Settled swiftly after Christmas, following a series of uneventful days, New Year’s quickly creeps up on us. While I can’t speak on behalf of everyone, I find that I am usually left with the last day of the year to hurriedly pull myself and my life together before the New Year is upon me. In attempt to be prepared for the fresh start, this, for many people, involves scribbling down a list of New Year’s Resolutions that remain untouched, unremembered, and unspoken about for the remainder of the following year.
The irony is lost on New Year’s Resolutions: with an unrealistic nature of fixing ‘something’ being embedded within them. Despite initially being a source of motivation, there is a fine line between bettering yourself and setting unhealthy expectations. This begs the question of whether we are putting unnecessary amounts of pressure on ourselves by setting them? I think the issue stems from the way in which we approach New Year’s Resolutions: often involving changing deeply rooted behaviours, which are tricky to break, we set an extensive list of vague and unfamiliar improvements to implement within a twelve month time frame. Not to mention that they also often encourage unhealthy cultures around diet and extreme exercise.
Failure to achieve these resolutions – which often is the case when they are unrealistic – is demoralising and fundamentally depressing for anyone. Whilst being mindful of the future is important, New Year’s Resolutions programme us to live in the future, rather than focusing on the present. Ultimately, this can lead to the degrading cycle of these resolutions becoming the same every year; losing their initial intentions and meanings.
In order to prevent this, it’s important to move our focus to forming a concrete list of smaller, more attainable, clear-set goals. By twisting our perspective to create goals rather than solutions, there is already a more motivating and uplifting atmosphere around resolutions. Similarly, instead of stopping old behaviours, we should urge ourselves to start doing new things – for instance, trying a new hobby. Choose a focused amount of time to work on and achieve these goals in, even in small stages, making for more achievable and enjoyable goals to pursue. I also think there is a lot to be said for reflecting on accomplishments from the past year before entirely moving attention onto the future.
In this sense, so long as New Year’s Resolutions remain distant from their initial origins, I will remain over them and their pressures until the ways in which we curate and view them as a society changes.
“New Year’s Resolution #06: Explore the world” by Viktor Hertz is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.