December 2025, 10 Minutes

January Is the Most Honest Month

The Cold, the Dark, the Stripped-Down Self

“The most common form of despair, is not being who you are.” – Soren Kierkegaard

It’s not yet January, but it soon will be. That means newness, or at least it should do. That’s the expectation – that when the big fat ball drops at midnight all things should start anew, and if they do not do so naturally through some mysterio-magical alchemical formula, then they must be force-started; a new day shall dawn. New year, new me. Accordingly, gym memberships skyrocket and are locked in for life unless you figure out how to cancel. Language learning apps get the expected influx of the yearning, the striving. Recruitment consultants see a healthy bump in clients wanting to switch it up, make more, feel like what they do means more. Diets change, booze is cut out, frugality, journaling, daily step goals. It mostly fizzles out before the shortest month has the chance to even say hello, and little of it makes springtime.

In my estimation, January is the month in which existence feels the least justified. This is largely due to it finding itself in the refractory period following the most festive of seasons, and holding space in the waiting for spring to at last spring. It’s not typically intolerable, nor catastrophic, not in the way early winter can be. It’s just…meh. Life continues, routines pick up after a (hopeful) rest, our creaking bodies still must move through cold mornings and dark afternoons, yet, unlike Christmas time, which practically drips with meaning, the question of why feels unanswered and possibly unanswerable. This can therefore lead to a despair, but not despair manifesting as an acute calamity. Rather, it is almost like background radiation, an unhealthy glow over there.

Thus, the questioning gauntlet is thrown down, demanding: is January a condition that needs to be cured?

Two-Faced Summabitch

In the answering of this question of January-itis, we must first go back. Way back. Think initially of the month’s name - January. Where does this come from? Well, few will be surprised to learn that it comes to us from the Romans. The pre-Empire, pre-Republic vintage. In Rome (but not just in Rome) Janus was the god of beginnings, endings, transitions, doorways, and time itself. Unlike the Olympian gods of Greece, who were associated with particular domains or moral archetypes, Janus presides over liminality - the vertiginous spaces in between which have developed a fascination in the common mind of late - and over the human experience of movement from one state to another. In fact, his name is oftentimes correlated to the Latin word ianua, which translates into “door” or “gateway,” further adumbrating his role as guardian of thresholds.

The origins of Janus, much like his essence, are obscure, even in classical sources. The Romans believed he preceded many other gods, existing at the dawn of creation and presiding over the first acts of civilisation. He may thus be considered an Overgod; he’s not a typically heroic fellow, nor does he have great myth or deed surrounding him. But his symbolic importance is nonetheless profound. In the many, often syncretic, Roman religions and cults, he was frequently invoked at the beginnings of rituals, the founding of settlements and cities, the start of voyages, and even in “ordinary” life events such as birth and marriage. In every case, he was a protector and overseer of the shift from one state to another. This made him uniquely versatile and central to Roman spiritual consciousness.

Janus was present at every beginning, yet he was never tied to a single narrative or mythic episode. Temples dedicated to him, such as the Janus Geminus in the Roman Forum, had doors that were ceremonially open in times of war and closed in times of peace (spoiler: they were open a lot! According to some sources, up to 700 years). Through this practice, Janus became a living symbol of the state of Rome itself, representing both the city’s security and its expansion, its pax and its capacity for conflict.

Janus is most famously depicted with two faces, one looking forward and one looking backward (perhaps now you know who I’m talking about). This imagery perfectly captures his dual functions: he surveys the past and the future simultaneously, embodying both memory and anticipation. Sometimes, these faces are shown as serene and contemplative; at other times, they convey the tension inherent in transition.

It is also worth noting that he is Italian pagan, sui generis. Not borrowed from the Greeks or the Persians. He was a god shared by the people of the Italian peninsula, the Latins, Sabines, Etruscans. He is sprung from that good and fertile land. (We see him today in the name of the city of Genoa. Well, allegedly. It’s one prevailing theory that he lent his name to that great port city. Unverified, but a nice theory.) This is probably why he is not anthropomorphised; he comes from a different pagan tradition, distinct from the godly halls of the Greek, Nordic and Celtic pantheons.

