Dwain Northey (Gen X)

As the calendar prepares to flip from 2025 to 2026, we participate—again—in a quiet, global ritual: we agree that time itself has advanced by one neatly numbered unit. Fireworks go off, resolutions are made, and somewhere a server updates a timestamp. Yet beneath all that confidence lies an unspoken truth: our numbering of years is not a law of nature. It’s a story we agreed to tell together.

Humans have always counted time, but rarely in straight lines. Long before numbered years, we tracked cycles: seasons, floods, harvests, moons, pregnancies, migrations. Time was circular, not progressive. Winter followed fall, spring followed winter, and nothing was ever truly “year one.” It just… happened again.

Numbering years—pretending time has a universal starting pistol—is the strange part.

The system most of the world uses today hinges on an event that wasn’t recognized as a calendar reset when it supposedly occurred: the birth of Jesus. No one in Bethlehem was shouting, “Happy Year 1!” The Romans certainly weren’t. In fact, they were busy doing what empires do—taxing, conquering, arguing, and counting time their own way.

During the Roman Empire, years were often counted ab urbe condita—from the founding of Rome (traditionally 753 BCE). Others marked years by naming the two consuls in office. “In the year of the consulship of so-and-so” was perfectly sufficient. Jesus was born, according to later Christian calculations, sometime around what we now call 4–6 BCE—meaning the central event of our calendar is not only mid-empire but also probably misdated. The reset button was pressed centuries after the fact by a monk named Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century, who was trying to standardize Easter, not reorganize human history.

So how did this work for the Romans? It didn’t—at least not at first. For centuries, Christians themselves continued using Roman dating systems. The Anno Domini system (“in the year of our Lord”) spread slowly through Europe, gaining traction only as Christianity gained political power. Time didn’t change; authority did.

Which raises the more unsettling question: if we hadn’t chosen Christ’s birth as the hinge of history, what year would it be right now?

That depends entirely on whose story you prefer.

If we kept the Roman system, we’d be in the year 2779 AUC (from the founding of Rome).

If we used the Jewish calendar, grounded in biblical chronology, it would be 5786.

The Islamic calendar, beginning with Muhammad’s Hijra in 622 CE, places us in 1447–1448 AH.

The Chinese calendar counts cycles rather than linear years, placing us around the year 4723.

And if we zoom out and think scientifically—using the emergence of Homo sapiens as a reference—we might be somewhere around year 300,000.

Each number tells a different story about what matters: empire, covenant, revelation, civilization, or species.

So when we say “2026,” we’re not announcing a universal truth. We’re revealing our cultural inheritance. The number doesn’t mark how old the world is, or how far humanity has come, or where we’re headed. It simply reflects which moment someone, long ago, decided was important enough to call “the beginning.”

And maybe that’s the most honest way to approach the new year—not as a hard reset or a cosmic milestone, but as a shared agreement to keep counting together, even while knowing the math is arbitrary.

Time, after all, doesn’t care what we call it. The Earth will still orbit the sun. Seasons will still turn. And when the calendar reads 2026, it won’t mean the world is new—only that we’ve chosen, once again, to tell the story this way.