Festivities, Frenzy, and the Psychology of Waiting

Celebration acquires meaning precisely because it is bounded. When every moment is marketed as exceptional, nothing truly is

By Nandini Bhautoo

The end of the year has always carried the weight of reckoning. Across cultures, it marks the closing of a cycle — a time to take stock of what has been gained, what has been lost, and what has quietly endured. This impulse toward reflection is perhaps even more pronounced in tropical climates, where nature itself refuses the excuse of withdrawal. There is no winter to retreat into, no long darkness to justify hibernation. Under the relentless glare of heat and light, bodies remain visible, streets remain active, life insists on participation.

This stands in stark contrast to the wintry imagination of the northern world. In T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, the end of the year unfolds as a season of suspension and barrenness, a time when the land itself seems exhausted. Here, by contrast, the cycle ends not in dormancy but in exposure. There is nowhere to hide — from the weather, from one another, or from ourselves.

Yet beyond symbolism and climate, something more consequential is unfolding.

At this time of year, the island becomes saturated with spectacle. Supermalls expand, promotional campaigns multiply, and urgency is manufactured with relentless efficiency. Trade unions protest – rightly — the erosion of purchasing power, wages that no longer keep pace with rising costs. These economic struggles are real and pressing. But alongside them, another transformation is taking place, one less visible yet no less profound: a shift in how we experience time, desire, and satisfaction.

Once upon a time — within living memory — life was stark for the vast majority of people. Scarcity was not a theoretical concept; it structured daily existence. Families saved carefully throughout the year so that children might receive a Christmas toy — often a single one– after months of anticipation. The screams of delight, the wonder etched into memory, still linger among those now well into late adulthood. The waiting explained the happiness. Desire was disciplined by time, and joy emerged not from abundance, but from restraint.

What has changed is not merely the quantity of goods available, but the rhythm of expectation itself.

In the pursuit of profit, businesses increasingly seek to transform citizens into essentialised consumers. Desire is no longer episodic; it must be continuous. The illusion is carefully cultivated that the island has entered a state of permanent celebration — une fête perpétuelle, to borrow Hemingway’s phrase from ‘A Moveable Feast’. Sales bleed into one another, occasions are endlessly manufactured, and festivity becomes an obligation rather than an event.

But beneath this artificial abundance lies a more troubling development: the gradual erosion of our collective capacity to wait.

We are becoming impatient with deferred outcomes, intolerant of delay, exasperated by processes that do not yield immediate results. This impatience spills far beyond shopping malls. It affects how students approach learning, how citizens engage with politics, how relationships are formed and abandoned, and how disappointment is processed. The expectation of immediacy has become so deeply embedded that friction itself feels like failure.

Consumerism alone does not explain this shift. Social media has intensified it in subtler, more intimate ways. Platforms reward the performance of happiness and success, demanding the appearance of fulfilment at all costs. Lives are curated, struggles concealed, and constant upward momentum presented as the norm. The quiet labour of waiting — working without recognition, enduring uncertainty, sitting with ambiguity — has no place in this economy of visibility.

When life inevitably fails to conform to these curated images, psychologies fray. Anxiety, resentment, and a diffuse sense of inadequacy take hold. The tragedy is not simply that people consume more, but that they begin to expect life itself to behave like a transaction: fast, efficient, endlessly rewarding.

Yet human existence has never operated that way. Meaning, growth, and even joy are slow achievements. They require endurance, repetition, and acceptance of limits. The wisdom of earlier ethical traditions — Stoic restraint, religious fasting, ritualised waiting — was not rooted in deprivation for its own sake, but in an understanding of the human psyche. Desire, left undisciplined, exhausts itself. Satisfaction, when endlessly available, loses its texture.

In tropical societies, this tension becomes especially acute. Visibility is constant. Festivity is public. The pressure to appear engaged, joyful, and prosperous never recedes. There is little cultural permission to withdraw, to pause, to admit exhaustion. Celebration becomes compulsory, and compulsory celebration is psychologically corrosive.

This is not an argument against pleasure or festivity. It is an argument against their inflation into a permanent state. A feast, by definition, presupposes fasting. Celebration acquires meaning precisely because it is bounded. When every moment is marketed as exceptional, nothing truly is.

Perhaps there is something quietly radical in recovering older ideas of waiting and restraint — not as moralism, but as psychological necessity. To wait is not merely to delay gratification; it is to allow desire to mature, to let expectations encounter reality, to develop resilience in the face of uncertainty. Waiting forms character in ways that instant satisfaction cannot.

The end of the year, then, should not be reduced to a commercial crescendo. It remains — despite every attempt to turn it otherwise — a threshold. A moment to ask not only what we have purchased, but what we have learned to endure. Not only how much we have consumed, but how well we have learned to live with limits.

In a culture that insists on endless celebration, the most subversive act may be to pause. To take stock. To recognise that not every desire needs immediate fulfilment, and that not every cycle must end in spectacle. The end of the year, after all, is not merely a marketplace. It is a mirror.

And before rushing into the next cycle, we would do well to look carefully at what it reflects.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 24 December 2025