2025
January 1st 2025.
Rain lashed the streets outside, the wet surface acting as a distorted amplifier to every car driving past.
FSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSST went each vehicle, their wheels spraying rainwater omnidirectionally.
Having gone to sleep at 9 in the morning, with my head still spinning from last night’s twisted revelry, I arose at 2 pm. Marooned right in the middle of the day, the morning and night seemed equally irretrievable before and ahead of me. I’d say that with such little sleep, I woke up not knowing what year it was, but I knew exactly what year it was. Arbitrary as numbers are, it’s difficult to ignore when you’re a quarter of the way through a century.
Morose as the weather was outside, the cold greyness of the sky spilt into the room, illuminating the walls with a hazy paleness that even Time found repulsive. It wrapped around my soul, however, like a comforting blanket. The rain, meanwhile, was a thick curtain which barred any admittance outside. With no worldly responsibilities requiring my presence and nowhere being open today, for once, I took relief in not leaving the house today.
I had awoken in my friend Pedro’s bed as I accompanied him back home after a rough night at work when he got food poisoning. Reposed on the couch, he was scrolling on his phone, sifting through an avalanche of New Year’s content the Instagram algorithm was dumping on him.
“What a disgusting day,” I lied to him.
“Well, it’s on days like this that drugs and movies exist for boys like us,” he said, handing me the stale remains of last night's joint.
After a cursory cleaning of his room, we settled into our spots on the couch from which we’d rarely move for the rest of the day, locked into a stable momentum of cannabis smoking while a battery of films played in the background.
I want to bring your attention to the first film we watched.
John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) is a fascinating and hilarious depiction of Western capitalism as a tool invented by a race of aliens to keep us docile and socially stranded, while they get rich and rule the planet. A down-and-out drifter looking for work stumbles across a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the world as it really is: adverts, magazines, TV, commodities, and money being hypnotic commands to act a certain way. These sunglasses also reveal every rich, upper-class person to be the alien they are. If you haven’t, I highly recommend you watch this film. It’s so wildly ahead of its time that its social and ideological commentary feels uncomfortably accurate to today’s world.
(Mild spoilers for the film ahead)
Near the end of the film, our two protagonists wander into a secret, Rococo-esque banquet hall where the aliens are addressing their own kind as well as the humans who’ve decided to side with them.
The speaker announces, “Our projections show that by the year 2025, not only America but the entire planet will be under the protection and the dominion of this power alliance. There have been substantial gains – for ourselves and for you, the human power elite.”
Pedro and I were stunned. We had to rewind and watch it again to make sure we hadn’t hallucinated that. Nope, it was real. Sometimes, completely random and unrelated occurrences align in such a way that makes this whole universe seem like an elaborate and calibrated mechanism. The only reason we had even watched this film was because of a whim. And that was such a throwaway line of dialogue that I didn’t even know it was in the script. This made us really happy. First gem of 2025. Off to a grand start.
While we spent the rest of the day watching all three Sonic the Hedgehog films (which are actually quite funny), that strange cosmic alignment from earlier kept knocking away at my frontal lobe. It’s 2025 now. Is our world in the chokehold of an indifferent and elite group of people by now? It does seem to be the case. Despite the ruling elite demonstrating some pretty questionable, bizarre, and inhumane behaviour, they’re obviously not aliens – not physically, at least. After all, the aliens’ subjugation of the planet and its people in the film feels peculiarly synonymous with our exploitative treatment of the planet, its resources, and even those part of our own species.
The more technologically advanced we become, the great heights to which we can rise towers as high as the depraved depths to which we can sink. Our conduct as a species has been pretty wretched, and we’ve been very busy during 2024. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine rage on, and this doesn’t include the litany of civil wars and other injustices the West doesn’t bother paying attention to or reporting on. Schizophrenic, far-right politicians and parties are on the up all around the world. A convicted criminal is at the helm of the most powerful country. A different band of inept and rapacious loons are running the British government. Governments in France, Belgium, and Austria are quivering as the drooling hyenas of populism close in. I’ve lost count of how many racial, gender, queer, religious, and ethnic rights have been stripped back around the world. And the health of our planet is the worst it’s been since humans began prancing around.
