When I turned 50, I wrote a post about wanting a new mountain to climb. It wasn’t that what I was doing wasn’t important or that I no longer found it fulfilling, but that we need new challenges to overcome to feel alive. But then, I was only 50, a mere boy.

At 60, the feeling was a bit different. Not just the new daily pains when I awoke, or the realization that my body couldn’t do the things the 30-year-old who still resided in my head told me to do, but that I had crossed over the peak and was now on the downhill side of the mountain. It all went far too quickly, and each year, each day, whizzed by at blinding speed. It made me realize that no day should be taken for granted, not so much because it may be my last but because it would be an utter waste not to make it count, not to enjoy it to the fullest. After all, I only had another 20 or 30 good years left.

So what became of 2021? It’s not that things didn’t happen. They always do. But it was a year when so many things that could have, that should have, happened didn’t. It held some promise of emerging from the dark corners of a pandemic back into the light of humanity. Go to work. Go to play. Go to restaurants, museums, the ocean, the mountains, the world of people doing worthwhile things for others and themselves, and most importantly, for those they loved.

But it never really happened. It was always tentative at best and too often shrouded in concern, if not fear, that kept us from throwing off the sense of impending doom and embracing joy. Many blame the pandemic as the source of this unhappiness, and it surely contributed enormously to the problems. Many people died and each person who died left behind loved ones who cared about them deeply and will miss them greatly.

The pandemic may have provided a hard reason to justify much of our lost year, but in another age, another time, it would have been a challenge that united us as a nation to fight it, to overcome it, to band together to make the best of it and to do whatever was necessary to survive and thrive despite it.

We are a resilient species. We were a resilient people. Nature kicked is in the teeth, often well deserved, and still we arose and fought back, unwilling to let challenges win. We did not fail. We refused to accept failure. Sure, we made mistakes, even if we were certain at the moment that it was the right course of action, the right thing to do.

One of the benefits, and detriments, of living long enough is to realize how choices that seemed right and made so much sense at the time were silly, naive, short-sighted and ultimately disastrous. But we couldn’t go back in time and undo them, as they happened. That’s how reality works, we can’t reinvent it to make ourselves feel better or pretend that we weren’t as stupid as we now know we were. What we can do, however, is snap out of it, dust ourselves off and try not to make silly, naive, short-sighted decisions again.

The past is what it is. The future can be better. We can hope.

Or we could hope. The loss of 2021 wasn’t due to the pandemic, at least not only the pandemic. It was due to the loss of hope. Young people are hopeless. Young people spend their days and nights arguing, snarking, sniping, fabricating and validating hopelessness. They fight for failure. The attack optimism. They despise positivity. The relish the misery of others as it confirms their own misery.

Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic keeps coming to mind: Someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. They are all so very smart, with facts and figures, studies and theories, all of which validate their misery and failure. They are far more concerned with whom to blame than how to make it better. To challenge them by asking why they don’t put their considerable education, efforts and youthful enthusiasm toward making their world, themselves, happier is to invite a shitstorm of excuses for nihilism.

And before anyone makes the insufferable mistake of arguing that their fight for social justice, for equity, is their version of making a better world, don’t. Hiding behind the infantile rationalization that your life suddenly has purpose to weed out all heresy until the only person doing TV commercials is a one-legged trans black polysexual immigrant vegan comatose bipolar native-Clevelander crack addict with restless legs syndrome isn’t going to make your world happy. No world where everyone can’t have the opportunity to experience joy is going to work, but it’s up to you to want to be joyful, to do what it takes to have hope.

I can hear you, mumbling “you don’t get it, old man. It’s different now. It’s so much harder. Things are do much worse. Everything is horrible, the worst it’s ever been.” Bullshit. It’s always been hard. We’ve all experienced problems, pain, suffering. The only question is how you respond to it, with excuses or with the refusal to let the world beat you. No president is going to solve your world. No Congress or Supreme Court, or singer or sports hero. Every morning, when you wake up, you make a choice of whether to see the day as an opportunity to be happy or to be miserable.

The year 2021 was a lost year, and the benefit of being old is realizing that lost years can never be recaptured. It’s gone. Don’t let another year be lost. Don’t let another day be lost. Seize it. Make the best of it, for yourself as well as others. 2022 will be the best year of your life if you make it so. Find love. Find joy. Find hope. It’s in you, and it’s in the world. Don’t let another day go by where you don’t believe it will be better than the day before.