Another year is ending...

It is a time of and indeed for, reflection. As we take the final steps of this year's journey and get ourselves ready to nod to Janus as we pass through the odd liminality of New Year, many of us will take this moment to look back and look ahead. Of course we do, it is inevitable at any time of transition and the year's end is the mother of all transitions if we all agree that it comes third after birth and death (order uncertain) neither of which any of us is in a position to report on.

There is a temptation for me, and many people of my age to start publicly wrestling with matters existential in a very open, frank and perhaps unwelcome manner, but I do not want to tread this familiar road. I say that, other than acknowledging that I am now nearer to the end of my life than the start (by any reasonable statistical likelihood) and my heroes are dying and some of my friends are starting to die and I do not find fear in these realities, but I am increasingly motivated to make the best possible use of time.

On the basis that I am not here to muse on the passage of time equating to another step closer to the grave, what is the end of 2025 inspiring me to comment on?

Compassion

One word answers are never enough, so I will be exploring what this means, specifically what it means to me, but also it is my hope that we may together find out what it means for you.

In order to discuss the reasons why Compassion is my essential subject at the close of 2025, I would like to offer a definition before we go any further, if for no other reason I have come to realise that people are often a little muddled by this word.

compassion

a strong feeling of sympathy and sadness for the suffering or bad luck of others and a wish to help them:

I was hoping she might show a little compassion.

There is nothing about this word that suggests weakness or moral failure, nor does centring any given situation in this feeling necessitate any parallel forgiveness or absolution, that is to say it is possible to feel compassion for someone who has done something wrong, without forgiving them for their transgressions. Nonetheless, despite the huge emphasis on compassion in Abrahamic religions, the driving force of social mores in the Western World and beyond, and indeed the similar importance of compassion in other major World religions and schools of thought that have provided the foundations of non-Western societies, we seem to be living in a World wherein compassion is in short supply.

Please do not misunderstand me, I am very much aware of the huge numbers of people giving their time to good causes and to helping family and friends and strangers, not to mention the armies of people working in some form of public service, whether in the caring professions, or keeping our countries moving and working, keeping us safe and more. There is a lot of Good going on in the World, that is not something I would ever want to ignore or discount, and it is in fact the hot ember of hope from which I believe we can build the fire of compassion and love that will burn away the evils of this World.

I am feeling a lack of compassion in the World, whether immediately around me, or in the wider World as seen through the array of lenses offered by the media, the internet and so forth. Surely there is as much compassion as there has ever been? Am I not satisfied with modernity and all of the undeniable improvements, at a global scale, in the lives of most people, most of the time? It is not that I am ungrateful, nor that I would ever deny the truth that on the global scale human life is the best it has ever been, but calling back to the awareness that I have less time to come than the time I have spent, I want there to be a meaningful shift in the paradigm that I can see and experience before my time is ended.

I want my children to live on in a World that I can be confident and happy will be moving constantly towards improvement and all the while be better than the one that I started my journey in. That wish is not just for my children, of course, I see it through that lens because my children are in their teenage years and starting to think about the adult lives that they want to pursue, and doing my best to guide and support them in that leap is perhaps my most pressing and immediate concern. Even so, my wish for a better World, a more caring and compassionate World, is for everyone, young, old, rich, poor, no matter the identity that they take for their own.

How can I have an effect? It can seem to be a task beyond the wildest dreams of any one individual, and I am not so deluded to think that the task at hand is accessible to me alone as a lone voice in the hurricane of voices that we are subjected to in the modern world. My hope is that I can reach a handful of people, and they will reach a handful of people and we can spread that effect out as a ripple on a ripple on a ripple. The aggregation of small changes, of personal messages and small changes in the World can be a tsunami of change overall.

