We go through the motions, I think, as we shift from one year to another. There is little to celebrate outside of the personal, and when we are self-reflexive about our privilege, the middle class guilt can only kick in. We refrain from posting food photos. We keep from the usual displays of celebration. We stay distant from the predisposition to overshare on social media.
There are a multitude of reasons, of course, to tell the world the year was good for you. And gratefulness is a good thing. For some of us though, it almost feels excessive to put it on display. This is not to question what others are doing, as it is to lean into why it is that this shift from 2023 to 2024 has demanded differently of the self. It isn’t why has it been hard to celebrate, but how it’s been difficult to put that on display. It isn’t about why there is a refusal to flex, as it is about how this denial of the reflex to share speaks to a specific kind of processing of the present.
That this sensing of the act of biting one’s tongue, almost as if (and ironically) in resistance, is happening on the first month of a new year is expected — what better time to find these words than in preparation for how we re-live the coming year?
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When we think of reliving, we think of the past — there is a sense of nostalgia, a kind of enjoyable distance. We view it through sepia-coloured glasses, maybe in black and white? maybe, in the color story of historical periodization as dictated by popular culture. To relive means to have lived through something once before, knowingly and consciously, body and mind. There is a sense of knowing, if not a sense of intimacy, which informs a present where this past is being re-presented as important and valuable, special and unique.
Reliving is about our relationship with the past, a sort of reckoning with, a taking stock of. To relive, with nostalgia and reminiscence, is not to repeat mistakes, but to have already reconciled with these. Accepting that some remain unresolved, others unforgiven; reconsidering the bad through glasses tinted now with the colors we can afford.
It is also portents. History repeating itself always seemed like fair warning of a reliving that would be detrimental, a downward spiral, a hundred steps backward. You hear it in the sound of the word itself: detrimental. As if referring to a petri dish of mental issues, a signal that historical repetition is a bad thing. We only know of its pitfalls, of course, because we have taken stock, reckoned, assessed. We have made sense of that past and carry a knowledge of its crises, its faults, its undoing.
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Whoever said we cannot step into the same river twice could not have imagined a present lived on loop. Where we are denied the distance we need to reckon with the past; where we cannot but be taken on waves of repetition.
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Yes, it is about living within online algorithms and real life echo chambers. And yes, these are the waves that we are riding, thoughtless participants as we can be in practices that deepen socio-political divides. The task was always unity, but that became nothing more than a campaign tagline — and it wasn’t even ours. Two years into this new presidency and we are watching things unfold like we are mere audience, not actual beneficiaries of a majority vote.
Between the trauma of the violence of six years under Duterte, and the exhaustion of a 2022 campaign that was a losing proposition from the get-go, it is understandable that we can barely care. But this disengagement is a privilege, as it is a delusion: to dismiss what unfolds politically is to imagine that it will not affect us.
The insistence that we learn our lessons from history might be best practiced with the recent past. Maybe we learn: we paid for our disgust and dismissal, our disengagement from governance, during the Duterte Presidency. We paid for it when, in 2022, we had no idea how to run a campaign and win an election, in the landscape of propaganda that he had incontrovertibly changed. The question is not how to change that landscape, as it is how to exist within it in a way that matters.
And that is not a question for the next election, the next campaign. It is a question for now.
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Voices from the six years of Duterte are now taking up space on our side of the spectrum, speaking about networks franchises being shut down, critics being silenced, pages being taken down, the horrid governance, the corruption, the waste of public funds, the health of the President kept secret.
It is like listening to ourselves, but in the voices of those who had earned from and built up the presidency we looked upon with anger and disgust. It’s literally the same words we used to talk about Duterte, now being used to talk about Marcos by people who were squarely against us for six years.
If that is not reason for disquiet, then we are not paying attention enough.
See: lessons to learn from recent past.
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When lines can be so repeated, but differently; when we hear our own words being said on repeat, in various iterations, over and over on algorithms not ours; when we listen in on conversations that exclude us, but which sound like us from such a recent past. When presidents change but become a version of the ones still so familiar. When leaderships change but problems remain the same.
When the present cradles many versions, the chronology of living day-to-day can only be sacrificed at the altar of repetition.
It is in this way that the political can but inform the personal, for those of us with the privilege to seek distance, to find refuge, to escape and elide and dismiss the present that matters. And in this shift to another year, one that leads up to another election, one where there is little indication that things will be better for the majority that are disenfranchised, one where we feel like we’re living in a continuation of the last leadership — if not the one from Martial Law.
In this space, in this new year, there is a lot here that might be about the personal we can celebrate. But where we seem more and more disconnected and divided, where we tend towards dismissiveness and apathy, where we find ourselves refusing to listen and denying the real state of the present, what surfaces here, in this new year, is nothing more than disquiet.
Maybe if we lean into that, we can start finding the tools to deal with 2024 better. ***