New Year's Day is the most active-minded holiday, because it is the one where people evaluate their lives and plan and resolve to take action.
The meaning of most holidays is clear: Valentine's Day celebrates romance; July Fourth, independence; Thanksgiving, productivity; Christmas, good will toward men. The meaning of New Year's Day-the world's most celebrated holiday-is not so clear. On this day, many people remember last year's achievements and failures and look forward to the promise of a new year, of a new beginning. But this celebration and reflection is the result of more than an accident of the calendar. New Year's has a deeper significance. What is it?
On New Year's Day, when the singing, fireworks and champagne toasts are over, many of us become more serious about life. We take stock and plan new courses of action to better our lives. This is best seen in one of the most popular customs and the key to the meaning of New Year's: making resolutions.
But what is the purpose of making such goals and resolutions? Why bother? Making New Year's resolutions (and doing so even after failing last year's) stresses that people want to be happy. On New Year's Day many people accept, often more implicitly than explicitly, that happiness comes from the achievement of values. That is why you resolve to be healthier, more ambitious, more confident. You want to enjoy that sense of purpose, accomplishment and pleasure that one feels when achieving values. It is happiness that is the motor and purpose of one's life. It is New Year's, more than any other day, that makes the attainment of happiness more real and possible. This is the meaning of New Year's Day and why it is so psychologically important and significant to people throughout the world.
If people were to apply the value-achievement meaning of New Year's Day explicitly and consistently 365 days each year, they would be happier.
Scott McConnell is a writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
So every day, fill your champagne glass of life to the brim with values-and drink deep to your life and the joy that it can and should be.
Happy New Year. Happy life.
