Amid the champagne and confetti of New Year’s Eve, the end of 2017 and 2018 for me has been accompanied by some sort of end-of-year article.
In 2017, it was an open letter to the year as a whole. I tried to chronicle events on a world scale as well as events that felt like the world to me. It was a fun, reflective piece. Then, in 2018, I wrote a lookbook to depict some important areas in my life—language, zodiac year, fashion, relationships, attitude and career—by analyzing what I wanted them to hold.
But this year, I want to talk a little about the idea of New Year’s resolutions.
Now, I’m the first to admit that making a promise to myself at the beginning of the year feels like the ultimate way to be accountable—for the first four days, that is.
And then, as human nature kicks in, we resort back to our old ways. Six months roll by and then tweets go out, approximately 182 days later, that our lives haven’t drastically changed while the year is already half over.
And you know what? Time flies when you’re having fun. But it also flies when you’re having fun denying yourself time to be dedicated to those resolutions you made six months ago.
Hear me out: making a resolution is perfectly fine. By writing this, I am in no way saying that resolutions aren’t an acceptable way to hold yourself accountable for a change you want to see in your personal life.
However, I think a lot of us—myself included—make resolutions in the hopes that by following the crowd, we’ll be group-oriented to go after our goals. And that, for the most part, isn’t the case. The majority of people—again, myself included—proclaim this drastic change they want and are baffled when they don’t achieve the desired effect when they’ve put no effort into it.
For people who use New Year’s resolutions, they have a physical, calendar depiction of when the goal should be accomplished. This means that they’re using the 365 days as a timeline for their transformation.
For the many others of us who make resolutions as a status update to blend in, we’re creating an environment of unfairness as we beat ourselves up over the stalling in our lives that occur because we didn’t have gas behind the goals in the first place.
Let’s face it. A year is a long time to commit to something, especially if we’re only doing it to follow the pressures of everybody else who want a fast track to be a better version of themselves.
As we get ready to go into 2020, I’m resolving to not make any resolutions.
For me personally, it feels like a recipe for disaster. I don’t like the idea of seeing the calendar tick down and having myself no nearer to accomplishing my goal. It’s disheartening, and then I’d have to sigh and say, “well, better luck next year” until I’d given up or switched gears.
I’ll leave you with this idea. Tomorrow is New Year’s Day.
- It’s the start of a new decade.
- It could be a realm of total self-reinvention.
- If that’s how you want to proceed, more power to you.
But if you don’t feel like being a person who puts their resolutions into writing for whatever reason, or being a person who makes them at all, that is totally fine.
Just remember that there’s never a bad time to change your life, whether you make it a resolution or not.
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