We have so many better ways to celebrate, ones that show off humanity's progress. Fireworks just seem like live archival footage.
As the new year hangover slowly departs us and recollections of what we were doing on that fateful midnight come back in patches, many will, no doubt, feature fireworks.
There’s very little humanity has kept for 2 300 years, but we’ve managed to hold onto gunpowder. That’s not all too surprising. We like things that look pretty and go boom. Why else would Oppenheimer get 7 Oscars?
But watching the fireworks go off, I couldn’t help but partially repurpose the phrase: “Okay, boomer”. It just seems so…senseless.
Understandably, people want to celebrate and loud pretty things have been the way since we discovered that copper sulphate burns blue-green, but really, all it is is lighting a fuse and standing back.
It hardly feels exciting, at least conceptually.
It’s a lot better than firing AK-47s in the air, but also feels less involved than putting a fist in the air and shouting huzzah.
You’re going to the shop, buying some sticks, lighting a match and sending them off into the air. It’s the gas-braai of celebration.
Money up in smoke
In an age where we can send swarms of drones into the air or “perform” a lightshow on a building or even perform synchronised building lightshows, shooting up some colourful gunpowder seems a kinda pathetic way to bring in the new year.
Far be it from me to rip off a tradition to many. And if it’s important to so many people that they turn money into smoke via a 15-second flair, so be it.
I’d bet that very few actually take the time to consider why they’re doing it and what is so joyous about it.
We’ve had brighter, more colourful displays since the invention of the LED television, and louder noise since the invention of dubstep. There’s no need to insist on firing play-play bullets into the air… though the oogabooga Neanderthal part of my brain still gets a dopamine hit when I see the explosion.
And that’s all before even considering the animals and how much they hate the bang-bang. When all we had to celebrate the bringing in of the new year was gunpowder then maybe, reminding the woofs and meows that they are lower on the food chain wasn’t that big of a deal at the time.
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Celebrating laziness and poverty?
Today, however, we’ve evolved somewhat in tech and character. Today, given the number of alternatives to fireworks, firing the old-school explosives off can only be an admission of either our laziness or our poverty. Neither of those things is worthy of celebrating, so it seems oddly redundant to do it in the first place.
We do weird things as humans, and sometimes they become so entrenched that we seldom question them. If only we could put that wonderful town-renaming energy into questioning why we declared 27 February National Milktart Day and why, on Earth, we’d maintain a Koeksister Day too.
It’s not like South Africans are immune to diabetes, but we do like our traditions, even if they hurt us.
So if the good people of South Africa wish to insist that it is vital to their celebrations to flex their wallets, empty out whatever they didn’t spend on Christmas, buy some overpriced gunpowder and light up the sky, that’s on them within the bounds of the local laws. I just don’t get it. The dogs don’t get it, and the moments after the light has faded, you won’t get it either.
We just have so many better ways to celebrate, ones that show off humanity’s progress. Fireworks just seem like live archival footage.
If people really wanted an explosive light show, they could tell America that they discovered oil in the next town. That way, they could at least celebrate the new year in the way that they make the animals do.
NOW WATCH: 5 of the best New Year’s fireworks displays from across the world
