New Year's

What does 2023 hold?

Are we closer to (what kind of) denouement, or are we waiting for new follies and complications? Are we, as a civilization, entering the phase of "waiting for the barbarians". Because, as he says Cavafy, they are at least a solution...

Or this is no longer the expectation of the barbarians. They have been around for a long time, and stronger than ever. Why doesn't it look like a battle? Battles that look like battles barbarians lose, they win only when you think it's long gone - it's not a battle.

Man is a being of hope, and that kind of mental inertia activates the illusion that a new number can bring a better world. But seriously believing in such a thing is like believing in the Immaculate Conception or the city of angels on the tip of a needle. You can believe whatever you want, in other words, but it doesn't bind reality. It spins to its own beats, its music is not audible to everyone, so it is not difficult to believe that any noise is more real than the silent dictator of our lives, reality itself.

The only way to get better is to get better yourself. There is no other recipe, since you are human.

That's why don't burden yourself with civil rituals and the illusion of numbers - the real battlefield is you, and every moment of your life in which you make some, even the most insignificant, decision. Let inspiration always come to you in such moments, and not (only) when the calendar says so.

Admittedly, perhaps the real question is how to think meaningfully about the near future, the threshold of which we are crossing at midnight, while in Europe a country is being bloodily destroyed in a way that we believed was no longer possible. Which is in some ways more "barbaric" than all the old and new barbarians that history has told us about. Ukrainian suffering, as long as it lasts, is a terrible scar on the face of Europe. The true day of Europe will be the day when Russia is returned to its borders.

And on the domestic front, similar landscapes and similar colors always await us. In the hope of the expected changes, they did not appear clearly enough this year either. Former expectations are turning more and more into a parodic fog. The scene is so shameless right now that you feel ashamed every time you listen to the nonsense you are listening to. We may have better luck next year. Although that is also unlikely. It's not up to the years, it's up to us.

Everything that should look like changes are actually accumulated incidents without full meaning, because they are not accompanied by systemic logic. In the midst of the story of successes over crime, prisons also like yesterday's feather of that struggle? And that under not at all naive accusations. What is it? Who mentioned the changes?

Or, how much the spirit of change is brought about by these half-humorous manipulations around the tremendous successes of the government, where the most insane statistical exhibitions show this government as a miracle of success. OK, and let's believe it for a second. But where does this success take place? Where did they reduce unemployment and raise all economic parameters? Where can it be seen? Except in government marketing. Didn't we, all together, laugh when DPS did this, just like this, or very similar? They also learned that school from them Vucic and this fluid old/new majority.

This society has had an extremely disappointing insight: even after political changes, the impression remains that real changes are still just as necessary. Probably, this insight is not conducive to the New Year's mood, but a night or two of high-quality euphoria (and hedonism) will hardly cancel the impression we are talking about.

When we remove children's mystifications (ranging from fairy tales to religion), only one civil ritual remains. Which is also changing... In the seventies and eighties, those holidays were celebrated in a way somewhat different from what we know today.

But hopes and wishes are, more or less, always the same. They are less affected by social customs and their changes. Luckily. You are there, always, with yourself.