New Year’s Eve always appears as a break without consequence, and a sanctioned eruption of noise, light, and collective relief. It claims to offer release rather than instruction. Yet this apparent innocence conceals a carefully choreographed moral order, because nothing reveals the power of brute force more clearly than moments that appear harmless.
New Year’s Eve is neither merely a party nor simply another transition in the calendar. It functions as a ritual that teaches people how to relate to time, themselves, and the experience of failure. Its effectiveness lies in its discretion. It never presents itself as pedagogy and operates under the guise of celebration.
The night trains emotional reflexes. At midnight, people are expected to celebrate survival as an achievement and continuity as progress. The striking clock transforms duration into accomplishment. Strangers embrace, fireworks erupt (let it be the last year of that, please; think of our animals, for heaven’s sake), and the year is declared complete, as though it were a finished moral object. This framing isn’t neutral.
What disappears is the lived complexity of the year. Experience is no longer understood as a sequence of contradictions, hesitations, and unresolved tensions, but as a unit that can be closed, judged, and archived. The past becomes manageable because it’s declared finished, even when nothing within it has been resolved, even when the world remains unchanged after midnight.
The largely forgotten French moral philosopher Gabriel Séailles argued that social cohesion is sustained less by shared convictions than by synchronised feeling. Communities persist, he suggested, by learning how to feel together before learning how to judge together. New Year’s Eve is a near-perfect realisation of this mechanism. The shared countdown produces emotional simultaneity. Relief, hope, or compulsory optimism are experienced simultaneously. That simultaneity generates legitimacy. If everyone feels it, it must be right.
The night’s innocence depends on familiarity. Because it recurs annually, it feels natural. Because it is expected, it appears voluntary. Yet expectation is one of the most effective instruments of power. One may refuse, but such refusal entails a cost in social ease and belonging. Trust me, I know. The ritual doesn’t punish dissent openly. It renders dissent awkward, excessive, or joyless. In this way, it sustains itself without coercion.
Time is often described as neutral, but neutrality is itself a story. Calendars don’t simply measure duration. They organise judgment. The end of the year invites accounting, comparison, and evaluation. What did you achieve? What did you waste? Who are you now compared to twelve months ago? These questions feel introspective, yet their timing is imposed.
The little-read Swiss philosopher Max Picard wrote that modern authority rarely appears as command. It operates through structure. Time, rather than rulers, becomes the organising force. It disciplines without issuing orders and governs without visible violence. New Year’s Eve functions as the annual reaffirmation of this authority. It reminds people that time advances regardless of consent and that a life must remain legible to its rhythm.
This moralization of time produces anxiety disguised as motivation. Individuals are encouraged to believe that the passing year has made a claim on them and that they must respond with improvement. Failure is framed not as a complex entanglement of circumstance, power, and chance, but as poor self-management. The clock becomes a silent judge.
What is rarely acknowledged is the arbitrariness of this judgment. Years don’t end because experience ends. Bodies don’t reset. Relationships don’t conclude. Grief doesn’t respect January. Yet closure is imposed. Reflection must happen now. Change must be declared now. Hope must be projected forward now. Time ceases to be a medium and becomes a script.
The effect is subtle but pervasive. When time is experienced as a sequence of moral checkpoints, life becomes a performance. One is perpetually behind, unfulfilled, and obligated to catch up. New Year’s Eve intensifies this pressure and then offers relief through celebration. The authority of time produces the wound. The ritual provides the bandage.
From my home near the Museumplein in Amsterdam, the ritual announces itself long before the night itself arrives. Days in advance, rehearsals echo across the square. Bass lines repeat with mechanical patience. Light installations are tested against the winter sky. The city begins to rehearse its emotions.
What is striking isn’t only the scale of the event, but its anticipation. Sound and illumination arrive before meaning, conditioning bodies before minds have agreed to participate. The repetition isn’t yet meant to entertain but to familiarise. By midnight, the celebration feels inevitable rather than chosen.
Even those who avoid public gatherings are already implicated. Vibrations pass through walls. Light spills into private interiors (even through my bedroom in the middle of the night, which, funnily enough, doesn’t bother me that much). The city itself becomes an instrument, tuned in advance so that resistance feels out of sync.
What appears as spontaneous collective joy is, in fact, carefully rehearsed affect, a reminder that in modern urban life even anticipation is no longer private. However, I have forgotten the leadership’s failings in 2025 and the current state of the world.
Modern societies often claim to have outgrown ritual. Yet they perform it with greater efficiency than many premodern cultures. The difference lies not in intensity but in form. Contemporary ritual does not invoke the Divine. It produces moods. Fireworks, music, alcohol, and spectacle generate emotional alignment without metaphysical commitment. This absence of doctrine makes the ritual harder to resist.
The Italian ethnologist Vittorio Macchioro argued that ritual functions as a defence against what he called temporal disintegration. When individuals feel overwhelmed by time, repetition stabilises the self by embedding it in a predictable sequence. New Year’s Eve performs this function on a mass scale. It reassures participants that time is survivable because it has been survived before.
