Three people sitting on couch holding champagne and looking sad
What if our acknowledgment of every new year was merely clerical, like with most any other day?Photograph from Alamy

Everyone says that 2020 sucked, and I am not going to argue with that, mostly because I have lost the ability to argue with anyone but myself. (I live with someone, but we have decided that there’s no point in arguing anymore, because if it escalated we wouldn’t be able to break up until March at the earliest.) But I will say one thing in this year’s defense. You know that part of the year between the last of the holiday paper going in the recycling bin and the shopping for the Later Part of the Holiday food, that moment when everyone—in the canned-tomato aisle at the grocery store, in the slushy Michaels parking lot as people stuff plastic bags full of streamers and magenta glitter into their trunks—is asking one another, “Are you doing anything for New Year’s Eve?” This year, nobody’s asking.

Before we get into how pleased I am about that, let’s go back to last year, and all the years before it, when this question had a starring role in the holiday play. If the askee says, “I’m not doing anything. What are you doing?” and the asker is doing something amazing—taking a fur-lined helicopter to Cornwall, learning how to make steak au poivre from a hologram of James Beard, winkingly “staying in” with someone they haven’t already fucked fifty billion times—then the askee knows that they are just a prop in the asker’s game. And yet the person with no plans, or basically no plans (“Our across-the-street neighbors have graciously offered to help us eat the panettone that Janet’s mom sent us, and we might play Settlers of Catan, a game that allows everyone to realize their dream of being the chief estimator for a medium-sized construction firm”), might at least walk away feeling grateful for the glimmer of jealousy—for feeling anything at the end of December other than cold, mildly useless, and in need of some larger clothes.

The more likely scenario, though, is that neither asker nor askee are doing anything, which is a relief but which also, perhaps, sends off a little current of mutual resentment, because in this exchange neither person has offered the other anything to aspire to.

This year, we will not be running into one another to ask what we’re doing on New Year’s Eve, and, in any case, if we did run into one another we would likely have little to report.

In getting rid of New Year’s Eve for 2020-21, I suggest we take the opportunity to get rid of it altogether. The following story might help illustrate why. Four or five New Year’s Eves ago, my boyfriend and I got into an argument about what we should do—go to a big party, go to a small one, stay in. It wasn’t a heated argument; it was just listless and petty. We went to bed at 9 p.m., both of us thinking that it might be time to split up. I only recall it so well because it was probably the best New Year’s I’ve ever had.

I can think of a bunch of worse ones. The time I was hanging out with a different boyfriend and several friends, none of whom liked my boyfriend, and realizing, when we kissed and one friend looked at me and mouthed “Eww” and I didn’t feel mad, that I didn’t like my boyfriend, either. Watching a lot of people high on Molly hug one another while I drank two gin and tonics and reread “Very Good, Jeeves!” on my phone. Two visits to an emergency room, one with a friend who was having a panic attack, the other because I got drunk and did a backflip off a bed and onto a vase and cut open my thigh.

On some New Year’s Eves, I have simply wandered around—on the subway, in a car, on foot—just looking for my New Year’s purpose. Whether I was twenty-two or thirty-four or forty-five, every wandering New Year’s had the same bad feeling of “Why am I not just at home doing nothing?” But, then again, if you did go home to do nothing, the empty, quiet house would be screaming at you that life is meaningless, and maybe it’s better to get that message someplace else. Feeling bad on New Year’s feels importantly bad. You know that a shitty New Year’s is not a referendum on your life, because anyone who thinks that is an idiot—but you do think that, you can’t help but think that, so now you’re feeling bad for feeling bad. You idiot.

I know what you’re thinking—maybe I’m onto something, but couldn’t we do New Year’s Eve one more time, even if we are just at home playing Catan, a game so awful I’ll make two jokes about it (the only thing more boring is building a popsicle-stick log cabin in your imagination)? Can’t we ring in 2021? We have vaccines. We have a new President, who is merely the devil we know and not the actual devil. “Conversations with Friends” will première on Hulu in the spring, and we are very likely to see thin, sexy Irish people smoking and cheating on one another. That’s all true. But 2021 is going to be bad. Unless they invent a way to vacuum carbon out of the sky, like dirt from a plant that your cat knocked over, and unless they figure out how to refreeze the ice caps, as if they were pints of ice cream you left in the car, each year is going to get worse in ways that we can’t comprehend. If, next year, a friendly stranger in the post office wishes me a happy New Year, I will not respond, “There is nothing about the passage of time that fills me with anything but dread.” No, I will smile and say, “Thanks. You, too.” But I won’t be the one to say it first. Time is not only passing. Time is running out.