Hot take, but I’ve always felt New Year’s Eve to be quite performative. And sure, I’ve partook in that performativity as a teen and young adult. Nowadays I find myself working on said holiday because I would rather work than indulge. Time and a half is great, since at midnight it’s technically New Years Day, the federal holiday. But, really don’t we all agree that New Year’s Eve is actually part of the holiday too? I’ve worked as a flight attendant where we celebrated New Year’s in-flight. I’ve worked on New Years Day in restaurants, retail, you name it. We’re getting ready to celebrate. We wait for the clock to tick midnight in our respected time zone. We are sipping on shitty champagne or your choice traditional beverage. We are watching the ball drop in all corners of the world: NYC, Vegas, Key West, and other cities. They’re all broadcasting that we exist for another year.

New Year’s celebrations through history:

Where did this tradition originate though? Ancient civilizations like Rome, Greece, Mesopotamia, and Egypt had their own ways of ushering in a new time. The Roman New Year originally was in March (Martius) which was tied to military campaigns. It changed to January upon Caesar’s era, the Julian calendar. Greece honored Dionysus honoring social order, leisure, and renewal. Practices included: role reversal, feasting, and suspension of the norms. Hmmm, sounds a bit familiar to modern times, no?

Various Asian cultures also had their unique practices. The basis for South Asian cultures New Year festivities was to celebrate the lunar cycles and agricultural seasons. The Japanese New Year symbolizes spiritual purification and good fortune for the coming year. The Chinese Lunar New Year celebrates renewal, luck, ancestral honor, and warding off misfortune.

Now, there’s no official “first” celebration of New Year in the “new world”, but history suggests that the first European colonies celebrated January 1 in the 1600s. Though Indigenous nations were celebrating cyclical renewal cycles long before that. Linking their New Year gratitude to plentiful harvests, the solstice, and other ceremonies.

As we step into 2026, I can appreciate the gratitude and thankfulness. “THAT year is over,” and we lived through it. However, I care less and less about reminiscing or ranting about the prior year. Seriously, the echo chamber that is social media (or interest media) is exhausting. Bless this trend of “going analogue”, right?

That is why I am glad to see people moving toward analogue modes, though, frankly, we never needed trend forecasters to “give us permission” to do that. We have always had the autonomy to step back without waiting for a cultural green light. Scrapbooks, notebooks, and so-called “junk journals” were already here; I was doing that in the early 2000s without knowing it had a name. Those were, and still are, my archives.

Of course, there is a paradox: if you are sharing your analogue life online, is it truly analogue? Probably not. And yet, as journalists, we are archivists by nature—of both digital and physical worlds. We collect research, stories, images, memories.

So, after that tangent, how do we change the performative nature of New Year’s? For starters, we reduce the fireworks pollution and respect the people working the holidays by paying them fairly. Beyond that, we can choose to step offline, without waiting for a trend, an aesthetic, or approval from anyone.

With that, Happy 2026. I’ll still be here writing about interesting people, sharing my favorite things, and talking about how we can deepen human connection. More presence, creativity, and action will save the world.

CHOOSE LOVE ❤

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