In my last article of 2025, I do not want to rehearse the usual litany.
I do not want to debate the economic reform law and its many flaws, nor the security situation and the illusion of stability it offers. I do not want to revisit the deadlock over Hezbollah’s arms, the presidency’s deafness to constructive criticism, or a prime minister whose support base seems once again unable to distinguish loyalty from accountability. I do not want to dissect how so-called reformists continue to agree on only one thing: that things must change, without ever agreeing on how, or with whom.
This is not because these issues no longer matter. It is because something deeper, quieter, and more dangerous has been taking shape beneath them.
As 2025 draws to a close, Lebanon is witnessing a growing rejection of the very idea of marking the end of a year and the beginning of another. Voices – increasingly loud, increasingly confident – are insisting that celebrating the New Year is forbidden, sinful, illegitimate. Most of these voices emerge from religious frameworks, particularly Muslim ones, though not exclusively so. And what they are rejecting is not fireworks or music or excess. What they are rejecting is shared time.
This may sound trivial. It is anything but.
Time is one of the last things societies still share when everything else collapses. We may disagree on politics, religion, history, and identity, but we still wake up on the same dates, age in the same years, and mark our lives according to a common temporal rhythm. The Gregorian calendar, with all its historical and Christian connotations, became global not because the world converted to Christianity, but because humanity collectively agreed that we need a common clock to live together.
That is why even atheists celebrate the New Year. Not because they believe in Christ, but because they believe – consciously or not – in society.
Rejecting the New Year is therefore not a theological act alone. It is a social one.
From a psychological perspective, what we are witnessing is classic identity consolidation under perceived threat. When communities feel besieged – economically, politically, culturally – they retreat into clearer, harder boundaries. Ambiguity becomes dangerous. Shared symbols become suspicious. Neutral practices are reframed as hostile intrusions. In such moments, rejecting common rituals offers a false sense of purity and control.
But the cost is catastrophic.
By refusing shared celebrations, we are not merely opting out of a party. We are opting out of history. We are pushing large segments of society outside a shared timeline, placing them in parallel moral universes that no longer touch. Once that happens, coexistence stops being difficult and starts being impossible.
This is how segregation begins. Not with borders and laws, but with calendars.
What makes this moment particularly tragic is that Lebanon has long survived precisely because it resisted this logic. We have prayed differently, loved differently, voted differently, and buried our dead differently, yet we still inhabited the same years, the same seasons, the same sense of “now.” Today, that fragile consensus is cracking. And with it, the idea that we are still moving forward together.
There is something profoundly unsettling about watching people argue over who is allowed to welcome tomorrow.
Even more disturbing is how this rhetoric mirrors a global regression. Across the world, societies are once again fragmenting along religious and moral absolutist lines. Gods are competing. Truths are hardening. Belonging is becoming conditional. And in this atmosphere, exclusion is marketed as authenticity.
Lebanon, fragile and exhausted, is absorbing this poison faster than most.
Psychology teaches us that when identities become too rigid, they stop protecting people and start imprisoning them. When belonging requires total rejection of the shared world, individuals gain moral clarity at the price of social collapse. The louder these voices grow, the more they push us toward a future where separation is no longer a fear whispered in private, but a demand shouted in public.
A future where we beg not for reform, but for divorce.
And this, to me, is the saddest endpoint imaginable.
Still, despair is not analysis and it is certainly not politics.
If there is hope to be found at the end of this year, it lies in understanding how deep and entrenched our social fractures truly are. Not pretending they can be fixed with slogans, elections, or technocratic reforms alone. Real reform must begin where laws cannot reach: in norms, in symbols, in the shared meanings that allow a society to recognize itself as one.
We do not need forced unity. We need negotiated coexistence. We need the courage to defend common spaces without denying differences. And we need a political movement that understands that Lebanon’s crisis is not only economic or institutional, but profoundly psychological.
A movement that does not promise easy harmony, but insists on shared time.
Because once we lose that, no reform law, no security plan, and no constitutional amendment will be able to bring us back together.
As 2025 ends, the question is not whether we celebrate.
The question is whether we still believe we are living in the same year.
Ramzi Abou Ismail is a Political Psychologist and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice and Conflict Resolution at the Lebanese American University.
The views in this story reflect those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of NOW
