An antidote to January’s New Year Illusion

A season of so many both/ands

Here we are committed to January, whether we like it or not. It took me a good week to transition from winter break into routined weekdays. 

It has me thinking (again) about how sometimes the season of our lives lines up beautifully with the natural seasonal cycle. And sometimes, maybe more often than not, it doesn’t, not at all. 

Especially inside service and knowledge-work spaces - academia, corporate Q1 culture, solopreneur hustle. These were never designed to honor seasons, bodies, or regeneration. Only output, with a thin sprinkle of “self-care” on top.

December and January are the clearest examples of this misalignment.

December is a threshold into the wintering dark. Inviting a slowing down while also being full on Capricorn season. (Love me that mountain sea goat energy.) Yet it also gets pushed into a lot of hustle, with wrap-up-the-year-strong vibes, too.

Then quickly follows January, framed as a time of rebirth. New year, so it’s a new start. We’re encouraged to emerge on January 1st renewed, motivated, and ready to overhaul our lives.

January is the heart of winter. A season of conservation, restoration, and quiet regeneration.

Historically, we knew this. The Roman calendar, predating the Gregorian, consisted of ten months, beginning in spring with March and leaving winter as an unassigned span of days before the next year. Um, yes please, could we plan out ten months and have those two to lie fallow and rest?! Instead, somewhere along the way, winter got repackaged as urgency-with-hope.

January-as-rebirth is a systematic illusion. One that is deeply institutionalized through productivity culture and capitalist timelines that benefit from us believing urgency equals renewal. Deinstitutionalizing January means slowing the story down long enough to feel what’s actually true so that when spring comes, the growth is real, resourced, and rooted rather than forced. Otherwise, guess what, you show up in spring already burnt out from the year/semester/life. 

And here’s the nuance.

Sometimes our personal lives do move forward in January. Mine did this year. A major life transition of moving carried momentum into the new year. On the surface, it looked like alignment with the “new year, new beginning” story. But that didn’t make the larger story true.

What it required instead was discernment and attention to small rituals of grounding alongside the movement. I had to ask:

• What actually needs to be here, and what is simply being projected onto December/January norms and expectations?

• What is my body asking for, underneath the cultural noise, and what do I have capacity to offer myself?

• And how do I honor forward movement without buying into the illusion that winter itself is meant for rebirth?

Long days of tasks and fires in the cold, under the full moon. Forward motion and intentional pause of a slow-cooked meal after days of takeout.

This is why I talk so often about mini cycles within larger cycles and why rituals as boundaries matter.

When you ignore them, the cost shows up fast. You start the quarter/semester reactive instead of reflective. You default to New Year hustle energy. You slide back into overing and proving your worthiness, pushing past the buildup of career grief and stuckness in your body.

So instead of pushing through, here’s my invitation: Given all of this context, what if you took a break from trying to optimize January and gave yourself some slower, more spacious reflection instead?

Consider this an invitation, not to do more, but to see more clearly what season you’re actually in, and what kind of growth you’re truly preparing for. January doesn’t need your urgency. It needs your attention.