The outfit is ready, the tickets are booked, conveyance is mostly sorted, and if all goes well and no hooligans disrupt the festivities, it will be a happy New Year’s Eve. In another scenario, none of the above is applicable: The new year will be welcomed from the comfort of the couch. Maybe all the necessary accessories will be thrown in: Hot chocolate, warm socks, fuzzy comforters, the works. There is ceremony.
The emotional labor of birthing the new year stays hidden behind it.
Like all transitions, the New Year’s Eve is a curious in-betweenness of time and space (a friend says December-istan is a place). The heartbeat of a dream and prayer and hopes, not quite born yet. We don’t want to jinx anything. We have to wait. Superstitions abound, just like around a high-risk pregnancy. No baby clothes to be bought, no names to be decided, no cheer to be allowed to escape our hearts till we hear the baby’s cries. And then we drowned the cries in ecstatic expressions of joy. We finally let our hopes be. Hopes are as fragile as infants, resolutions like their lanugo. We lose resolutions faster than infants lose their fine hair. Statistics actually show that most resolutions we make on January 1 have disappeared by January 20.
Yet, we keep at it year after year. Some years, we say no to resolutions because we are too cool for them. Because we want to flaunt our awareness of the statistics.
But, can we truly turn our back on hope?
Martin Seligman would advise not to. A proponent of positive psychology, Seligman wrote in his autobiography, The Hope Circuitthat there is a way of making hope triumph. By observing animals, Seligman surmised that many of us turn our backs on hope by what he calls “learned helplessness”. Yes, we learn to be helpless. We make suboptimal choices because we are making do lest we fail. We learn fatigue.
We learn it through repetition, through environments that reward endurance more than agency, and through narratives that quietly suggest effort will not matter. Learned helplessness, as Seligman first demonstrated in his seminal experiments, is not a moral failure but a psychological adaptation: When outcomes appear uncontrollable, organisms conserve energy by disengagement. In humans, this disengagement can masquerade as realism, maturity, or even sophistication. We tell ourselves we are simply “being practical.” Or, we are engaging in acts of “self-love” or “self-preservation”.
But the cost is steep. Chronic disengagement erodes motivation, diminishes well-being, and narrows our imagination of what is possible. Because some of us learn to believe “nothing we (sic) do matters”, we keep shutting doors on ourselves. We use pessimism as an aesthetic, an affectation. Seligman, who resisted the bookshop label of “self-help” for his earlier bestseller Learned Optimismwrote in it, “Optimism matters because it produces persistence”. The line does sound gauche, one must admit. Though we must fight everything merely because it violates our aesthetics?
Optimism belongs to the realm of the future. This is where the ritual of New Year’s Eve matters. Rituals, research suggests, provide a sense of control and meaning during periods of uncertainty. They help regulate emotion and anchor identity. Whether one is counting down in a crowd or watching fireworks flicker on a screen from the couch, the act of marking the transition serves a regulatory function. It is an exercise in what positive psychology calls “intentional activity”; Deliberate practices that shape well-being more reliably than circumstances alone. Ceremony, then, is not frivolous. It is a fortifying scaffolding.
New Year’s resolutions often fail not because hope is foolish, but because it is under-resourced. We declare agency without pathways, ambition without structure. When these collapse by January 20, we mistake the failure of strategy for the failure of hope itself. How about staying gently optimistic? Strengths-based goal setting and self-compassion.
Hope, like an infant, insists on care. It cries when neglected, grows when attended to, and surprises us with its resilience. We may lose our resolutions by January 20, but the deeper impulse of imagining a future that can be shaped persists. And that persistence is not accidental. It is human. Perhaps this is why we keep returning to hope, despite our cynicism.
The new year does not need us to be brave or brilliant. It only asks that we remain participatory. To light a candle, make a modest plan, say a careful yes. To resist learned helplessness not with grand declarations, but with quiet, repeated acts of agency. Like, leaving a bunch of rose petals in someone’s freezer during a high-octane party for them to find later in a moment of quiet and solemnity.
Nishtha Gautam is an author and academician. The views expressed are personal
