Don’t let superstition rule your 2017

The last day of last year was, without a doubt, one of the best. My friends who I hadn’t seen in weeks or months were gathered around me to celebrate the end of the year from hell. Yet, the jubilant cries of my friends at the stroke of midnight almost drowned out the mantra I was repeating over and over in my head — “2017’s going to be a great year. It’s my year.”

I wasn’t alone in my optimism about seeing 2016 go. Seemingly endless political controversies, terrorist attacks and public angst created a feeling of helplessness and a lack of personal agency among many, including myself.

But the mindset that 2017 will be better simply because it’s a new year is worse than superstitious, it’s irresponsible. Pessimistic media commentators, among them Rolling Stone’s Tessa Stuart, have pointed out with more than the usual amount of doom and gloom that 2016’s catastrophes are inevitably going to spill over into the new year. We’re mere weeks from the inauguration of a president whose administration seems destined to be mired in scandal, international fiascos in Syria and Libya persist and our beloved dead celebrities remain dead.

We can all look forward to the fresh start the new year offers us — but this year has to be one of actively working to improve our world, not waiting around for forces bigger than ourselves to save us.

It’s an integral part of the human experience, especially for students, to experience events that are beyond our control. People asked themselves if last year was cursed, and culprits as diverse as the Mayan calendar and the “new” Zodiac sign NASA introduced back in September ended up with a large share of the blame.

I remember my sense of confusion and anxiety the day after the presidential election stemming from an uncanny feeling that the realities of the campaign season and the realities of the election’s outcome didn’t match up. The Democrats had done everything right, the way we were supposed to in order to win an election — how could the result not reflect that?

Presidential elections have been connected in studies, including one from the Association for Psychological Science, with increased superstitious behavior. I can relate — checking FiveThirtyEight’s election tracker became a daily ritual for me in the months leading up to Nov. 8, and I came to see the repeated action almost as a good luck charm. If I didn’t check in for a few days, I was genuinely nervous of what I might see the next time I checked.

Whether the preferred superstition connects the alignment of stars with political outcomes or a pair of lucky underwear with success on an exam, the motivations and results are similar. We can’t see the positive effects of work that might actually improve the outcome, so we switch over to an easier approach. We end up trying to improve our lot by asking a higher power or a superhuman force to do the heavy lifting for us.

I could feel myself slipping into this mentality, along with many of my friends, as 2016 finally drew to a close. My interest in keeping up with political news slacked significantly and my investment in academics and extracurriculars diminished until it was little more than a venture in making it to the end of the semester and the year intact.

My friends and I started to discuss in detail the influence of our pseudo-scientific Myers-Briggs personality types and how they governed our life choices. I began to read the horoscopes increasingly unironically, seeking out what I, a Taurus, could expect from the coming day. Of course, reading the horoscopes is just about as harmless as anything, but the mentality of limiting yourself to the arbitrary predictions of an arbitrary star sign did nothing to contribute toward my life or career advancing. My mind was stuck in a moment in time.

As I contemplated the landscape of 2017 that was fast approaching, I began to realize that the new year’s new start wouldn’t mean anything unless I treated it realistically, as something I needed to face myself.

Like every year, 2017 will have its ups and its downs. If there is something that we can affect in the way the upcoming year rolls out, it has to be our attitude toward how we react to these ups and downs. Yes, the bad stuff that happened in 2016 will continue to be with us. And taking a definitive stance for the good in the next 12 months will mean direct action to make both our personal world and the world at large around us a better place — or at least slightly less ugly.

If 2016 has taught any of us anything, it’s that we can’t trust ourselves to a superstitious faith in powers beyond our control, ruling our lives, both individually and collectively as a society. 2017 has to be a year marked by strong, confident and determined action from all of us to make progress and improve our lives.

The fact that we survived the events of last year proves we can do it — if not, we’re simply doomed to repeat history.