I’ve been thinking recently on how little I like, indeed how much I dislike, celebrating achievements, completions, the ends of projects and companies and trips with anything other than an exchange of smiles and verbal congratulations. The big exception is celebrating birthdays etc., but these are just excuses to get together really; no-one is seriously considering the person’s success in surviving another year or celebrating their presence anymore than they usually would. The prime example of things to celebrate in my life are exam results, but there are also things like finishing exams and terms and years. I’m not old enough yet to finish “team projects” at “places of work” though I imagine that will come.

As regards to celebrating the success of someone else, a success in which I had no part (i.e. not team efforts between me and others), I’m perfectly ordinary about it, but if it’s me or a team I’m on or even my team, I dislike it.

A particular example of this is the day I got my (final) A-level results, brought back to me by last week’s A-level results day. I dashed inside school (I think maybe it was raining?) from my mother’s car, grabbed the envelope, checked that I’d got my offer and then headed back. The only thing I said to my mother was a gleeful expression of selfish success in that I’d beaten someone at either Maths or Philosophy who I did not expect to beat, and she was then cross with me for the rest of the day. Putting aside the pathetic intellectual competitiveness shown there that I think I’m well on the road to dropping from my personality, this day well illustrates my attitude. I haven’t not got what I needed, so let’s put the stupid thing behind us.

Now, the above description is something to do with exam results, and I’m always very anti-results in general and see all exams as a stepping stone and little more: I’m sufficiently disenchanted with whatever it is that exams are supposed to test that they’re little more than a necessary (oh so very necessary) evil for me.

So in the case of exams I have a reasoned out objection to the practice and therefore do not wish to indulge in it any more than it necessary: slightly rattled or not, the experience each time is over and I can go on to more interesting things. For other celebrations, such as finishing exams, finishing a term or a project—if I played a sport, another example might be winning a tournament or whatever—there’s no actual objection, just a strong distaste. When someone says “let’s celebrate” I find the idea petty and out-of-proportion. The best explanation I can come up with is that I seem to suddenly rattle up through the layers of perspective when there is a cause for celebration to see the achievement as utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of things; at least, choosing to go and celebrate seems pompous and arrogant and out-of-place.

It could be a bad reflection of my psychology at work here, that I am always living in the future rather than the present or something or maybe the reverse. I just want to move on and do, continue trying to be better, rather than “letting myself go” to celebrate already having been great—well, no need for that, I’m uncomfortable with that.