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I know most people don’t want to think about this stuff yet, provided you’re even a Christian, but Thanksgiving — provided you’re in the USA — is this week, and that starts this whole weird period of the year where family is everywhere, and so are commitments, and it can feel overwhelming, and family can be beautiful but also absolutely tragic.
I crank a lot of different music this time of year, including the above video, which is “Same Old Lang Syne,” a riff on the song they play after the ball drops for NYE.
Some lyrics:
We drank a toast to
innocence
We drank a toast to
now
And tried to reach beyond the
emptiness
But neither one knew
how
Intense stuff, eh?
Those lyrics definitely described 2020 in many ways … there was emptiness over all manner of things, including lockdowns, lack of access to people, death, racial discord, elections, partisanship, the fact that money clearly isn’t real, and more.
We were all trying to reach beyond the emptiness, and a lot of us didn’t know how — because maybe that was yoga for you, and your studio is closed, or similar.
2021 was going to feel different, and for many people, it probably did in pockets — restrictions got relaxed in some areas, and people resumed a vague sense of normalcy. And then there were variants, and stop-and-start work plans, and a crazy-ass housing market, and more racial discord, and more political tribalism, and more beauty and greatness and new babies and new love stories but also strife.
A lot of us are a few months from entering our third year of all this stuff. It’s nuts to even think about.
There are a lot of different things we could discuss here, about work-life balance and burnout, or about belief in expertise, or about tribalism on the rise, or literally 10,000 other things. Instead, I wanted to focus on one thing that I think causes a lot of people to feel emptiness at this…
