For the past four or five years, my husband and I have sent out New Year's cards. We have fun looking back on the year and making a photo collage of some of our favorite memories. This year was full of big events, including our beautiful wedding, trips abroad and our beloved Cubs finally, mercifully, winning the World Series. We welcomed a new nephew and niece into the world. We had a banner year, personally and professionally.
As I scrolled through designs for this year's card earlier this month, I found myself drawn to a simple photo grid with "Best Year Ever" emblazoned across the bottom in gold cursive print. It was perfect. But I hesitated. Was it OK to so brazenly celebrate a year that many were deeming the "Worst Year Ever"?
Personal joys aside, 2016 has been especially terrible on a global scale. Acts of terror, human rights atrocities, police brutality, political unrest, the deaths of beloved artists and athletes, the rise of fake news, the normalization of bigotry and the Twitter murmurings of our president-elect sending shock waves through politics before he's even taken office. It's been a rough one, to be sure. But the worst ever?
As Jia Tolentino wrote in her profound piece in The New Yorker, "The Worst Year Ever, Until Next Year," recency bias can muddy our view of things.
"It's in the nature of years to feel exhausting in retrospect," Tolentino wrote. "The world is punishing; we have short collective memories and a cognitive bias that makes us recall bad events more vividly than good ones."
With a new year so close on the horizon, it's become oddly reassuring to hear people trashing the last one on its way out. There's something comforting about the idea that turning a page on a calendar might put an end to all that ails us. Of course, we know a new year doesn't actually bring with it a fresh start. In fact, next year might be even worse. So it isn't actually helping to wallow in our sadness. We're only adding to our melancholy with every "worst year ever" tweet we send and every 2016-trashing meme we share. We would be better served acquiring the tools to deal with the chaos, rather than merely waiting for an arbitrarily assigned end to it.
Sam Weinman, author of the new book "Win At Losing," joined my "That's What She Said" podcast this week to talk about how to grow and learn from what might feel like devastating failures and losses. His advice offers insight into the many losses we felt this year, whether they be the loss of faith in what's real when it comes to the information we digest, the loss of civility in our discourse, or the loss of progress in civil rights and gender equality.
"The worst thing you can do," Weinman said, "is to have some sort of loss and try to gloss over it, and not look inward and just try to make yourself feel better. Because (A) you're enduring the loss, which is not good, and (B) you're not learning anything from it."
In the case of the presidential election, which was a deeply felt loss for more than 65 million voters, Weinman finds a growth opportunity.
"This whole exercise I went through [in writing the book] was about how to navigate a reality that is different from the one you wanted or the one you expected," he said. "So for a lot of people who were expecting that in a little less than a month's time we would be inaugurating Hillary Clinton, we have to deal with this debacle that's in front of us. I would say that the opportunity is in the way it motivates us and mobilizes us.
"The examples I point to [in the book] are that people are hopefully going to be more engaged in the political process than they were before, people are donating money to nonprofits at an unprecedented rate because they want to do something with their frustrations and their anxieties."
So instead of marinating in our losses and waiting for a change that won't come on Jan. 1, it's time to embrace the good and grow as a result of the bad. The positive net of learning from a failure won't necessarily outweigh the negative, but actively learning from loss is certainly a better choice than the alternative. As Weinman said, "It's trying to be more proactive in how you think about it, as opposed to just feeling like a victim or feeling like the world's conspiring against you."
Back to earlier this month. I scrolled through more cards, looking for one that didn't feel so unabashedly joyful. But I kept coming back to the pretty one with the gold cursive lettering. I stared at the words: "Best Year Ever." I decided to embrace our happiness. We can acknowledge the tough times and seek to prevent their return while also celebrating our successes. I clicked "order," refusing to let the losses drown out the wins.
