It all started as just another game on Twitter. On the drawing of a glass bottle, the sentence: “Introduce a positive word into this jar that starts with the first letter of your name to inspire us in this new year.”
Every year that begins is full of good intentions which, as the days and months go by, tend to vanish. However, we do not give up and, Every January 1, we think that our life from that day forward will be somehow different than it was 24 hours ago. There is nothing rational about that belief, but, after all, at this point, and after so many conspiracy theories that we have seen grow in recent years, are we still sure of our rationality?
Tell that to our planet, which we continue to mistreat despite the evidence of the environmental crisis we are facing.
we like stories
Skepticism with critical thinking, analyzing consistency of evidence versus immunity to evidence, accepting randomness and uncertainty, are rational exercises that sound good but, unfortunately, we don’t do them often enough. Echo chambers, cognitive biases, or simple intellectual incapacity often leave us at the mercy of political or commercial interests and make us making decisions that are inconsistent with our individual or collective interests or with the truth.
After all, more than our ability to think, perhaps what most accurately defines us is ours ability to create fictions, stories that help us try to contain the immensity of reality in small, more manageable narrative artifacts. Dim sources of light that help us illuminate the path we travel during our lives, a tortuous path that crosses lands where uncertain jungles grow, vigorous and exuberant, and which does not have nothingness as its final destination.
twitter, a space for words
In this game that took place on Twitter, Hundreds of users of this social network wanted to share words that, according to them, can or should compose the story of what the year 2023 will be like. Sometimes with hope, sometimes with humor or a desire to surprise, tweeters have created a short dictionary in which it is possible to identify the trace of his fears, also of his desires and, above all, of his great sense of humor. Also of his desire to oxygenate with bonhomie a social network recently hit by the whims of its owner.
Dialogue #Feliz2023 pic.twitter.com/zenTNNoZpe
– David Martinez (@dmartinezpr) January 1, 2023
Anonymous people or celebrities like the director Santiago safe they participated in this fun with words like friendship, kindness, affection, dialogue, empathy, illusion, peace, health, tenderness or resilience. Others have preferred to bet on a sense of humor or brutal honesty, opting for neologisms such as “drawers” or “real” drink brands such as “Jäggermaister” or “Tanqueray”perhaps seeking refuge in alcohol before what they think the new year will bring, which we never recommend here.
In some cases the initial letters of the names do not help to participate in the game and, therefore, we find words like xylophone or Zen. Here the brand takes the cake Spain is worth it who, showing a sense of humor, has participated with names such as walkman, water polo, tungsten or windsurfing… Let’s go to the ones he found in the dictionary.
In short, as we can see, and until the future of this social network from which many have begun to flee is clarified, it continues to be a space in which constructive and stimulating conversations can flourish between people who contribute to perpetuating what was called “the magic of Twitter”. Despite Elon Musk.