Yet ritual always teaches what matters, what may be ignored, and what must be accepted. The ritual of New Year’s Eve teaches that the passage of time should be celebrated rather than questioned. It teaches that dissatisfaction should be translated into resolutions rather than critique. It teaches that collective emotion is preferable to solitary doubt.
Its effectiveness lies in adaptability. Irony, cynicism, and even critique are easily absorbed. One can mock the clichés, complain about the crowd, or joke about broken resolutions and still participate fully. The ritual doesn’t require belief but presence. Belief can be contested. Presence is far harder to refuse.
Ritual without the Divine doesn’t mean ritual without power. On the contrary, it produces power without accountability. No authority can be questioned. The clock strikes because it strikes. Fireworks explode because they are scheduled. Meaning appears to emerge spontaneously, but it is carefully scaffolded by repetition and expectation.
Power today rarely announces itself as command. It presents itself as convenience, entertainment, or tradition. New Year’s Eve exemplifies this smiling authority. Participation feels pleasant. Refusal feels socially abrasive. The night doesn’t demand obedience but rewards compliance with belonging.
Commercial power is evident, but focusing on consumption alone misses the underlying dynamics. The more significant force is narrative. The new year is framed as a fresh start, a clean slate. This story is emotionally appealing, but politically anaesthetic. It suggests that problems can be reset rather than confronted.
The neglected French thinker Eugène Minkowski wrote that modern life reduces duration to productivity. When lives are framed as annual projects, people become units of progress. Worth is measured through improvement, efficiency, and visible change. Structural injustice recedes because attention is redirected toward personal renewal.
Institutions benefit accordingly. Governments promise reform next year. Corporations announce commitments next year. Environmental destruction is deferred to future solutions. The ritual habituates people to delay. It trains patience precisely where urgency would be disruptive.
Power smiles because it doesn’t need to argue. Fireworks or light shows drown out questions. The countdown replaces debate. Emotional excess substitutes for understanding. This doesn’t make participants foolish but human. The ritual exploits basic social instincts: the desire to belong, the fear of isolation, and the comfort of repetition.
The language of freedom saturates New Year’s Eve. Anything is possible, people say. This will be my year. Yet freedom, presented as an abstract possibility, often collapses into performance. Resolutions are announced publicly not because publicity increases commitment, but because the declaration itself feels like action.
The obscure Italian philosopher Guido Calogero argued that modern societies confuse intention with transformation. Movement replaces change. Declaring resolve substitutes for altering conditions. New Year’s Eve epitomises this confusion. To promise change feels like changing. The ritual supplies emotional satisfaction in advance.
This performance of freedom is safe because it leaves existing structures intact—one resolves to exercise more rather than to question why exhaustion is normalised. One resolves to work harder rather than questioning why work consumes life. Freedom is reduced to improved self-management rather than to collective reimagination.
True freedom is disruptive. It interrupts habits rather than decorating them. It doesn’t arrive on schedule, and often emerges from discomfort rather than celebration. The ritual of New Year’s Eve offers a controlled version of freedom, expansive in feeling but conservative in effect.
This doesn’t mean that joy is false or that celebration is inherently oppressive. It means that joy can be instrumentalised. When joy is tied to obedience to time, it becomes conditional. One is joyful because the calendar permits it. Outside that permission, dissatisfaction appears improper.
A more demanding understanding of freedom would detach it from this collective conditioning. It would recognise that insight arrives unevenly, that courage does not respect the year's transitions, and that change often begins in moments that feel inconvenient rather than festive.
What would it mean to live without granting the countdown its authority? Not to reject pleasure or gathering, but to refuse the moral weight assigned to midnight. It would mean treating the passage of time as descriptive rather than prescriptive. Days pass. Lives continue. Meaning remains unsynchronised.
The Spanish philosopher José Bergamín wrote that truth emerges indirectly, never at the moment it is proclaimed. Midnight is a proclamation. It declares significance. Yet the most significant shifts in a life rarely announce themselves. They occur quietly, often without witnesses.
To live without the countdown is to reclaim temporal sovereignty. Reflection happens when necessary, not when scheduled. Grief is allowed to persist beyond January. Hope may arise in April. Some years don’t improve, and this isn’t a personal failure.
This stance doesn’t isolate but deepens. One can still gather, toast, and laugh. But laughter need not signify obedience. Celebration need not substitute for sense-making. Meaning remains something that must be worked through rather than scheduled.
The danger of New Year’s Eve isn’t that it exists, but that it asks to be believed without examination. A society unable to question even its most famous rituals is less free than it imagines. The clock will strike whether we applaud or not, but whether we grant it authority over our inner lives remains an open choice that no collective force should make for us.
PS, with deepest respect, I’d like to thank all police officers, riot police, security personnel, and fellow professionals who, despite escalating violence and at the cost of their safety, stood strong for us. Thank you, indeed.
