As the plain-spoken Montaigne showed us, philosophy can be made from anything. From the everyday, from the simplest, from the most tangible. And also from what is common to all: that sort of tremor of the soul that arises when we see that the new year is approaching, that frenzy of thinking that everything will change with the new number on the calendar.
The New Year’s resolutions, that idea of the year as a reset, the relationship with time, the projection into the future and, in short, this peculiar air that lingers at this time of year, are the focus of this interview we share with philosopher Jorge Freire.
-Each change of year seems to come charged with the promise of starting from zero. Why do we need that idea of a reset so much?
So new is the year to come that, like the rest of the years before, we celebrate by raising a glass and signing up at the gym the next day. Nihil novum sub sole… We mistakenly believe that this reset is accompanied by a change.
One day our shoes shed their wear and we decide to buy a pair of the same model, same size, same colour. When the next day we step onto the streets, as a child would in new shoes, those who know us and are at least observant will notice that our feet reflect a singular brightness. New shoes, indeed, and the same old ones, at once.
Do we replace the snake by shedding its skin? I think there is no novelty: there is only renewal. To renew something, according to the dictionary, is to return it to its first state. That is, to be what one is, perhaps in greater quantity, or with better features.
-What does this say about our relationship with time and with ourselves?
We treat time as if it were our enemy, as if it would snatch away what we are. Fortune is depicted as bald because it is hard to cling to its thinning strand, but it is wise to learn to be timely. Timely, I mean, and not opportunistic. Ob-portus means “facing the harbour”.
It is timely for those who are well on course, even if they do not honk their horn or drive at full speed, and it is opportunistic the one who is in a hurry to reach harbour. As Machado’s verses say: “and if life is short and the sea does not reach your galley, wait without departing and always wait, for art is long and, moreover, it does not matter”. There is no gift more precious than the gift of opportunity. So let us switch off the clocks and the calculators and keep alert.
On one hand, time unsettles us because we do not know what it is. In his Confessions, Saint Augustine says he has the answer to the question of what time is, on condition that no one asks him. “If no one asks me, I know; but if I want to explain it to the one who asks me, I do not know”.
On the other hand, it would seem that in our language one can only speak of time to wind up the clocks, and it is a pity that Spanish has not inherited from Greek its richness when it comes to conceptualising it: besides chronos, there exists a time as eternity (aión) and a time as event (kairós). Some will answer, not without reason, that we are finite beings and not eternal like the gods.
Very well: let us set aside aión, eternity, and finally focus on kairós: time as event. Kairós is the time in which what matters happens. Let us understand it well, because every day we are told there is a historic event, a cataclysmic event, an irrepeatable piece of news, and rarely do we witness anything akin to what they announce.
Among other things because the great events only unfold their mantle once the time has passed. Did the French who took the Bastille know they were carrying out the French Revolution? To inhabit that time in which what is essential happens one must ground oneself in the present and flee from the current affairs.
-We live projecting ourselves constantly into the future: when the new year arrives, when this changes, when I become someone else… What do you think of this relationship between expectation and frustration, even in everyday life?
There are people determined to try to leap out of their own shadow. I prefer to learn to walk on my own shoes. As Pessoa wrote in the Book of Disquiet, through his heteronym Bernardo Soares: “The cat basks in the sun and there sleeps. The man writhes through life, with all its complexities, and there sleeps. Neither escapes the fatal law of being as one is.” I prefer to make peace with the one who travels with me rather than run away from him.
-We also live with the obsession not to waste time, to extract value from every year. What effects does that obsession have on the way we live and on inhabiting the present?
In Fortunata and Jacinta, Maximiliano Rubín is told by his aunt: “you are like this, either the dozy apathy, or the pure gunpowder”. Well, that’s how we all are. Either we yield to indolence and binge on a series, or we embark on silly gynkanas that leave us exhausted, so much that we require holidays from holidays. The counterweight to agitation is not rest, but numbness.
That is why agitated people are never fully asleep or awake, but live in a half-drowse, under a motor’s veil. He who embraces much does little to sustain it, and today we, bent on “doing things”, which is the stock phrase for disguising our impotence, lack those things Plato called dynamis, the capacity for both activity and passivity. It is not about doing many things, but doing things that are meaningful.
