Marking Time in an Unceremonious World

Cassie McClure
Sat, 03 Jan 2026 23:00:00 -0800
Lifestyle

The hot take that floated into my inbox this week was that resolutions are passe. Apparently, thinking about "next year" is outdated. We're in this grind of time and marking it arbitrarily doesn't matter. But, really, we time-travel constantly. It's one of the best things about being human.

We can rehearse future sticky conversations in the shower. We can relive our moments of wildness while folding laundry. We can imagine a future version of ourselves who has it together, so she is not constantly behind on laundry. Yet every January, the naysayers trot out the idea that it is naive to believe in fresh starts.

I think forward and backward all the time, even while the narrative starts to insist I live in the present. Got children? You better be soaking up the moments, right now, all the time ... but there's only so much spilled milk to sop up until you have to wring it clean before the moment's overdone and sour.
Updated: Sun Jan 04, 2026

The hot take that floated into my inbox this week was that resolutions are passe. Apparently, thinking about "next year" is outdated. We're in this grind of time and marking it arbitrarily doesn't matter. But, really, we time-travel constantly. It's one of the best things about being human.

We can rehearse future sticky conversations in the shower. We can relive our moments of wildness while folding laundry. We can imagine a future version of ourselves who has it together, so she is not constantly behind on laundry. Yet every January, the naysayers trot out the idea that it is naive to believe in fresh starts.

I think forward and backward all the time, even while the narrative starts to insist I live in the present. Got children? You better be soaking up the moments, right now, all the time ... but there's only so much spilled milk to sop up until you have to wring it clean before the moment's overdone and sour.

But some moments come back with time travel. I catch myself eyeing long, raven-haired babies and in a flash, my 13-year-old is that small, with her fleshy hand still in mine.

I then time-travel again. When I was fifteen, the millennium flipped over from one number to the next. This was supposed to be a moment, perhaps The Moment. Prince had been telling us for nearly two decades that 1999 would be the party to end all parties, and who were any of us to argue with Prince?

My dad went to bed early.

My mom and I stayed up in front of the television. One of the dogs slept on the floor, snoring softly. The other hovered nearby, unsettled by the unusual hour and the inexplicable wakefulness. When the ball dropped, there were cheers on the screen and confetti and noise, and then my mom looked at me and said, "Naja ... that's it then." She stood up and went to bed.

The lights stayed on. The dog snored through history.

It was an unceremonious ending to a moment that had been sold as monumental. I remember feeling slightly embarrassed for believing it might be anything other than that. Shouldn't I have marked that shift more momentously?

That Y2K memory returns to me whenever I hear about the debate over whether resolutions matter. Time does not care whether we declare intentions or refuse to. It moves on either way. Yet we keep creating markers, rituals, moments when we pause and say, "here." Here is where I try again. There is something deeply human in our desire to steer the boat we're on.

Even if time has no ceremony, humans create them anyway. We know the calendar is arbitrary. We know that one random Tuesday is not so different from Jan. 1. Time moves past us without ceremony and does not pause to offer a clean edge. It flows onward, around us, and we drift in it, pretending we are steering. We choose to mark time because it gives shape to a life that otherwise feels like an uninterrupted stream.

The problem is not the resolutions themselves, but the expectation of our transformation without effort. Time will not do that work for us; that's up to us. What we can do is decide, again and again, to pay attention and to choose to do things that matter to us, even when the moment feels ordinary.

The millennium passed with a shrug and some dog snores. Life went on. Most moments do. Meaning rarely announces itself with confetti. It shows up quietly, in the choosing of small acts we repeat until they add up to something like change. Time may be unceremonious, but we don't have to be, and you, like me, can resolve to chalk up hope for the future that's out there waiting for us to catch up.