Happy New Year, beloved readers. You’ll exist eventually. You’re going to love it when you do. 2026 is your year.
Yesterday, the sun went down in 2025, and today it rose in 2026. The difference was a digit. In every other way, yesterday and today were just like any other day and its tomorrow. One day follows the previous, each day is just the day before the next, each sunset comes after a sunrise and each sunrise comes after a sunset.
Unsurprisingly, humans are the only species in the animal kingdom that celebrates a new year. Why? What other animal do you think has time for all that rubbish? Can you imagine deer at New Year’s? “10, 9, 8, 7— AHHH!”
They’re busy killing and being killed by one another. We were busy too, once. There was a time when the pursuit of food, water, shelter and warmth occupied all 24 hours of the day, a time when we didn’t have time to be diagnosed with anxiety and wouldn’t have had any use for an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
But one day, Mr and Mrs Homo Erectus got too good at killing and eating things, and so they got bored and began creating problems where there formerly weren’t any. One of those problems is now popularly known as the ‘calendar’.
At some point, the feeling of an infinitely long string of structure-less time stretching out into eternity became simply too hard for humans to bear, so we chopped it up. We decided that one sunrise and one sunset is a day, and the days we have decided to count.
Then, someone decided to name the days of the week. Nothing had changed in the world, but suddenly, it was important that the days of the week had names. We made a week 7 days, a month 30 or 31, depending on nothing at all, and sometimes 28, and occasionally 29.
We made 12 months a year, but once, in ancient Rome, Julius Caesar decided to add two one-off months which made the year 46BC 445 days long, the longest year in history. And that was… fine.
But wait! Each year has a longest day. Finally! An actual tangible timestamp that we can count around. Let’s make it the 21st of June. And New Year’s Day, the beginning of our solar year and the most important day in the calendar – let’s make it some random f***ing day when the weather is as shit as possible.
Today is 1st January, yesterday was 31st December. Yesterday was 2025, today is 2026. Today is Thursday. Yesterday was Wednesday. Today the sun rose in a similar way to how it rose yesterday, and indeed every day before that for the past fourteen billion years. Probably.
But I have high hopes for 2026. What can I say, I’m a romantic! Sue me.
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