But that’s only one half of the story. Undeniably good things have happened around the world on a public and personal level. I’m sure there have been countless breakthroughs in human relations, community, and struggles all around the world – Western news simply likes to ignore most of that because it doesn’t serve the agenda of political lobbyists to keep things tense and polarised. But even they couldn’t ignore Syria finally breaking out from Bashar al-Assad’s grip and driving out that disgraceful parasite. We’ve all been part of and witnessed moments of togetherness in our own lives and those of others. Times of blessed beauty have followed times of ugliness. A vast amount of every kind of art was created last year for us to relish. Lessons were learnt about ourselves and those around us.
You may beg to differ but I don’t believe in good or bad years. A year is just 365 (an extra one if we’re leaping) blank pixels which briefly illuminate with the light of life before they’re handed over to the past for safekeeping. The vibrancy of our year isn’t determined by the things that happen to us but by our actions in response to them. Our conduct is the red, green, and blue that lights up those pixels. Of course, some years are more difficult than others, and it feels like everything is out to get us. But there is no happiness without suffering. I’ll even say that the latter is the fuel to the truest kind of happiness, for it is in moments of hellish adversity that we learn how to pull ourselves together through it. We gain a deeper insight into ourselves and learn to live in harmony with our virtuous nature rather than finding happiness in things that are hollow or temporary.
Similarly, there is no good without evil, and vice versa. They chaotically flow in abundance around the world and through people’s lives. Where someone somewhere is making the conscious decision to be horrible, another is consciously choosing to do good. During times when the world seems evil and hell-bent on ruining itself for the gain of a few, it is incredibly important to remember the forces of good who are striving to make this world a better place for the many. Given how mass media portrays a world ubiquitous with strife, it’s easy to get wrapped up in it all and convince ourselves we’re fucked. But there are bastions of hope out there; in you. And to forget about what’s good with the world is an insult to you.
I’ve heard it said that humanity is the universe becoming conscious of itself. A beautiful thought, no doubt; but it places undue emphasis on humanity as the instrument of universal consciousness. What I find most admiring about humanity isn’t our delusional position at the top of the pecking order but our shared helplessness. Down in the mud, along with everyone else, is where life happens. I propose a rephrasing of that statement: we’re history becoming conscious of its own unfoldment.
And I’m not just talking about the history that’s taught (and will be taught) in schools. I also refer to the larger bulk of history that sits in dimly lit and dusty archives.
People have a whole lot more agency than they did, say, a century ago. For some part, we have rights and a voice (no matter how smothered by injustice) to vocalise those rights. We’re more socially and culturally aware of the world than we used to be in the days when we literally shat out of windows. Also, we all have the instruments to record history in our pockets. Gone are the days of sitting idly while history just happens to you. The archives accessed by future generations won’t be composed of material recorded by expert photographers and historians, but by our camera rolls and social media posts. If history teaches us one thing, it’s that periods of stability and instability take turns. Things happen in cycles. History repeats itself because we don’t learn from it.
The two directions I can think of (and please offer alternatives if you can) are these: read history or become history. The first is obvious. The second entails understanding the marks our existence leaves not just on this planet but also upon history itself. With the staggering amount of user-generated content humanity has created - and continues to create with blistering acceleration – history will no longer be made of sweeping generalisations of faceless groups. The accounts of individual lives will be more numerous and detailed than they’ve ever been. We no longer have the curse (or blessing) of anonymity anymore, and neither can we plead ignorance.
With that in mind, go out and live your life, find beauty and happiness and spread it, treat people with kindness, voice your opinions on social matters that are important to you, and leave a positive footprint on this world. Become history.
By no means should we improve simply out of fear that future generations will view us bleakly. What does their opinion matter? They don’t even exist. But don’t just be sorry, be better. We should be on the right side of history not to validate ourselves in the eyes of people who aren’t born yet, but to be a credit to our fellow humans.
So, if your world gets on top of you this year, let’s take Dua Lipa’s words more literally than she meant them, “if you’re under him, you ain’t getting over him.” Remove yourself from the rhythm of your life, go touch some grass while there’s still some, and take stock of everything good in the world around you; whether they’re people, places, passions, or all of the above. There’s plenty wrong with this world, being run as it is by a cavalcade of leeches. But the rest of us exist in spite of – not because of – everything wrong. You may be dust and particles in the grand scheme of the universe, but down here on Earth, not only do you matter, you also have the power to make yourself matter.
If you’re reading this, Happy New Year. And turn it up.
-A
