Ouroboros; or How to Beat the Cycle of Resolutions?
Psych! You can’t. You’re stuck in a cycle of resolution renewal. But why?
There it is. The end of the year. A depressingly cyclic end of things that don’t really end.
And I hate it. What do you mean it’s a new year? I see the same shit every day, week, and month. It’s repeating, cyclic, and suffocating.
But I don’t hate circles, no. Circles are fascinating.
Both in a geometrical sense—especially when applied to constructions (think of cross sections of tanks, rockets, missiles, pens, and whatnot—but also in how they’ve charmed the collective consciousness of humankind.
Think of the first time you sat down with a crayon and drew that rudimentary landscape, a rite of passage in creative expression for every kid. You had the triangular hills and valleys, a snaking river, a boxy house, and some green blobs on sticks for trees.
But the sun always found a circle—misshapen, yellow, yet overbearing—as its avatar.
It’s a silly thing, I know. But circles are everywhere. Ubiquitous, missable, physical, conceptual. Circles are primed in your conscious and subconscious. The watch on your wrist, the camera on your phone, the rim of your glass, the rotation of your keys inside the lock, the cycle you ride, the cycle of life, the calendar that repeats, the trips there and back again.
It’s a very small sampling of how thoroughly interbred we are with the idea of circles. Even our fantastical imaginations adapt this shape: the discs of UFOs, the many rings of power, the circle of life, the mouths of sandworms, knights of the round table, the seating plan of Jedi High Council, the accretion disc of Gargantua, the cycle of avatars . . .
I’ll stop. You get the gist.
Circles are essential.
Circles are endless.
Circles are eternal.
(I’m breaking the flow here, but if you don’t connect with the above—you know, if you belong to the square or triangle camp—I urge you to take a dip into the research done on how circles are embedded in our memories as patterns we instantly recognize.)
There is, however, one circle that I absolutely love. Whether you take its physical potential, its symbolic significance, or its literary ligatures.
Drum roll, please?
It . . . is . . . the . . . ouroboros.
And it’s ironically the best representation of what I hate: the cycle of years.
Etymologically, the word comes from Greek, as most unsuspecting etymological things do, οὐροβόρος. These letters mean exactly what the picture shows: a snake or a drakon swallowing its tail.
What we have here is a circle that’s perpetual, cyclical, and progressive. But it also appears to be consuming itself. An endless cycle of self-sabotage, if you will. A very Euclidean geometrical identity that is familiar yet different.
And that’s precisely what I see every day in the enshittification of the world around us. The year’s beginning in revelry rings as hollow as the stupid resolutions everyone sets for themselves. The end, meanwhile, feels like the mourning of a loved one while reminiscing about how they were some years ago, particularly before COVID broke the world.
In this pattern, there emerge the same concepts of life and death that the ouroboros represents. The calendars don’t really change; our notions of what the passage of time is do. The year ends up eating itself, only to start again. Not exactly a phoenix rebirth.
The resolutions are just as cyclic; their emitters have to chew their words back when they fail.
So why stick to this fallacy?
Why conform ourselves to this very Euclidean shape that’s non-Euclidean in function?
Why, to stretch the point, make the world feel like it’s tied to numbers that increment in an abstract notion space and time superimposed on the Earth’s track around the Sun, and its own pirouettes to pass the day?
The truth is . . . we’re dealing with sacred geometry here. Humankind is primed for a pattern that has modelled our visions for atoms, eyes, planets, and cosmic objects. It almost feels too . . . oppressive, doesn’t it? Like a geometrical god only wanting us to fold our space into its dimensional rules?
And once you fold your world and its view into itself, walk a corridor that runs into itself endlessly, you just can’t get out.
No? Is it just me and my ramblings here?
Fine, I’ll keep my cosmically crushing depressive ideas to myself.
To be honest, it all started with the end of the year. A depressingly cyclic end of things that don’t really end.
And I hate it. What do you mean it’s a new year? I see the same shit every day, week, and month. It’s repeating, cyclic, and suffocating.
But I don’t hate circles, no. Circles are fascinating.