-There is a sense that each New Year demands a better version of ourselves. Isn’t there something deeply exhausting, even violent, in that constant obligation to improve?
Life as a hurdles course! My view on that is the same as with martial arts: fine, as long as someone else practises it. Joking aside, I think that rather than obsessing about our navel and its mutations, we’d be better off focusing on others and forgetting ourselves a little.
-Many decisions are taken with the self we will be in a few months or years in mind. What risks lie in living always for a future version of oneself?
To quote Agustín García Calvo, “we kill ourselves by the force of the future”. It was believed that it would suffice to live by drawing birds in the air. But this era gives the sense that we resemble those Romans who, from the outermost wards of the Empire, saw nothing but fog. Today we see no future, even though our leaders insist that “imagination is needed.” To ask us to pull a rabbit out of a hat is to put the cart before the horse.
El futuro no se convoca por sortilegios ni se improvisa como un brindis. Yo creo que el futuro es, en esencia, la decantación lenta del presente. No se revela en forma de oráculo ni como profecía; a veces basta con atender a lo que ya se mueve bajo los pies. Por eso el porvenir no lo construyen quienes viven anclados en el pasado o proyectados al futuro, sino quienes pisan firme el sustrato del presente.
-Llegado el año nuevo, mucha gente hace listas de propósitos que rara vez se cumplen. ¿Habría que abandonar esa lógica o reformular qué entendemos por “propósito”?
Are they purposes or mere school duties? Because finding meaning is not comparable to starting a diet or signing up for Pilates. Without a purpose, we are rudderless boats, without a compass or tiller. I have never believed in that puff of wind that “he who has a how always finds a why,” another example of that nauseating self-help motivational speech that piles on a burden you do not always deserve. Not every difficulty has a why, indeed, nor are all obstacles overcome by conjuring. But let no one rob us of the search for meaning.
-Repetition is often seen as failure or stagnation, but a great part of life is repetitive. Can we reconcile with that dimension without feeling we’re wasting time?
One must differentiate between the nobility of habit and the vile mechanical routine. Routines, which are mechanised customs, may be fine for the gym, but not for life. The habit makes the monk and the tracksuit makes the athlete. I propose training ourselves in virtuous customs, which is the best way to live with happiness. And one such habit is to busy oneself without worrying. In other words: be where you ought to be.
-In your writings the idea of limit appears frequently. Could it be that living the future better involves less expanding everything and more accepting what will not change?
This is an idea from Eugenio Trías, a titan of thought who sought to rescue philosophy from that leaden, dull and pretentious prose that had seized it since Kant (with all due respect to the great man, of course). Trías understood that philosophy is not just science or dry argument, but also literature, beauty, aesthetic vibration and pure emotion. Who said there is no thought or life without limits? Read Trías to understand why.
-Rather than setting new goals, how can we conceive a 2026 that makes more sense?
By paying attention to what surrounds us, especially what goes unnoticed. We think the world has lost its interest merely because we have stopped looking at it as it deserves. It is not about attending to everything, incidentally, but about dosing that scarce good which, not by coincidence, the tech giants fiercely contest. Let us not squander it nor gift it to the first stimulus that appears. Being attentive, according to the dictionary, is to be considerate. Everything around us deserves a second glance.
-If you had to propose an attitude (not a goal) for facing the year that begins, what would it be?
To abandon cynicism. What is noble about wandering through life with a frown and a beard slung over the shoulder? I’d rather go about a little oblivious, with a puff of straw, even if it means having my wallet stolen. Against cynicism, which is numbing for the character, I propose the leap of faith of trust. The cynic moves through life protecting against everyone and distrusts even his own dear mother. I prefer to trust or, as Aristotle said, trust without fully trusting. Trust, by the way, comes from con-fidere, shared faith; it is not turning another into an object of worship, far from it, but offering a hand, even knowing they are not perfect and may fail you. Cynicism is a cowardice; trust, on the other hand, is a risk.
