The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, January 1, 2026

Notably: As with birthdays, which we stop celebrating, as with funerals, which we start scheduling, we reach an age when new year resolutions, like new years, are not worth the delusion.  With age there’s a lot less new in new year and a lot more old, the oldness of it all, not just one’s own. We’ve been here so often before, seen so much of it, that playing the game isn’t as appealing as, say, a good beer as if it were any old Sunday in April, or a good Mozart sonata any time. It is good enough that we have made it this far. Resolutions seem presumptuous. We are on borrowed time. Vanity-driven self-improvement–losing weight, exercising more, drinking less–can seem like self-indulgent narcissism while friends are on chemo, on restricted diets, on beer faker than maga patriotism. Nothing wrong with good health as a personal, if not a civic, responsibility: let’s each do our part for the survival of Medicare (the fewer hospital stays for you, the more available for the next guy). “To go on living is a mistake,” Thomas Mann wrote in 1953, despondent over his lessened powers, “especially since I live mistakenly. Eating is a burden and a plague. My only comfort is smoking and drinking coffee.” Not such a long way at all from Magic Mountain‘s reflection at the end of the book that “time, then, had continued to bring forth changes in its furtive, unobservable, secret, and yet bustling way.” Which is to say: Thomas Mann in 1924, when he was 49, had intuited what he was feeling in 1953, a year from his death–that, as Gibbon put it, “It is the common calamity of old age to lose whatever might have rendered it desirable,” a sentiment Gabriel Garcia-Marquez put more poetically as “the trail of yellow leaves of his autumn of pain.” But there is also self-indulgence in the kind of grimness that would produce a soggy moan like I’ve just written, particularly for New Year’s day, even if it no longer has that same ring, now that tinnitus is louder. Watching those happy feasts from around the world even for 30 seconds quickly demolishes my ridiculous down beats. But they’re not out of nowhere: If we have made it this far, maybe the seeming banality of New Year’s is in how others see it as such an occasion for celebration when, in our grizzled reality, what the others have yet to discover–and let’s not rush them: theirs are the lives they should live to the hilt–is that they will be lucky to reach the age when every day is a triumph, and every day is a new year. Janus is the god of age. So go ahead, set off those fireworks. But on mute, please. Cats present. 

Roy’s no Mormon and not much of a Christian, and does not honestly believe in an afterlife. Yet the manner of death he fears does not sound bad to me; to me it seems like a decent, clean way of taking off, surely better than the slow rot in a hospital oxygen tent with rubber tubes stuck up your nose, prick, asshole, with blood transfusions and intravenous feeding, bedsores and bedpans and bad-tempered nurses’ aides—the whole nasty routine to which most dying men, in our time, are condemned.

–From Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968).

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