Here is the hard part - none of us are perfect and starting from compassion all the time, every day and in every situation is not only hard, it is next to impossible. The trick is to keep starting from compassion, even with yourself, so that if you catch yourself judging someone unfairly or reverting to anger or conflict or treating with someone or a situation in an uncharitable fashion, do not give up on compassion, just start again. My failure is being horrifically judgemental of drivers that make bad choices, especially when I am in a time-pressured moment. Intellectually I know that they cannot hear my cursing, and in fact that it would not dispose them to me or my ideas about how they should be driving, and even that the negativity I am putting out there is not helping me at all, even as a release, but I fall into the trap of blurting out the worst torrents of abuse when someone holds me up or cuts me off. I am not going to work on that, at least not yet, because no one experiences my anger except for me, but I am absolutely going to remember to start again from compassion as soon as I get to where I am going and step out of the car.

There are more important ways in which I want to promote the idea of compassion, or indeed radical compassion, than pointing out that road rage is counter-productive and something that I still need to work on.

We live in a time when despite all of my hopes, when I was in my twenties, we are seeing an increase in intolerance towards people that do not fit into their society's definition of the norm. I can remember thinking, perhaps foolishly, that we were on the brink of committing sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia to the vault of history. and yet the last four or five years have appeared to set the idea of acceptance and tolerance back by five decades. Further to this concerning trend the World is, as it has ever been for almost two centuries, at war. Not just in Ukraine or in Gaza either, there are multiple ongoing, significant conflicts in the World at the moment.

The resurgence of Populist, Nationalist, Right-Wing Politics, all across the World has hijacked the narrative about these issues, about acceptance and tolerance, as those political forces need others, groups that fall outside the perceived norm, to point to as a threat to "good people", or "our way of life" etc. in order to energise the Centre into supporting the Right while energising those already inside their tent.

Once we turn our attention to the looming Climate Crisis and the way in which the Populist Right utterly denies it as fantasy, but is in truth, without any remaining doubt scientific consensus, and we start to see the huge boulder rolling down the hill towards all of us. As the 0.1% fund those that are quite happy for the boulder to wipe us out in the pursuit of retaining and servicing the obscene wealth of their masters, without realising how irrelevant it will be with no one to spend it with, and no one to sell to, we are distracted by contentious media circuses and all of the other tools of Late Stage Capitalism.

If the Human Race is going to make it we need to find all the people that agree with this idea:

"All people have equal worth, all people deserve the same basic dignity and respect, and no one is really a product solely of their skills and hard work. The future that we all need is only offered if we acknowledge that those at the top must actively reach down and pull up the ones that have not yet made it, however that goal is achieved. And lifting up others is not enough, those who wield power and influence have a moral duty to wield it in such a way as to offer the greatest possible advantage to the greatest number of people."

and we need to spread it all around as far and wide as we can. Those that are still hoodwinked by the idea of the self-made person, that do not realise they will almost certainly never grasp the brass ring offered by the American Dream or the bill of goods we are all sold by the Capitalist machine, because the people that do "win" all start with a leg-up or even by operating on an entirely different level, leveraging not only money but opportunity, connections, access to better education and healthcare and any number of functions of privilege. Yes there are rare examples of people that succeed in the current system without any advantages or privilege when they started out, but they are rare outliers, people who would have succeeded regardless, just because of the law of large numbers.

For every Steven Bartlett or Billy Connolly or Angela Raynor there are hundreds of people that were handed the keys to the kingdom and used them without ever looking back. If we do not make those at the top realise that they are better served by improving the lives of those at the bottom, and I am talking about fundamentally improving their lives, so eradicating homelessness, ensuring that universal, socialised healthcare has been delivered as the human right it ought to be acknowledged as, liberating the working poor at least enough that life is not merely an uphill struggle toward death, through Universal Basic Income.

Our race needs to transition from the pursuit of riches to the pursuit of a better world. The financial elite need to leverage their power towards improving the lot of humanity rather than preserving and growing their wealth and the political elite need to care more about the masses than the financial elite.

