based on the agreement, things can happen and be ordered. Not unlike technology standards and protocols. There’s power in those agreements.
time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.

A year is the orbital period of earth.

Due to the Earth's axial tilt, the course of a year sees the passing of the seasons marked by change in weather, the hours of daylight, and, consequently, vegetation and soil fertility.

the exact date is arbitrary but marks a cycle.

https://earthsky.org/earth/why-does-the-new-year-begin-on-january-1/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return

https://www.universetoday.com/107322/is-the-solar-system-really-a-vortex/