Observations about anniversaries and consistency

EDIT: I wrote this a verryy long time ago, and realized I never posted it- sorry!

So, this post is kind of like a 1-year anniversary post for my blog! Though I created it on the 4th of February, 2022, and that date has passed, I was truly shook up by the earthquakes occurring in my hometown, Turkey, and thus didn’t feel as though it was appropriate to post a celebratory blog post. However, as conditions have begun to improve, I decided to not postpone this post any longer, but as always, the occasion of my 1-year blogiversary will also be topped off with my thoughts on anniversaries and also on consistency.

I believe that anniversaries are a great way to celebrate consistency, and not just in an academic/professional context. I believe that anniversaries for couples, for friends and for personal enjoyment is a great way to celebrate having got there with that person (or yourself) and to strengthen your bond. However, I also think that the pressure of still maintaining the perfect relationship before the anniversary, or maintaining the perfect blog with having reached x amount of posts and y amount of followers can do more harm than good. This is often the case with me; I simply put too much pressure on what could be a normal, celebratory day. Although I believe setting goals before such dates (especially for professional/academic/activity-based anniversaries such as this one) is an amazing way to document your process and see how far you’ve come, I don’t necessarily think they work for everyone. Sometimes they may work counterproductively and lead to that person experiencing pressure leading up to the date, and in the end damaging their relationship with the activity or the person.

However, I think that rather than this deterring someone from celebrating anniversaries and milestones, it should be a way for them to self-reflect and think, why does this work counterproductively on me? Why is it that I feel pressure to be perfect for an arbitrary date that I could as well not even keep track of? I think this stems from a couple of reasons, but the main ones I can think about are:

1. Having experienced that same thing during childhood: being taught that you have to do everything well in order for it to “count”. This is quite related to one of my classes, where in one lecture we covered a book called “The Rhetoric of Reaction”, where the author proposes three theses for why making change is not good. One of these is the futility thesis, which suggests that any change that is made in a direction towards change is essentially futile, i.e. it won’t make a dent. For example, it could be applied in terms of climate change: if you as an individual work your whole life to cut on your emissions, don’t take the plane, use recycled materials, upcycle clothes, buy bamboo toothbrushes, go vegan etc. this is still not impactful enough to make a dent in this massive issue in which it’s the corporations and billionaires that are to blame. However, there is a prominent, simple argument against this: “Better is good.” Even a small change made in that direction is an important sentiment, and is definitely not futile. If a lot of people took a lot of small actions, we could significantly improve pretty much everything. So this is how you can rationalize that to yourself: that better is good, and that getting to a point better than where you were previously is admirable. You’re off to do great things. 🙂
2. The person doesn’t believe in themselves enough to think that they’d be able to have accomplished significant things in the next anniversary. But this is not important, as I said, it’s completely arbitrary! Just do whatever you like, and people will inevitably be drawn to your energy! Even if that’s a small group of people, that’s fine because why would you want to try to connect with people who don’t match with you at all?
3. They don’t have people to celebrate with. Absolutely screw this, celebrate by yourself. Celebration doesn’t have to be something you have to go all out for (though you can if you’d like), but it can simply be buying flowers for yourself, getting snacks, a new book, going on an excursion, or simply sleeping all day. It can be whatever you’d like, just something that you’d actually like as a result of you having accomplished that milestone and come so far!!

Hopefully you feel that celebrations are less lame now. And I absolutely believe that celebrating every single milestone is so important in whatever way you deem is right. Be proud of yourself and be your #1 biggest supporter always!!!

❤