A Fantastic Year or Just 365 Disappointments?

Riddle:

Made with hope, but often broken, a promise to change, yet never spoken
I start with a thought to end with a deed, helping the new year plant its seed.

Getting across the conventional border between the years gives us a couple of days off to sober up and or finally clean up that room—yes, that day is probably tomorrow. Right now can be a good time to sit back, reflect, and ponder: Was it a good one? A mere Not great, Not terrible one? Or perhaps just another “period of 365 disappointments” as Ambrose Bierce would call it out in his witty Devil’s Dictionary?

Source: Cottonbro Studio / Pexels

What constitutes a memorable year, that brings us a sense of fulfillment or adventure, mysteriously infecting us with a flicker of hope for the year to come? Most importantly, can we seize and appreciate an amazing year as it happens, or will it always appear fabulous only in retrospect?

To start this reflective journey, consider a little side quest(ion): When thinking back—What year of your life would you go back to?—if you had to live it as a "Groundhog Year," starting it over and over again, for an indefinite number of times? Would it be a childhood year, sheltered from the worries of the grown-up (and ever-growing) pressures, when you still had your favorite toy which tragically disappeared somewhere down the road? Or a college party year in which all inhibitions seemed forgotten and friends were readily available to go out, instead of having to check their agendas two weeks ahead? Would it be a real year from your past or one from an imaginary future?

Personal nostalgia (different from historical nostalgia, which can also shape autobiographical memory—the Living in History Effect, explored in our study) is a bittersweet phenomenon, akin to the words it’s derived from: The Greek nostos, meaning homecoming and algos, meaning pain, and initially used to describe a debilitating medical condition experienced by soldiers, a type of homesickness.

A curious finding from studies using the Nostalgia Inventory developed by Dr. Krystine Batcho revealed that we might tend to engage in this retrospective journey more often in young adulthood, and not leave it to older age, as one would intuitively expect. A sense of nostalgia summoning positive or problematic events that we nevertheless managed to outlive was found to strengthen our social connectedness. It also helps regulate emotions during stressful times, sometimes by reappraising events in a positive light. Nostalgia-prone people are more likely to cope with them by understanding and manifesting their emotions rather than suppressing them, and more likely to seek emotional support from peers.

It is possible that engaging on this path down memory lane also brought to light some buried regrets. Oscar Wilde reflected: “Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel.” Or as the artist Sibylle Baier meditates in her song I lost something in the hills, it could lead to an acute or chronic sensation of loss: Oh, what images return / Oh, I yearn / For the roots of the woods / That origin of all my strong and strange moods.

A comprehensive study led by Shai Davidai, a psychology professor at The New School for Social Research, and by Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich revealed that the most lingering types of regrets were those about what we could have done, not about what we did wrong. They discovered that the regrets of inaction related to our unrealized ideal selves are the ones that cause the most long-term sorrow. Probably because they generate, cold,” long-lasting emotions which tend to exacerbate over time, as opposed to the hot” emotions generated by wrong actions, which dissipate more quickly.

The antidote to living a life of regrets, the authors note, is not a simplistic carpe diem by continuously seizing the moment, as it might bring both short-term benefits and repeated misfortunes. Then what is there to do to avoid living in the ominous shadow of the What ifs? The authors suggest a mindful switch from their lingering cold embrace to hot” emotions that generate actions that can feed the neglected ideal self in other ways. For example, planning to take a trip to an unfamiliar destination every year to solve part of the regret of not taking up a volunteering experience in an exotic country as a young medical doctor.

A distinct possibility, however, is that while looking back at the bygone year(s) as a non-narrative, you found this to be another exercise in futility and identified no time of the past that you’d want to return to or that you can vividly remember. Moreover, even thinking about the past year like the poet John Clare, you simply notice:

The Old Year’s gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark, or place
In either shade or sun:
The last year he’d a neighbour’s face,
In this, he’s known by none.

One should not (en)force recollection as a constant habit, yet actively running away from reminiscing can leave us with unprocessed regrets and even affect our ability to think about the future (episodic future thinking). The two vectors: thinking about the past and the future are intimately intertwined in what is known as mental time travel. We develop this ability during early childhood and continue to shape it with our added experiences throughout adulthood. Having a future orientation can be crucial as an interpersonal asset that can generate the resilience needed to substantially attenuate the adverse effects of stressors such as early maltreatment on youth development.

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Thinking About Yesterday to Feel Better Today

On the cusp of the new year, some of us might be writing down the answer to the riddle above, namely your New Year’s resolutions (while you are at it, you might consider scheduling them to start on a Monday, since research revealed that we are more likely to follow through with our goals if we start on a Monday, rather than a Thursday). Now that our concern for the future (ideal) selves has been thoughtfully postponed, we can use the time to carefully enter the universe of our past while remembering what Bertrand Russell advised in his sublime Conquest of Happiness: “The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead.”

Answer to Riddle: [New Year’s Resolution]