I have written on the topic of time recently, and I suppose in a manner I am doing so again, here. As a god who looks both backward and forward, Janus embodies human awareness of temporality. He reminds us that beginnings are inseparable from what has preceded them, and that every choice carries the weight of consequence. In this way, he is not a mere ceremonial figure but a philosophical one, representing the continuity of experience and the inseparability of past, present, and future.

Historically, the earliest Roman calendars did not include January at all. According to Roman tradition, the original calendar attributed to wolfboy, Romulus contained only ten months, beginning in March. Winter existed outside the calendar entirely, an unnamed and uncounted interval between years. It was only in the early seventh century BC, during the reign of Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius, that January (Ianuarius) and February (Februarius) were added to create a twelve-month year. Even then, January was not conceived as a moment of renewal. It was a practical correction, an attempt to impose order on a period that had previously been left undefined. A new civilisation doing new civilisation things.

Even then January did not immediately mark the beginning of the year. For centuries after its introduction, the Roman year still began in March, aligned with spring, agriculture, military campaigning. January finally existed, yes, but it was in the background, a literal afterthought. Only in 153 BC did Rome formally shift the start of the civic year to January 1st, largely for administrative, tax-collection, and militaristic reasons (as the empire’s borders grew and bloodied, newly elected consuls needed to take office earlier to respond to conflicts, and January, already associated with Janus, provided a convenient symbolic anchor).

This is an important detail. January became the beginning of the year not because it embodied rebirth or optimism, but because it served the needs of governance. Its elevation was bureaucratic before it was emotional. Julius Caesar’s calendar reform in 45 BC cemented January 1st as New Year’s Day, and the later Gregorian reform preserved it. So basically, what we all now see as a universal temporal “reset”, is actually just a residual of Roman bureaucracy. Well, not just that, but it’s how the whole thing got started.

The contemporary insistence that January should feel hopeful, energising, or transformative is therefore historically misplaced. January has always been about ordering time rather than inspiring the soul. It is a month imposed on winter, not one that emerges from it, and its beginning is procedural, not organic

Seen in this light, January’s emotional tenor begins to make sense. It begins in darkness rather than light, in cold rather than warmth. It follows excess with austerity, noise with silence. It asks us to call something “new” while leaving almost everything unchanged. This tension is not a modern failure of mood but is actually built into the month’s origins. January was never meant to feel natural. It was designed to function as an inorganic hinge, a processing cantilever, not, as so many will it to be, a flowering.

In this sense, January has always been honest about itself, despite the dishonesty of those who project upon it. It has a heavy burden to endure - the emotional weight of billions of souls crying out for meaning and renewal, and yet it does not exist in pretence, it does pretend. that a new year erases the old one. It stands at the threshold, aware of both directions, looking both ways, offering no reassurance about what lies ahead. Its role is not to console, but to mark the passage from one span of time to another, from what has been endured into what must still be lived.

January is not a fresh start, and should not be seen as such, lest madness grips us at our most fragile moments. It is an administrative fiction that we have learned to inhabit emotionally. But, with all that said, convention dictates that it has a meaning, a profound one, one that must be navigated. Having a fringe historical understanding of its fons et origo does not negate this reality. So, with that said, and with the desire to not allow the aforementioned madness to wrap its powerful fingers about my increasingly fragile self, what to do?

The Camusian Condition; Clarity, Burdensome

Here we have a one-two punch; a pair of thinkers united by having looked too long into the deep waters of life.

Albert Camus wrote that the absurd (the tension between humanity’s deep longing for meaning and the silent, indifferent universe that offers none in return) is born from the confrontation between our hunger for meaning and the indifferent silence of the world. January offers us an annual staging of this confrontation. A joust for the motivated, pushy peasants to enjoy. December clatters about the place with meaning, traditions, symbols, expectations, stories, a time-unique folk art. January, now as in the time of the Romans, withdraws all of this at once, sucking like a backdraft. The world goes quiet. And in that quiet, we are left alone with the question Camus thought unavoidable: now what? Now the fuck what?

