It is the supreme irony of our age that we live in a period of more peace, prosperity, and health than the world has ever known, one where new wonders arise practically weekly, but cannot bring ourselves to acknowledge how truly lucky we are.
There are years that are objectively bad. No one, or at least very few, looked back at 1929 on New Year’s Eve in the wake of the worst stock market crash in history and said it was good. Similarly, but for different reasons, no one ended 1941, three short weeks after Pearl Harbor, and looked ahead with optimism for the future. In more recent memory, 2020 was self-evidently a bad year, back when the term of art was “dumpster fire,” and everyone knew why after a global pandemic effectively shut down the entire world, killing millions, and the United States was embroiled in a bitter election dispute. Generally speaking, however, these years are outliers and especially in the modern era, when each year tends to bring with it some new advancement and countless diversions, one would think people, short of those who are truly suffering for whatever reason, would at least attempt to see the brighter side of things. Instead, at least so far as I can tell, there seems to be a disquieting new trend that reflexively seeks to label every year as terrible, awful, and no good, looking for a reason to be upset rather than a reason to remain hopeful. For progressives, still reeling from their nine year failure to destroy President-elect Donald Trump, this might not be surprising. For example, I don’t think anyone who read Timothy Noah’s column in The New Republic, asking “Did anything god actually happen this year” and declaring “2024 Is Finally Over. Now Let’s Forget That It Ever Happened,” was particularly shocked. To him, the year was apparently so bad that no one wanted to recap it in the first place. He began by asking, “Is it my imagination, or are there fewer ‘year in review’ photo essays this year? In years past, newspaper editors loved these features because you could prepare them in advance and then run them in December while practically the whole newsroom was out on vacation. But the few that made it into print this year conveyed little enthusiasm.” Then again, maybe that’s not quite true, “Maybe I’m projecting. I really didn’t care for 2024. It was the year when Donald Trump recaptured the presidency, when ‘Zionist’ became a term of abuse, and when my favorite local seafood restaurant closed its doors after 79 years in business. The only good thing that happened was the reopening of Notre Dame in Paris, but that occurred too late for inclusion in the year-end photo essays.” While acknowledging, that his own life has been going well, “no significant health problems, a happy family life, a satisfying work life, and more financial stability than I’ve been able to count on during the past decade,” he bemoaned the fate of the “wider world,” starting with how now one seemed to listen to his genius, seriously. Variously, he “urged the Democrats to win back the working class, and they didn’t,” “urged Biden to halt the shipment of offensive weapons to Israel, and he didn’t—not even after the election.” From there, Mr. Noah lamented both the big and the small, from Hollywood giving “up on making good movies, with the result that amazingly few domestic films found their way onto critics’ “10 best” lists” to the retirement of Paul Krugman, The New York Times’ “best columnist,” the “Israeli slaughter in Gaza and Russian slaughter in Ukraine” while “Climate change continued to lay waste to the planet,” even The Los Angeles Times being reviewed by robots or something. Ultimately, he concluded, “I don’t want to remember 2024. I want it to be over. There’s a decent chance 2025 will be worse, but we have nothing to gain by clinging to its predecessor. Let midnight come, then let’s get on with it.”
While some of this griping might be expected from progressives, even conservatives, who should be buoyed by President Donald Trump’s victory in November, seem less than enthused. Derek Hunter, writing for Townhall.com could only bring himself to claim the year “didn’t completely suck.” “I kind of expected 2024 to suck,” he began. “It didn’t, at least not completely. All’s well that ends well, they say, and 2024 ended well. It’s amazing what a good ending can retroactively do to an otherwise mediocre movie, and it’s amazing what an electoral victory can do to an otherwise mediocre year. That encapsulated 2024 for me.” Before lauding Trump’s triumph, Mr. Hunter detailed a litany of issues, “inflation continued, people suffered and the political party in charge didn’t give a damn…They also spent the year trying to rewrite history, recent history. It’s one thing to try to claim Abraham Lincoln was gay because you’re desperate to push a left-wing gay or trans agenda and there’s no one left alive to call you out for the lie first hand, it’s another to attempt to do it to convince people they had it worse just a couple of years ago when they can unambiguously remember the truth.” Though “2024 left the left reeling…they are not dead. They still control the education system and will continue to churn out more and more drones. Reality struck back and gave Republicans the House, Senate and the White House. If things improve – and how could the not? – and Democrats continue to double-down on the hate, child genital mutilation, embracing of mental illness and calling everyone else names there is no reason to think this will change in 2026. But we have to get through 2025 first, and no group of people excels at self-destruction like Republicans. Buckle up and sharpen your elbows. Happy New Year.” Nor is the malaise limited to political pundits. Comedian Dave Barry, writing his annual year in review for The Miami Herald, began by asking “How stupid was 2024?” He too credited the election with making us all dumber, “what made 2024 truly special, in terms of sustained idiocy, was that it was an election year. This meant that day after day, month after month, the average American voter was subjected to a relentless gushing spew of campaign messaging created by political professionals who—no matter what side they’re on—all share one unshakeable core belief, which is that the average American voter has the intellectual capacity of a potted fern. It was a brutal, depressing slog, and it felt as though it would never end. In fact it may still be going on in California, a state that apparently tabulates its ballots on a defective Etch-a-Sketch.” Like Mr. Noah, Mr. Barry also called for the year to end as soon as possible, “Clearly, this year needs to end. Which is why we’re looking forward to New Year’s Eve—when, in a beloved tradition, thousands of revelers will gather in Times Square to say goodbye to 2024, and welcome 2025… let’s hope that 2025 will be a better year.”
