The Christmas season, whether you like it or not, is upon us now. It’s time to be cheerful and insist that everyone else have a Merry Christmas, God damn it. It’s time to remind ourselves and everyone else of our material wealth by giving them plastic-wrapped products that prove it.
But it’s also time to be with the people that we love, if we can be so lucky, and huddle together with them in the face of the inevitable New Year—that interminable recycling of the months that deludes us into thinking we’re starting over and becoming new people, when really we’re just falling back into the same hopeless hopes of improving ourselves.
You would think we would have learned to stop raising our expectations during this arbitrary time of year only to have them dashed by mid-February, but that’s exactly the kind of behavior that an ignorance of the Void will lead you to keep repeating.
In this otherwise religiously-overstuffed part of the Gregorian calendar, this January you ought to start worshipping the Void. It’s dangerous to celebrate a holiday that’s sponsored by shadowy robber barons who stole it from a bunch of people who worship a plebe who was literally born in a barn (you can’t make this stuff up).
Instead, the Void exists (or does it??) to lower your expectations to the point of irrelevance, so you never have to worry about whether or not life is fundamentally futile (it is).
Think about it: a bunch of capitalist overlords pay their workers just enough per year for them to then spend it all on overpriced gifts that the fat cats of business have produced for them to buy—and they give these gifts to their children, who will grow up to serve in the military that the captains of industry have funded for Comrade Obama in exchange for tax breaks.
Rather than take part in this system unwittingly, it’s better to embrace the futility of life and treat this year exactly the same as the last one.
Merry Christmas!®
