New Year’s Resolutions are garbage. Every January, you hear your Facebook friends or relatives talk a big game about how they’re totally going to turn their life around, and every February, you stop hearing about it, because they have forgotten about it or decided their goal was too lofty and threw themselves back into the swallowing maw of their couch.
For the last three months of the year, I hear people tell me that they are waiting for New Year’s to start their new fad diet or buy a gym membership. In these preceding months, all the New Year represents is a far away deadline to curb their reckless hedonism. It’s all well and good to set deadlines, but when you’re already saying “oh, next year” in August, something is going wrong. Places like Gold’s Gym report membership numbers spiking by as much as forty percent in January before dipping all the way back to regular numbers in February. Gyms know that you are going to fail in your resolution and they adjust their contracts for people like you. It’s like clockwork.
Not only are New Year’s resolutions often hollow promises, but they’re often unreasonable goals as well. People are always so gung-ho about making radical changes. I know several people who say every year that they are going to quit smoking, that this is going to be the last cigarette they ever smoke. That’s fantastic, but setting such a lofty goal for yourself is almost definitely setting you up for failure. There are some people who can certainly do that, and they have my intense admiration, but radical change requires a very specific type of person.
In order to make an honest-to-goodness change in your life, you need to take baby steps instead of jumping off the proverbial cliff. I wish those people I mentioned would just tell themselves to cut back on the smoking, one or two cigarettes at a time, until they realize they don’t need to smoke so much or eventually at all. Another example of this are people who want to save more money over the New Year. They start out by cutting back on everything, from food to entertainment. They are spending pennies on the dollar, until the moment where they break and spend a ridiculous amount of money just from the pressure alone. “Woops, honey, I just bought a car.”
The thing that most bothers me is that people wait for this part of the year to make a change, when it’s always a good time to make a change in your life. There’s no reason why January 1st has to be the day that you stop drinking or start reading again. You can’t just fail and try again, because you gotta wait until next year to try again. This idea that New Year’s is the only time to make a change is harmful to people in that way. You should be constantly looking for ways to improve yourself, as opposed to loafing about waiting for the sun to circle back around to the right position.
Just remember, if you fail your New Year’s resolution, pick yourself off the ground and try again immediately. There’s no time like the present to become a better you.