What accounts for this cross-political and cross-cultural malaise? Why is it that a broad cross section of people seem to believe every year is bad, if not the worst ever, rather than looking to the future with hope and optimism? One might not like the outcome of the election, but imagine what a terrible year it would have been if President Trump had been killed on that field in Butler, PA and the world was rocked with the first assassination of US president since John F. Kennedy in 1963? Why is no one talking up that particular miracle? We can start with the obvious: In most cases, politics has been elevated far beyond its rightful place in the hierarchy of our mental state. There used to be an old saying, as goes General Motors, so goes the United States, that captured the auto giant’s influence on the economy after World War II, but today, we might rephrase it, as goes the fate of our preferred candidates, so goes the fate of the whole world. While I can certainly understand that politics is a factor in the assessment of a given year, one partisans on either side are likely to disagree about, the obsession with it above all other things is misguided and downright unhealthy. I’m certainly pleased that President Trump prevailed, very much so, but after he lost in 2020, or Mitt Romney lost in 2012, I didn’t go into a depression and declare the year was terrible as a result. The political, to me, is subservient to the personal and the professional. When I evaluate a year and come to the same conclusion as Mr. Noah, “no significant health problems, a happy family life, a satisfying work life, and more financial stability than I’ve been able to count on during the past decade,” nothing political could possibly interfere with my enjoyment of it, despite being a political junkie as anyone visiting this blog surely knows. Beyond there being far more important things in life, far more capable of bringing true joy to our lives, the average person’s influence on the political world is essentially zero, even for journalists and other supposed insiders. While every vote counts, rarely does a single or even handful of votes change the outcome. In another context, Bruce Springsteen once sang “you’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above,” and developments in the political world certainly fall into that category in my opinion. For the sake of our own sanity, we should not stake our hopes on what happens beyond our control, but even more fundamentally, the media class at least appears to be suffering from a creeping pessimism, where nothing or practically nothing is ever good.
It is the supreme irony of our age that we live in a period of more peace, prosperity, and health than the world has ever known, one where new wonders arise practically weekly, but cannot bring ourselves to acknowledge how truly lucky we are. Instead, we, performatively at least, must do the opposite, elevating the bad, diminishing the good. The famed science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” By that standard, we live in the era of magic itself, what would be considered the golden age in any science fiction or fantasy novel, doing things on a daily basis that would have astounded anyone in any earlier time and yet simply refusing to properly enjoy them. The totality of human knowledge fits in everyone’s pocket. The totality of human invention is equally available, either in person at a local store or online without us even having to leave our couches. The totality of nature’s bounty is at a grocery store, a short drive away, or a quick delivery order. The average person has access to more, more free time to enjoy the access and a significantly longer lifespan to enjoy that free time and all they can access. This extends from the mundane and daily – twenty plus different kinds of pasta and sauces – to the rare and extraordinary – cars that practically drive themselves or impossible to believe globe trotting experiences – with everything in between and everything practically available on demand. It’s a bizarre testament of the extent to which we enjoy these things and more, believing they are our birthright, that we take them entirely for granted, and choose to judge everything wanting instead. Bizarre, sad, and potentially dangerous for the future. There will always been crises, controversies, and calamities, but the world needs hope and optimism to thrive and prosper; an intellectual class devoid of both, clinging to the negative rather than the positive all around them, barely mentioning crises that have been avoided and refusing to acknowledge those that have been solved along with the progress we have made, brings everyone down. Our current obsession with declaring every year terrible while pining for a future they feel might even be worse, is just another example of a long-running trend that should be rejected. If you want happiness, joy, and satisfaction look to yourself and your loved ones. Today’s chatterers will deliver only misery.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 