I love the idea of New Year’s Resolutions. In theory, the concept of evaluating ourselves, our choices, and our habits is incredibly valuable and necessary. However, I don’t like the fact that because we have this yearly reminder about evaluating ourselves, we tend not to examine our actions or make changes throughout the rest of the year. I know I, personally, would think of things in the last few weeks or months of the year that could be improved upon and automatically filed them away in my brain as “New Year’s Resolutions,” aka, something I didn’t have to deal with for another few weeks/ months, by which time I would have forgotten about them.

The concept of evaluating is essential to being a person and while making resolutions on the New Year seems to promote this process, it can actually detract from it. Because it gives us an excuse to file away worries and positive changes away to be dealt with later, we feel the need to not evaluate consistently or thoroughly. New Year’s Resolutions shouldn’t prevent resolving to be a better version of yourself throughout the rest of the year. The ironic prohibition of self-improvement by resolving to improve only on a yearly basis suggests that what we should be doing is looking at ourselves and our choices much more frequently.

The other problem with only evaluating once a year is that we don’t really look at thoroughly or conquer any, or even a portion, of the things that could be examined. Think about it, there are probably way too many things at which you could be better or more committed to put them all on a list of New Year’s Resolutions. To actually improve our lives and ourselves, we need to be using the New Year as a reminder to evolve constantly. If anything, we should be resolving to constantly resolve.