Why We Celebrate New Year's Day

Why We Celebrate New Year's Day

Human beings are lonely creatures, full of doubts and uncertainties. Facing the same fate, that is Death, we are bound by our common constraints. We would like to make sense of the world, of life, of what it takes to be alive and live in the far corner of the universe.

It is not a co-incident that we gather together to make sense of the passing of seasons, days, or years. In the past, people tried to understand nature and themselves. Animals, too, change their behavior when seasons change. Many of them migrate, some mate, some travel to a far away land, some stay the same place to die alone.

Every culture embraces celebrations - to mark the change of seasons, e.g. from winter to spring. Those joyous celebrations are accompanied by music, dance, and food (as well as alcoholic drinks).

Some would say that we celebrate another year because we want to let ourselves and others know that we have made it through 365 days, still up and going. As mentioned, we humans live within the constraints of space and time. We make sense of ourselves, of our primordial instincts to survive and reproduce as species.

New Year is also an opportunity for us to reflect. Socrates said that life without reflection is not a life worth living. We are the only creatures in the world that are capable of using signs to represent realities and to pass on our thoughts and feelings - our histories.