This has been a very difficult year. For many, the election of Trump is the most glaring example of how 2016 has been a complete dumpster fire, and this is particularly poignant for people who are members of marginalized groups. Add to this the ample amount of remarkable deaths and public tragedies. And for many of us, myself included, this has also been a year of great personal loss and suffering.
But since there is no shortage of posts lamenting the shittiness of 2016, I think I want to reflect on the future. It’s important to note that nothing is going to ultimately change when we wake up on January 1st, 2017. There is nothing about this date that magically makes anything better. It is not as if we are turning the world off and turning it back on. Tomorrow is just like today. There is nothing but convention that marks the difference between 2016 and 2017. Which is why it’s so important to harness both our optimism and our realism for next year. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to change for the better unless people—people like me and you—make it change. It is up to us, each one of us, to change ourselves and to change the world. This will not happen by itself. As painful as this last year has been, the fact remains that, on the whole, we live in a much better world today than we did even a few decades ago. On average, people are happier and the world is safer than ever before in human history. Yes, the world is still full of fucked up bullshit wrapped in blankets of agony. Much of the world straight up sucks and people are needlessly suffering because of it. But look at where we’ve come from. We’re animals risen from the muck, stuck with evolutionary vestiges, victims of our capricious psychologies, subject to spectacular short-sidedness, selfishness, violence, and destruction. But we also have a capacity for great things: friendship and tenderness, creativity and laughter, generosity and compassion. We are apes capable of both stupidity and wisdom, hatred and love. What tendencies are worth embracing? It is up to us to decide. This won’t happen if we shrug our shoulders in apathy, if we accept defeat, if we nihilistically assume there’s nothing worth fighting for. We must somehow open our eyes to the pain that surrounds us, the pain of strangers as well as ourselves and our loved ones, and at the same time fight really really hard to make things suck a little less. We can only accomplish this if we keep perspective and acknowledge the dizzying responsibility of our existence. As Carl Sagan says, ‘there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.’
So, for those of us privileged enough to do so, let us temper our anger and pain from 2016 with some hopefulness for what’s to come. Let us cultivate gratitude for the life we have in order to motivate us to work hard to create the future we want. If that’s something worth fighting for, and I don’t know of anything that’s more worthy, then our only shot is through ourselves. It is our responsibility. It is up to us.
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