I don’t make New Years resolutions. It’s not something that I do consciously, or as an act of defiance, I’ve just never really seen the point.
The idea of making a change to your life, no matter how big or small, based solely on the fact that you need a new calendar seems kind of trivial.
By no means am I knocking those of you who do make resolutions and if December turning to January is the motivation you need to improve yourself, then by all means go for it.
For me, I’ve always felt it to be a bit silly to let a calendar dictate your actions. I would liken it to Valentine’s Day in a sense, where couples use the day to show their boyfriend/girlfriend, husband/wife, fiancée how much they care about them. Shouldn’t you be doing that every day?
The same goes for New Year’s resolutions; if there’s a change you want to make in your life, and I mean one you really want to make, then what’s stopping you from doing it on any other day of the year? Why not March 20 or June 13 or Sept. 30?
If anything, I would imagine that opting to make a change on your own accord would garner a much higher likelihood of success than doing it because you feel obligated to.
Take for example, one of the most common resolutions, “this year I’m going to get healthy, I’m going to eat better, go to the gym, buy workout videos and equipment, etc.”
There was a time when I wasn’t lazy and I had a gym membership. When I say I had a membership, I mean I actually went to the gym regularly. January was always a dreaded time around the gym (except for membership coordinators who work on commission).
The gym would be crammed like a nightclub with all the born-again fitness nuts, wearing the brand new shoes and spandex they purchased the day before, vowing to themselves that this was the year they were going to get in shape.
Throughout January it stayed pretty steady, in February things started to dwindle a bit and by March break, things are pretty much back to the status quo, with the regulars taking up most corners of the gym and perhaps a few stragglers, still gutting out their resolution.
And that’s how I feel most resolutions go, you better yourself briefly before slipping back into the same habits, “Yeah, it’s probably fine for me to eat McDonald’s twice today, I went to the gym for two months, that should hold me over for the year.”
Comedian Jim Gaffigan has a monologue that relates to this, where he speaks about Catholic confession. He says, as if speaking to a priest, “yeah, I stole, I lied, I double parked, can we wrap this up I’ve got some sinning to do.”
The same can be said about New Year’s resolutions as far as I’m concerned, it’s an outlet to both erase whatever you weren’t happy about from the previous year and preemptively discount a few months of misdoings with a few months of good deeds.
My dad’s New Year’s “resolution” every year, for as long as I can remember was to stop eating whale blubber. When I was younger, I never quite understood that he was being facetious, in that he never ate whale blubber to begin with, so he was in fact making a resolution that he knew he could keep.
In that same tradition, perhaps my “resolution” to not make a resolution is my own way of accomplishing what I set out to do, by not doing anything at all.
