Longtime TOA readers will recall my official stance on the matter - New Year's Resolutions are a waste of time. The main reason is that I've always felt resolutions were covered in dust, which accumulated over the weeks and months spent on the proverbial "for later" shelf while everyone waited for the year to end. Is there any worse thing for an idea than saving it for later? If you go to a restaurant and see an enticing menu item, do you say "I resolve to order this on January 1, but until then I'm going to order the same crap that I actually hate"? Goodness me, get out of here. But I think a lot of people fall into a similar trap - they come up with a so-called good idea... then let it wait until the day they recycle last year's calendar. When you put a good idea on the backburner, what it really means is that you've probably only had a decent idea, since good ideas can rarely afford to sit around waiting for an invitation. In my mind, instead of New Year's Resolutions the way to go is a routine of immediately implementing your good self-improvement ideas, whether that be on January 1, December 31, or any of the days in-between.
The problem is that this fails to acknowledge the important contribution of ceremony to the process. The strength of New Year's Resolutions is that it works a bit like the last train - you don't really want to miss it, so you make some extra effort to get involved on time. You could think of the role of ceremony here as a form of safety net for the self-improvement concept. It's possible that circumstances could dictate an entire year's passage without allowing for a moment to consider self-improvement, which means when January 1 rolls around there is sudden importance to the day. What kind of person do I want to be this year? If you only ask yourself this question once a year, it takes on an urgency that I assume would spur additional action, almost like how an alarm clock pulls us out of bed (though maybe only after using the snooze button a couple of times).
I think the experience of the past two years has led me to the sort of scenario I sketched out in the prior paragraph. The response to the pandemic necessitated that a majority of people follow a certain kind of survival playbook, with much of it improvised along the way and very few of us sharing identical experiences. In fact, I assume the only shared feature of the experience for most of us was the loss of sustaining routines as normal life quickly took on the shape that is only now just beginning to feel familiar. For me, a first year constrained by twenty to thirty "close contact" interactions meant I sheltered within an uncompromising routine to maintain my mental health, and then the following year was one of constant adjustment to all the changes that were necessitated by the situation. Looking back, there was no time or energy to implement anything resembling a resolution, which seems perfectly logical given that society itself spent most of the past two years implementing one of the greatest resolutions in its history. To add another angle to this point, the turbulence of the time meant that the warning signals of past years could simply be written off as coping skills necessary in the pandemic, which meant that the bar subtly shifted in the sense of identifying self-improvement ideas - the way I felt at times over the past two years could have led me to conclude that "reduce stress" would make for a fine New Year's Resolution, but stress didn't seem that important when everyone was stressed out.
This all led to an unanticipated moment a couple of months ago - I realized on a cold January morning that despite my best efforts, I had indeed managed to cook up an idea or two in the sense of a traditional New Year's Resolution. This may seem like a truly shameful admission for those who suspect I value my long-term consistency, but for me I feel that I am simply maintaining a consistency in line with the principle outlined above - this January I had a good idea, which was having New Year's Resolutions, so I implemented it immediately.
All defensiveness aside, I ended up with four official resolutions:
- Take a few weeks off from exercise
- Move my bedtime forward as far as possible
- Reread my old book notes and condense the best ideas
- Eat more vegetables before noon and have lighter dinners
Longtime TOA readers probably already know what I'm about to say - I'll return with a few posts to talk about the above in more detail. But are there any broad lessons to learn from this process separate from the specifics of each resolution? To be honest, not really. As I'll explain soon, I'm doing fine with a couple of those while the others are on the verge of abandonment, but the sum hardly adds up to more than its parts, at least in terms of insightful reflections.
This is, I suppose, the only logical endpoint, where I unenthusiastically fall into the same rut that so many others have complained about over the years - The Land of Failed Resolutions. Yes, it does seem like this is the case, but I'm not sure if this problem is such a big deal. Tim Harford (the official economist of TOA) pointed out in an article I saw this week that if you are in the habit of failing to keep three of your five resolutions each year, then that means you are completing two annual self-improvement initiatives. It speaks to our aversion to failure that some have abandoned the New Year's Resolution concept entirely, allowing the sting of three defeats to outweigh the success demonstrated in the other two initiatives. But for those of us determined to carry on in spite of this fear, perhaps this is wisest way to do it - if we make enough resolutions such that failure in at least one is a certainty, then maybe that gives us a sense of freedom to just do our best. If we are going to fail anyway, why not fail beautifully? I'm not sure there is any other way to make the most of ourselves in each and every one of our new years.
