New year, New you? How strange a concept.
See it would seem absurd, if each time the year changed, we stripped raw the interior of our houses, threw everything out and re-did the decor so that it resembled something entirely new. A waste of money, and time and entirely a fruitless and crazed endeavour. I imagine, each time we went home we would feel disorientated, lonely, uncomfortable even. We build homes as we grow and that’s what makes them ours. So why do we insist on stripping the interior of our bodies?Â
What fallacy has convinced us that it is normal to reinvent ourselves every year? To start afresh. Who says we aren’t enough as we are? We are fuelled by some seemingly innate urge to change ourselves, to improve ourselves, but why must there be something in need of improving?Â
New year, new me!
This pressure to reinvent ourselves may seem motivating, it may pretend to promote wellness and encourage healthier, happier lifestyles – renew, refresh, re-do, it seems positive. Change is good. New is desirable. Fresh is better. But just as the continuous destruction of our homes would weaken its structure, the constant reshaping of ourselves has its damaging effects.Â
We are all attuned to it now; mass media mobilises us through end of season sales, wellness narratives and an overwhelming number of shared resolutions, leaving us glued to our screens and our mirrors alike with a critical gaze.Â
Pilates, journaling, more water, a half marathon, less sugar, no meat. These aren’t necessarily bad moves, they are positive steps, but the motivation is often impure. The aim seems to be of impressing and self-improvement and the cost is our self-esteem. We become convinced that who we are on January 31st and who we have been those last 12 months, is flawed in some way. It’s ingrained, the very translation of the phrase suggests that there is an issue – a problem to ‘resolve’.Â
“To the resolution?!”
We are tricked into passages of mindless consumption and over-emphatic self-critique; an issue that becomes hard to address without the mention of gender. It is no secret that self-improvement rhetorics are heavily gendered. Consumption, fashion and wellness narratives have traditionally been fundamentally feminised – of course that is not to say that the potential of toxicity spread from such discourses is exclusive to women. Men too are becoming increasingly dominated under rhetorics of well-being and the aestheticization of healthy living that assumes a never ending battle of progression and self-advancement. But generally, women face the brunt of it. Femininity in some ways is forever undefinable, what constitutes a “good woman” is forever changing and always under scrutiny. Through the patriarchal gaze we will never be enough, and sometimes new is not better. That said I shan’t strip you of your agency and your choice, do you, do for you. If new you is your you then that is fine, change is natural, unavoidable, but not always necessary.Â
The general point seems to me that New Year’s resolutions breed toxic mindsets and can be harmful to our self-perceptions and self-esteem, enlightened no less by the mass media and the extent of the para-social world in which we inhabit.Â
Of course, New Year’s resolutions are fun, they can be harmless, they can be healthy, but, like all things, balance is key. Know that despite the phrasing, there is nothing to resolve. Be as you were – as you are – that is enough. The environment that new year’s resolutions produce is unsustainable and leads to an impossible quest of unfindable satisfaction. Celebrate the new year, and celebrate yourself, as you were, as you are and as you will be.