Camus distrusted hope when it functioned as escape. Not hope as courage, but hope as postponement; the belief that life will begin later, once conditions improve. January dismantles this belief. The conditions are not improving. The weather is bad. The light is scarce and a bit crap when it bothers to turn up. The year is long. If life is to be lived, it must be lived here, not deferred to spring, or to the person you imagine yourself becoming. As Al Pacino shouted to a locker room filled with down-on-their-luck modern gladiators in Any Given Sunday, life is “the six inches in front of your face”.

This is why the beginning of our year can feel so close to The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus does not push the rock with optimism. No copium flows through his energised veins. He does not believe the task will one day justify itself. He simply returns to the mountain. Begins again. January is a Sisyphean month. The routines resume without much ceremony. Work continues. The body requires care, sometimes fixing. The rock is still there, heavy and grey and old and patient. The question is not whether this is meaningful, the whole fuss of it all. No - the real question is whether you will continue anyway.

There is a humble dignity in this. Camus believed that revolt was the proper response to the absurd. The dignified response. Revolt, in his sense, was not a dramatic rebellion of manning the barricades with Molotov cocktails and antiquated guns run in from distant, sympathetic shores, but steady refusal. A refusal to lie to oneself, refusal to invent false consolations, refusal to deny reality. January is a month of revolt precisely because it strips away the lies we normally tolerate. There is no fantasy of endless possibility in a dark, wet Wednesday afternoon in mid-January. There is only the decision to get through the day without pretending it is something else.

New Year’s resolutions, therefore, seen through Camus, are acts of metaphysical impatience. They attempt to leap over the absurd instead of standing within it. They hubristically defy Janus, demanding he gives meaning to the middle, makes the threshold the destination. They promise a future self who will redeem the present one. In essential truth, January, by contrast, insists on presence. It does not ask who you will become. It asks whether you can inhabit your life without embellishment, without the story that this is all leading somewhere that will finally make sense.

This is where January becomes genuine and authentic. To live without false hope is not nihilism; it is responsibility. It means accepting that meaning is not waiting to be discovered but must be enacted, daily, without guarantees. Getting up when there is no enthusiasm. Caring for others when nothing feels uplifting. Choosing to continue when continuation itself feels like the only reason. The body is also exposed, and that matters. Cold, stiffness, fatigue, the fleshly reminders that existence is physical before it is conceptual. Meaning does not float above the body; it is carried by it. January’s discomfort grounds philosophy where Camus believed it belonged: in lived experience, not theory.

What remains, Camus would say, is the choice to live without appeal, for nothing could be more absurd.

Perhaps no other thinker understood subtle register of finding meaning in the stony face of meaningless than the insomniac son a priest, Romanian-born Emil Cioran. Cioran is the philosopher of mornings. Cold ones, where the weak sun has not yet risen. His is the mind we turn to when getting out of bed feels philosophically unconvincing, physically unmountable. Not dramatic enough to provoke action, not painful enough to demand change, January exists in this precise register; the distractions of December have fallen away, and what remains is a thin, exposed continuity, that of the same self, the same life, but now stripped of narrative momentum, and as we (mostly; the intuitively dull do exist among us) all intuitively understand, so much of life is founded on momentum. Where Camus famously asked whether life was worth living and answered somehow, despite it all, “yes”, Cioran never stops asking The Question. He lingers about the question until it corrodes the very idea of an answer.

For Cioran, lucidity is not a virtue but a liability. To see clearly is not to be liberated, but to be immobilised. Consciousness becomes excessive, surplus to requirements, a burden rather than a tool. January risks overexposing this clarity. Without stimulation or illusion, thoughts and questions turn inward and begin to interrogate itself. The danger here is therefore the despair of understanding. Cioran’s bleak remark (that forever doomed him to academic obscurity), “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late”, is not flippant and immiserating, it is the thinking January in its purest form, quadruple filtered, a place in time that is too exhausted to embellish existence but too lucid to believe in redemption.

