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A Few Thoughts About the New Year

Sam Harris Jan 1

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The following is an edited transcript from the Making Sense podcast:

Well, another year has elapsed, and 2025 is upon us. If you’re over a certain age, every year now appears absurdly futuristic. (How young do you have to be for 2025 to not look like the chyron at the start of a science fiction movie?)

As I look back over the year, and look ahead to what may be coming, it’s hard to escape the sense that we are witnessing more than the usual degree of change and chaos. Liberal democracies are under threat globally. The conflict between Israel and her neighbors continues, and there is the looming prospect of a proper war with Iran. There was the fall of the Assad regime in Syria and uncertainty about what comes next. The war in Ukraine continues to rage, and there is simmering hostility between the US and China. Unlike most other periods in memory, if someone came from the future and said, “Don’t you realize that World War III started months ago?”—that would seem, if not plausible, at least possible.

And in this context, it remains hard to believe that we’re returning Donald Trump to the White House. There are just so many reasons why this seems like a bad idea. To name only one: He is the sort of president who thinks that Pete Hegseth should run our Department of Defense. The list of Hegseth’s disqualifying sins is so long and miscellaneous that it is hard to perceive his nomination as anything other than a terrible mistake—that is, until one recalls that Trump put forward Matt Gaetz to run the Department of Justice. Happily, Gaetz is suffering the fate of so many who come within range of Trump’s enthusiasm—humiliation and oblivion (that is, until he resurfaces selling gold-plated rifles or starts a podcast with Andrew Tate). These nominations really do seem like some sort of troll or act of vandalism—both Gaetz and Hegseth could be easily cast as villains in a Batman movie. Less obscene, but perhaps even more dangerous, we have the prospect of Tulsi Gabbard serving as Director of National Intelligence. Her well-documented patience, if not fondness, for the Assad regime isn’t aging very well. Listen to her describe her meeting with Assad on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where she directly responds to all the criticism she received for speaking so diplomatically about Assad. The level of naivete and frank delusion on display—given who we knew Assad to be at that point—is just astounding.

When the world could really use a shining city on a hill—that is, a healthy, liberal democracy capable of leading, not merely by force, but by example—we have decided to return a man to the presidency who refers to his fellow citizens (Democrats who didn’t vote for him) as “vermin” and “scum.” We can’t pretend that this is normal. And it has been, frankly, nauseating to see the parade of business leaders—many of whom despise Trump and his effect on our politics—race to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the man’s ring (and much else). It’s tempting to ask these captains of industry, all of whom are rich beyond imagining, “What’s the point of having fuck-you money if you never say fuck you?” This was an opportunity to say, “We’re rich enough, and our companies will be fine. This is still a country of laws, and if the President targets us in any way, our lawyers will be ready, and real journalists will be eager to tell the story.”

I’m not betting that everything Trump does in his second term will be bad—and I’m certainly hoping for the best. But all these billionaires should understand that normalizing Trump and Trumpism by purchasing million-dollar tables at the Inauguration isn’t without risk of embarrassment. Just take a moment to reflect on how this will look if any of the darker possibilities of a second Trump term are realized.

Or just give another thought to January 6^th. It’s only decent to notice that no one is worried about what will happen on that date this year. We won’t see Kamala Harris or Joe Biden inspire a mob to attack the Capitol. How refreshing! Everyone who is now sanewashing Trump and Trumpism should at least acknowledge the difference here. And it’s worth reflecting on how much worse January 6^th 2021 could have been, and how Trump played no role at all in preventing the worst possible outcomes.

If you are someone who thinks that the significance of January 6th has been exaggerated, what do you think would have happened if the people who were chanting “Hang Mike Pence” had gotten their hands on him? Do you actually think that people who had travelled halfway across the country at the summons of the President, and just spent the previous hours stabbing police officers in the face with flag poles—and who had successfully breeched the Capitol as a result of this violence—and who were now, by their own account, hunting for the Vice President and other leaders in Congress—do you really believe that these people would have suddenly turned docile and shown themselves merely eager to chat if they had found their quarry cowering under a desk? What about the people carrying zip ties, did they just want to talk to Nancy Pelosi? Do you really not understand that what appears merely ridiculous in failure was likely to have been horrific in success? Spend some time reading about the French Revolution, or any other circumstance where the crowd actually gets its hands on the people it is hunting. Perfectly normal human beings regularly behave like monsters when they join a mob.

It may seem strange to re-litigate an event from four years ago, but it reveals the danger of treating Trump like a normal president. I really think we escaped tragedy on that day as narrowly as Trump escaped assassination in 2024. How strange would it be to normalize that? The fact that Trump is still alive doesn’t make the attempts on his life any less real, or disturbing, or significant of ongoing danger to him. Just imagine if I said that the attempts on Trump’s life didn’t need to be taken seriously—they’ve been blown way out of proportion—because the guy was barely scratched. I know people who have been injured far worse in their own kitchens! Would that make any sense? No. And yet no one who is busy laundering Trump’s reputation seems to understand the obvious parallel to January 6th.

How would Trump and Trumpism seem if a couple of Senators had been beaten to death or hurled out of windows on that day? How would Trump’s continuous lying about the election having been stolen seem? Again, ask yourself, what would have happened if the mob had gotten hold of Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence? It’s no credit to Trump that this didn’t happen. He knew that the people he had turned loose on the Capitol were calling for Pelosi and Pence to be killed—for hours, he knew this, and he just sat on his hands. Whether he actually said that Pence deserved to be hanged, as Cassady Hutchinson testified, will surely be doubted by Trump’s defenders. But what cannot be doubted is that he declined to lift a finger to defend his vice president, or any other member of Congress, for hours. He just watched the violence on television and refused to do anything useful. Of course, he has done nothing but defend the rioters ever since and has promised to pardon them. And he still claims that he won the 2020 election.

