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.
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.
I was thinking this morning that a year is real; it’s the period of revolution of the earth around the sun. But New Year’s Eve is an imaginary and arbitrary boundary point in that revol…
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 short answer? No. Not in the way that a popular animated gif insinuates, at least. If you’re even a casual space fan you may have seen a viral gif animation showing our solar system traveling through space, the motions of the planets tracing cork…
Space Catitude 🚀
•Pelle Wessman
•Evan Prodromou
•Pelle Wessman
•Steve Scotten
•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?
Nelson Chu Pavlosky
•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.
problem affecting digital systems that store system time as a signed 32-bit integer
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Escarpment
•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.
Prof West Wing Chicken Shack
•Chinese new year is in about a month.
Jewish new year is around September or October timeframe.
I'm easily confuddled.
😊
[nick@{÷)} ~]$ :cursor:
•Sergi Sobrino
•David J. Atkinson
•…might work for coffee…
•Eliot Lash
•darkflib
•Evan Prodromou
•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/
Year boundaries are imaginary
Evan Prodromou's BlogEvan Prodromou
•m. x. u. :matrix:
•Fifi Lamoura
•Charles Roper
•paul
•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/
Is the Solar System Really a Vortex? - Universe Today
Jason Major (Universe Today)