January invites Cioran’s conclusion almost against our will. If nothing justifies itself, why continue? If clarity dissolves every reason, why act at all? Cioran articulates the temptation toward absolute honesty, the kind of honesty that negates movement, responsibility, and care. He gives voice to the thought one does not want to end on.

With Cioran and Camus present, January becomes a sort of philosophical test. How much honesty is survivable? How much self-awareness can a person endure without retreating into illusion or collapse? What does it mean to continue at a moment when continuation is no longer automatic?

But don’t despair, we are not yet done…

Churchyard Thinker

Where Cioran hangs about in the clear, thin gazpacho soup of clarity until it incapacitates all movement of the mind, and eventually the body, Soren Kierkegaard offers something a bit more subtle, even instinctive. Being a Dane, deep winter was in his bones as an atavistic understanding. For him, despair is not a stage-managed rupture in the natural ordering of life, but a condition of existence, the inevitable misrelation of the self to itself, the authentic self searching in the dark, a flickering candle it’s only source of illumination. January, stripped of the distractions of festivity and ritual, exposes this somewhat unbearable truth: that we are now forced into proximity with who we are, and the work of the self is a task we cannot escape, and must not try to. Perhaps due to his remarked upon Northern European origins, Kierkegaard would recognise the unease of a cold, dark January morning not as a sadness, but as the labour of being required to confront the self without illusion. Unlike Cioran, he does not tempt us toward self-erasure; and unlike Camus, he does not demand revolt against the absurd that pervades all. Instead, he asks us to inhabit our condition responsibly, to bear the weight of despair with attention and care. In this sense, January, rather than being a desperate and costly scramble for renewal and newness, can rather become a sort of philosophical apprenticeship to the self. The routines resume, the body endures, the days pass, yet within these motions lies the quiet cultivation of selfhood. The leap Kierkegaard prescribes is not out of existence or into defiant meaning, but inward, toward a deliberate engagement with the finite, flawed, and persistent self. This is an engagement that prepares the ground upon which the Camusian act of revolt, if so wanted, may meaningfully unfold.

Final Words of 2025

Engaging with Cioran’s work reminded me of the counterintuitive-yet-genius line by G.K. Chesterton, where he observes that, “If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

I thought about discussing Thoreau here rather than Kierkegaard. But concluded no, not yet. I will have other opportunities, and I wish to keep my proverbial powder dry on that particular American, at least for now. I think he’s deserving of a piece of his own, dedicated to the man solus.

Camus is a thinker that I wished I had an option to study in uni. Alas, he is still largely considered on the periphery of modern philosophical departments, and is probably more popular in literature ones, at least in the Anglosphere. Not, I don’t believe, for any cynically reason, any desire to withhold the truth from spongy youthful minds, just, I think for reason of practicality – there’s only so much time to cover so much, and the Anglo tradition leans analytic, anyway. for as I am, in some ways - in Wellesian ways - living my life in reverse, I was less maudlin back then, funnily enough, and could have done with the foundation; it may have afforded me the chance to deal with what was to come with a bit more grace.

I know people had a tough one this year. I hear it through the grapevine, and the ambient consensus appears to be so. I know a lot of this is linked to macro, often global factors: politics, technology, economics, war, race genocide. It seems too that a spiritual anxiety has reached into the souls of many. Something’s not quite right with the modern world, the way things have turned out. The “worst timeline” as is sometimes sardonically said. Naturally, the above-mentioned macro factors heavily contribute to this, and to a very large extent what we experience personally and interpersonally is downstream from these cultural titans. With the advent of “AI”, the general neoliberal order in collapse, and the consequent historical re-motions, I suspect things are going to get worse before they get better, so having some philosophical steel inserted in our bones can only help.

Therefore, we must be patient.

To that end, perhaps go easy on yourself this January, don’t try to fix everything at once, just be for a little bit, and see where you stand come springtime – I bet it’ll be taller than you expect. So, as Fr. Collins did in David Lean’s undervalued masterpiece, Ryan’s Daughter, I will leave you with the gift of a doubt - that maybe Janus’ gaze is an unsteady one.

Happy New Year, and all the best for the next one.

Photo by: Anna-Louise