The New Year is upcoming, and as such, I'd like to share a few related thoughts with you.

A year is a strange data node in one's mind. Think about it: hours are changing very quickly, and so the data node for hours is quite dynamic: one can never relax and be certain that the next hour is not up. Days, though, slower, are seemingly as dynamic and therefore change easily. Same goes to weeks and even months, to a lesser extent. But a gap between a month and a year is so big that the data nodes connection loses its elasticity.

Hours quite obviously compress into days, days compress into weeks and weeks compress, less obviously, into months. That months compress into years is unintuitive, even if obvious, and for some time after the next year arrives, it's hard to believe.

I get this feeling - what I dub the Old Year Inertia - every year. For a few months after the New Year celebration is over, everything released during the current year seems somehow very new - surprisingly so, in fact. Just last year, when I was still watching TV, it astonished me for a moment to see a new music video having release date of "2014": "Wow", I thought, "that's new. When did they even?..". Things produced during those few months feel more modern, more cool, more new than even those made December, 31st last year, and this feeling alone fills me with awe of time. Another year has officially passed... Wow!

I notice the same nowadays as the year 2016 creeps closer: things made in 2015 are old if not obsolete, and anything that the next year promises me seems, somehow, more prominent and exciting.

That time passes continuously is not obvious to me in day-to-day life, even as I entertain the insight. It doesn't matter, either: I'm so used to seeing time as numbers and weekday labels that it doesn't matter that a minute has passed - the hour isn't over yet! It's December 31st - but the year isn't over yet! How peculiar: numbers are more important that the actual passage of time.