This is the person who will be president of the United States in a few weeks. This is the person you are honoring with your million-dollar tables at the Inauguration. He is capable of making your efforts to normalize him more than a little embarrassing.

Anyway, stepping out of politics and looking ahead to the new year, I think it’s worth reflecting on why we are tempted to reflect at all at the end of each year. What is it about the calendar change that matters?

We may as well ask the question that lurks behind every New Year’s resolution: What is a good life?

Or, put another way: What makes life good? Or, with a slightly different emphasis: What is life good for?

Of course, there are many answers—or parts of answers. Love and friendship. Creative work and enjoying the creativity of others. Learning—that is, growing in our understanding of some sliver of reality. Or learning new skills—doing things that are hard or beautiful, or are just fun. And, of course, there is pleasure, of all kinds. If your life is full of laughter, sunsets, sex, ice cream, and rewarding work—you’re probably not miserable. Though you might be—amazingly, you might still be miserable. Of course, there is also compassion. There is so much suffering in the world. Relieving some portion of it is one of the good things we get to do here.

However, there is a deeper answer to the question of what makes life good, and one can be led to it if one interrogates any of the answers already given. What makes love and friendship, or creativity, or learning, or fun, or laughter, or compassion good? And how are they different from all the things that seem to make life less than good—hatred, terror, boredom, despair, envy, resentment, contempt…

There is a deeper answer that is more philosophical, or spiritual—and, therefore, tends to be unhelpfully bound up with religion. When I talk about this, I tend to talk about meditation. And while it is a helpful starting point, and even a necessary one, it is also misleading. Meditation sounds like a practice—it is something you do, something you add to your life. In the beginning, it certainly seems this way. Did you meditate today? “No, I forgot.” Or, “Yes, for 10 minutes, right before lunch.” But meditation isn’t something you do—it is something you cease to do. It is just non-distraction. It is the freedom to notice what is already here. When you meditate, you’re not changing anything about yourself—which itself is a profound change in attitude. In real meditation, you are recognizing the condition in which all apparent changes occur—the very nature of your mind.

So the question about a good life becomes, what is there to notice, right now, that matters? What is available to your powers of attention in this moment that is important, or even sacred? (Again, the language one reaches for begins to have religious connotations.) There is a freedom to be found here in recognizing what it’s like to be you—what life is actually like in each moment, rather than what you think it’s like, or hope it’s like, or fear it’s like. Meditation is simply noticing what is real, as a matter of experience, now and always—but always, and only, now.

If you are alone in a room, what is in that room with you? What are you, really, as a matter of experience? And where are you? And where is the room? Are you in it, or is it—in some sense that is philosophically and scientifically interesting—in you?

Every religion will tell you that there is something you have to believe at this point—there is something to profess, if only in the privacy of your mind—some set of propositions that must be added to your solitude to redeem it and make it sacred. But this is demonstrably untrue. You can believe all sorts of things, but belief is not enough. Ideas are not enough. Thought is not enough to make solitude and silence matter. In fact, thought is the very thing that makes the privacy of our minds often feel like a prison.

What is life good for when you are alone with your thoughts? And aren’t you always alone with your thoughts? Even when you are out in the world with other people, there is a veil of opinion, judgment, prejudice, and pointless chatter that comes between you and everyone and everything. Don’t you see how every experience, no matter how pleasurable or intense, gets distorted by your mental efforts to grasp it, secure it, prolong it, rehearse it, narrate it, compare it, or change it?

I’m not saying that thoughts aren’t useful, or even necessary. They obviously are. And their character matters, because we spend most of our time lost in them. If we spent most of our time dreaming, our dreams would determine the quality of our lives—so they, too, would matter. And the truth is, dreams are nothing other than very vivid thoughts—and ordinary thoughts are dreams, of a kind.

Meditation is nothing other than the act of waking up properly, if only for moments at a time. That’s why we called the app “Waking Up”—it’s more than just an analogy. There really is something dreamlike about our default state of thinking every moment of the day. I haven’t talked about this topic much on the podcast of late, because it’s my whole focus over at Waking Up. If you want to know more about meditation, and why I think it’s important—and why much of what people think they know about it is mistaken—you can find all of that at in the Waking Up app.

As for New Year’s resolutions, I have one this year that I hope will cover more or less every aspect of my life. It’s not a concrete resolution, exactly—it’s more like a new conceptual frame that I will try to place around everything. I’m going to try to live this year as though I knew it would be my last. I’m perfectly healthy, as far as I know. And I don’t mean to be morbid. But I think it is very powerful to put the finiteness of life at the very center of one’s thoughts, more or less all of the time. The question, “Would I do this if I knew I only had a year to live?” is quite clarifying of one’s priorities. It might seem like too stringent a filter—it would seem to prevent any long-term planning, for instance. But I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I have kids, and I obviously care about their future. And I care about the future of society generally. There are many things I might do that could, at least in part, be motivated by a time horizon that stretches beyond 2025. For my New Year’s resolution, I’m going to work with this thought: “Would I do this, would I pay attention to this, would I care about this, if I knew that 2025 would be my last year of life?”

Would I watch a bad movie? Probably not. Would I watch a bad movie with my girls? Absolutely.

This year, I’m going to do my best to live in a way that would be impossible to regret. I know I can’t control everything. Almost everything that will happen in the world, and much that happens in my life, will be outside my control. But I can pay attention. I can cease to be preoccupied with things that don’t really matter. I can let my hopes and my fears vanish—I can notice that they are always in the act of vanishing. And I can increasingly enjoy life as it is in the present. Perhaps you’ll join me.

Wishing you all much happiness in the New Year…