I am not naive, I realise that there will always be those who have more money than others, and I do tend to believe that the society that we ought to strive for allows for the possibility of freedom to pursue greater financial attainment if that is something that individuals want. Not only that, but from time to time there will be individuals that have a skill or a talent that others will value and want access to in some way, by spending money to get their products, books, films, music and so forth. There is, however, a balance to strike. No one needs to be a billionaire - it is simply impossible to spend all of that money, and amassing and hoarding wealth is detrimental to the wider economy as a healthy economy is defined by the movement of capital and outcomes (goods, services etc.), so the more billionaires and multi-millionaires that we have sitting on their wealth like avaricious dragons, the less and less healthy our economies will become.

None of this thinking is new. The 1930s and 1940s saw these ideas put into practice in Scandinavia, and now the modern inheritance of this region, while imperfect, is one of greater shared wealth on the national scale, and societies that are widely considered by the rest of the World as being inclusive and tolerant. There are those on the fringes of Norwegian, Swedish and Danish societies that are not happy, those that would like to be free to be prejudiced against minority groups, those that would be happy to see the poor suffer as a trade-off to their greater personal enrichment, but as a valid generality these societies are driven by and thrive under a general aegis of compassion for and service to their fellow countryfolk.

The false myth of the great man, or great woman, is that kindness, compassion and acceptance are all luxuries that greatness cannot afford, but what is greatness without the ability to sleep at night, without the freedom to connect with others because of the fear that they may take what you have? If we can shift the narrative to one that states that true greatness is in sharing, in lifting up others and in removing suffering in the World, by accepting others, by improving the lot of most people. There is no true legacy of wealth and power unless you mobilise your capital and leverage your power; clinging to either or both without doing anything is failure.

Compassion is the key to this shift. When we see and acknowledge not only our common humanity, but also acknowledge the privileges that have enabled us to attain more than the next person and then deploy them to eradicate hate and want and suffering, then we achieve something worthy of remembrance, worthy of legacy.

As a parting thought, and at the risk of revealing myself to be a Swiftie, I would like to offer the example of Taylor Swift as the modus operandi I want to see from the top on down. The Eras Tour, her record sales and her subsequent acquisition of all her early catalogue have elevated her to billionaire status, so despite my enjoyment of her music I ought to disapprove of her based on everything else I have expressed above. There are two details that I believe allow me to tolerate her approach to being a billionaire, versus the general approach as seen amongst others with whom she shares this rarified air.

1. She awarded life-changing money as bonuses to all of the people involved in the Tour, the publicly acknowledged amount is $197Mn.
2. Everywhere the tour stopped she gave large, often six-figure sums to local charities

The success of the Tour makes the money it grossed incredibly visible, there is no way that the company she runs everything through has not paid a solid chunk of tax, and on top of that everywhere the Tour stopped the local economies saw a major upturn that became known as "the Swift Lift". On top of all of that she has spent the vast majority of the money securing her back catalogue, which is the main contributor to her own personal wealth being calculated as being north of a billion dollars, making her a billionaire. If we cannot escape a World wherein rare individuals will achieve this kind of financial success, then we need to demand of them the kind of willingness to give that wealth away that Taylor Swift has modelled to the World and to her peers already, but that I suspect she will continue to lead on. (I know that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have attempted to carry out great social change and improvement with their insane wealth as well, but their efforts have always come with strings, even if only threads, not bonds. I am talking about actively sharing wealth and power with no quid pro quo).

So...

What do I want from 2026? I want more people to feel empowered to demand social and economic justice from their politicians, from their heroes and from not only the 0.1% but the 1% and all those in between. I want to hear and see people in my social circle giving others the confidence and support to make these demands, and I want the story to spread. I want to see a kinder, more compassionate World that sees the deep and powerful strength in caring for others, and sees the callow weakness of those that are willing to abuse and exploit others to snatch at riches and power only to hoard both and achieve nothing.

I want more Compassion, for everyone.

I want everyone to find the same fulfilment I have found in centring life in Compassion, and through that revelation build a World that is kinder, that has less hate, less suffering and less strife. We should all do anything practical we can, but all of that is built on resources that are best nourished with love, kindness, understanding and Compassion.