As we are nearing the end of the year, it is time to start thinking about our New Year’s Resolutions. When I was brain-storming mine, I was thinking about the usual things. I want to be healthier. I want to lose some weight. I want to do better in school. I want to save up some money. You know, all of the pretty typical New Year’s resolutions are on my list this year.

When I was doing all of this thinking, a thought came across my mind. Why am I even doing this?

Let’s think about it: most of the time these resolutions don’t work out. I’m lucky if I even stick to them until the end of January! So, why do we even make them in the first place?

I think for myself, in particular, it is a combination of two different things: lusting after a dream-self and procrastinating on the creation of good habits or the destruction of bad ones.

Let’s unpack these a little more. What do I mean by lusting after a dream-self? It’s when you make all these plans for yourself, but it takes a lot of work to reach that goal or there is something in the way of you reaching that goal right now.

Examples of this would be that you want to lose weight because someday you want to be a specific size or your Pinterest board is filled with tons of pictures of cute clothes and you want your closet to look like that one day. One big one that I have is that my Pinterest boards are filled with recipes that I want to make because I want to be a great cook someday.

As far as procrastinating on habits goes, it’s kind of like when you procrastinate your chores. You put it off and put it off because you don’t want to do it. You tell yourself that you’ll do them after work or on the weekend when you have more time, but something comes up or you’re tired.

I feel as though New Year’s resolutions give us an excuse to push back the goals we have for ourselves because it seems like a really great time to start. It’s the whole “new year, new me” mentality. That is just absolutely bananas to me because New Years is just another day in your life. But for some reason, I, and everyone else, get sucked into the lie.

If we really want something in our lives to change that much, why do we wait for an excuse like New Years? It doesn’t matter whether you start to go to the gym in the beginning of January or the middle of September—making a step towards your goals can happen at any time.

It is just crazy to me that resolutions are such a craze and it seems like the whole country is caught under procrastination’s spell. Well, I hope that someday we all break free.