Welcome to 2021

We partied on New Year's Eve and celebrated the moment when the clock striked midnight when the day changed from Thursday to Friday signaling the beginning of the new year. This usually a transition of no special significance. But somehow this change, which ends one year and begin the next, is different. It is a traditional time of celebration.

This unique tick of the clock has always prompted us both to celebrate and to step outside the day-to-day activities we’re always busy with to reflect, look back, take stock, assess how we did, and resolve to do better. This is best seen as one of the most popular customs and the key to the meaning of New Year’s celebration by making resolutions. The universal human desire to have some control over what lies ahead as the future is unsettlingly unknowable. Not knowing what’s to come means we don’t know what we need to know to keep ourselves safe. To counter that worrisome powerlessness, we do things to take control. This is motivation for survival. As our birthdays do, New Year’s Day provides us the chance to celebrate having made it through another 365 days, the unit of time by which we keep chronological score of our lives.

Resolutions (and doing so even after failing last year’s) stresses that we want to be happy. On New Year’s Day we accept, often more implicitly than explicitly, that happiness comes from the achievement of values. We want to enjoy that sense of purpose, accomplishment and pleasure that one feels when achieving values and on this more than any other day, which makes the attainment of happiness more real, calculable and achievable.

If we apply the value-achievement meaning of New Year’s Day explicitly and consistently 365 days each year, we would be perhaps more happier that’s what the human psyche says. So every new year’s eve, let’s fill our champagne glass of life to the brim with values, raise toast and drink deep to the promises of a new year, of a new beginning...