We ritually declare each December to be cursed. But is the hex on the year, or on our own expectations?

The end of the year, more than any other time in our annual calendar, is rife with tradition. Some are ancient — our Western Christmas, for example, rooted in thousands of years of mid-winter Pagan ritual. Some are more recent — the creep of Black Friday, initially an American day of retail chaos after Thanksgiving break, which has now morphed into a multi-day sales season to mark the beginning of Christmas shopping. But the most recent tradition, especially loved by fellow middle-class knowledge workers, is the declaration of the soon-to-be-ending year as ‘cursed’ (though common variations include ‘shit’ or ‘fucked’ or, as Queen Elizabeth II once described 1992, the year three out of four of her children had public break-ups and Windsor Castle caught fire: “annus horribilis”).

“I can’t wait for this cursed year to be over,” we say. “Only X more days of this cursed year.” 

I can relate, and have likely made similar pronouncements in various Decembers over the last forty-something years. But, as the ‘cursed’ season rolled around this year, I couldn’t help but wonder: was 2025 really cursed? If so, was it more cursed than 2024? And, if all years are cursed, can we really say any single circuit around the sun is particularly hexed? Isn’t it just life that’s cursed?

My default position is that one’s self-assessment of the quality of life is largely determined by expectations. At various times in human history, our species has lived wildly different lives. Early on, when we were hunting and gathering, a few really good kills, a particularly good berry crop, and a minimum of contact with murderous rivals would have meant a pretty good year. Once we were living in buildings and had stoves and bread, simply being in my 40s while still having all my teeth and all my children alive would have been something to celebrate.

All of which, I recognise, is a particularly relativist way to look at things. I don’t think life was better then because we didn’t have doomscrolling and microplastics. But I also don’t think it’s necessarily better now just because we have smartphones and modern medicine. At each point in history, we had different expectations of life, and therefore different levels of contentment. But like all forms of relativism, looking at life that way can be a convenient dodge — especially when things are undeniably shitty. 

Earlier this month, Stats NZ confirmed what many of our depleted bank accounts already knew: food inflation hit 4.4% this year, with sirloin steak’s jump of 26.7% paling in comparison to the humble loaf of white bread’s jump of 53.2%. Our national housing market entered a “soggy” phase, with November sales slumping 5.7% year-on-year. Unemployment reached 5.3% overall and 15.2% for 15-24 year olds. Socially, the national debate over the definitely cursed Treaty Principles Bill threatened to tear the country in two. Perhaps related, the proportion of adults experiencing “high” or “very high” psychological distress nearly doubled to 14.3% in the 2024/25 Health Survey, up from 7.4% five years prior. 

Globally, we’ve had major developed cities on fire, trade wars, real wars (and real war crimes) on multiple continents, plane crashes, terrorist attacks, and heat waves and earthquakes claiming thousands of lives. Reactionary national populism remained on the ascendancy, influencers and shitposters gained increasing political relevance, and the continual decline of global, government-level shit-giving about rising temperatures and sea levels.

You can see why the calendar year becomes a convenient container for our frustrations, hoping that the stroke of midnight on 31 December will act as a global exorcism. But, the “cursed” label is also a form of secular liturgy. By communalising our misery, we find a strange sort of comfort. When we post that “2025 was a bin fire,” we are seeking to halve our personal burden by sharing it. It is a ritual of solidarity in a world that feels increasingly atomized.

But if we step back from the ledge of hyperbole, we might find that life isn’t cursed — it’s just remarkably consistent in its inconsistency. In many ways, most of us live with basic conveniences and comfort that only a few generations ago were reserved for the wealthiest people on the planet. But just because nearly all of us can now buy oranges or salt our food to an unhealthy degree, our dissatisfaction remains. 

If we declare every year cursed, the word loses its meaning. We are not living through a hex; we are living through life. Always messy, always complicated, always unjust, always tragic; but sometimes good, even in its difficulty. It was this year and it will be next. Or as Ian MacKaye sang with his brief (and cursed) band Embrace, “It’s the end of a fucked up year / There’s another one coming.”