Every year is a chance to start over, to take in the power of the next 365 days and to reinvent yourself. In the new year, we’ll all eat healthy, exercise, give up bad habits, and practice self-love.
Or at least, that’s what we want you to think.
Because I know for a fact that all of you resolution-makers out there snapping your chats and filtering your Instas (my resolution is to be better at social media - is it working?) do it for the pat on the back and not for the results. Why do you think #goals is a thing? We will live #vicariously so we don’t have to do the #legwork.
For some reason, especially with resolutions, we want to feel praise more than we want to actually commit to our goals. Yes, I do want to stop having back pain, but no, I don’t actually want to go to yoga. The idea of no back pain makes me happy, so I will take your praise and use it to keep me going for the next 12 months.
Let me travel back in time to the far-off place of one week ago.
As we clink our glasses and sip our bubbly, or our sparkling cider for all you youngsters out there, we offer to our friends and family a recap of what a crap year it was. It seems no matter how amazing the year was, or in the case of 2017 for the liberal half of the U.S., what a steaming pile of garbage this year was, we tell ourselves the same thing: next year will be better.
Personally, I told myself that I would exercise according to this nifty workout calendar sent to my email every month that I religiously ignore. I told myself that I would quit biting my nails. I promised myself that I would learn to properly human (a verb I just created) and finally take my professional career into my own hands.
We’re a week into 2018 and I’ve already broken all my resolutions.
That workout schedule I was definitely going to follow? I studied it diligently as I ate my second chocolate mug cake.
You see, in theory, resolutions are a fantastic concept. They work to remind you of what you’ve accomplished and what you still want to achieve. But often they put too much pressure on such an objectively insignificant day.
Let’s be logical here for a second: there are 365 days in a year and although we take pride in counting down the seconds until the ball drops at midnight, time doesn’t restart. So why do we keep thinking January 1st is the only time to reinvent ourselves? Time marches on, so if you didn’t start today, start tomorrow. And if you need three chocolate mug cakes to get through your day, first give yourself time to get over the chocolate withdrawal and then start the heavy lifting on bettering yourself. You have tons of time.
Resolutions are inherently a concept that is doomed to fail. So stop waiting to achieve all your #goals until the beginning of the next year. If you missed the imaginary window of opportunity, so what? Create your own.
Was this really a guide? No. But judging from this past week, and this mug cake graveyard stacking up around me, we were never really going to listen anyway.
