New Year, New Decade, Same Me.
Only a few people in my personal life know this about me — and I’m sorry for my strong feelings — but I intensely dislike the expression “New Year, New Me”. Yes, these feelings are very intense, and to most, it might seem like I am against growing and bettering myself or even getting out of my comfort zone.
I assure you that that’s not the case, but hear me out.
After all of my articles on habits, success and productivity, I still fail to understand why we need a new year to start taking steps toward what we desire. I guess what baffles me the most though, is that it’s basically a tradition now, despite us knowing that thinking this way sets us up for failure before we even start. It’s an established fact that most people abandon their New Year’s resolutions within the first couple of weeks of the new year. This might or might not be the case for you reading this. However, it could be for someone you genuinely care about.
Either way, I do believe that it’s time for us as a society to wake up given that all of this can be detrimental to our mental wellbeing.
You might be wondering at this time why I keep coming back to topics I’ve covered in the past, and my answer to that is because I don’t believe that doing something once means that it’s a done deal. My last writing on the topic of habits was published in November 2019. And if I have to be honest with myself, it’s not one of my proudest work.
In my attempt to clarify things, I wrote an article that was trying to solve too much, which ended up missing the point entirely. I’m talking about this article in case you’re wondering.
The idea of doing things repeatedly also happens to be the same for habits, resolutions, goals etc. Now, why am I mentioning this? You’ll see soon enough.
Most of us face problems and challenges we’d rather not deal with. To say that we’re not happy with the situation we’re in is an understatement. That’s why when a new year or an entirely new decade starts, masses of people — like in previous years — are going to attempt reinventing themselves to walk away from those very dilemmas.
As happy as I am to see that most of us admit that we’re not perfect and want to improve for the better, I believe that it’s worth mentioning that our idea of improvement in itself, is not built upon the sole intention to “improve” — it’s most of the time for an end goal.
In other words, our idea of improvement is more of an obligation built on conditions rather than the journey it takes us to get there.
My observation is that this stems directly from the “all-or-nothing mentality” that has been instilled into us from school. This is for many a pitfall because they keep valuing things that at the end don’t matter long after the fact.
The high we get from spending time with family or loved ones, shopping, devouring food and excessive drinking during the holiday season gives us the feeling that we can do anything.
A lot of us are great at making plans. But dreaming and planning are not going to get us any closer to our resolutions.
We treat abandoning our goals a few weeks in like a major joke. We are more aware of the failure rate, but we treat it like it’s a regular thing. Most people fail anyway — whether they fail right away or later on — one thing is sure, they too have failed. Therefore, we have a safety net catching us; the one that says that I’m not alone in this.
Once we notice we’re not alone, it’s time to brush it off and laugh along with everyone. There’s always the next year to start over and try again.
I think that a lot of people struggle with a lack of direction and blame it on a lack of motivation. There is no shortage of motivational content online. Therefore, I don’t believe we have a motivation problem.
We are capable of being motivated, but that can only take us so far.
If we look at the generations before us, the more distant they are, the more structured they were and the less personal burdens they had.
Over the years we’ve yearned for freedom. And now that we have it, we don’t know what to do with it. That in itself causes us to struggle because it brings with it too much burden for us to handle.
I’m all for freedom, improvement and autonomy, but I have to admit that they also end up making us feel miserable. This very phenomenon I’m describing is referred to as “The Paradox of Choice”.
Our goals and resolutions are usually not as ours as we think they are.
Back in May and June of last year, I wrote this and this article, and in them, I describe how we’re so used to doing what we believe is expected of us. We’d rather go through life wearing masks and pretending as long as it gets us approval from those around us.
Philosophically speaking, I’m all for doing what we’re ought to, but if I feel like I’m selling my soul to follow and to seek approval, then I take a step back and analyse what has happened to lead me to where I am at currently.
For me, the earlier has happened many times already and speaking from those experiences; I can say that this is the very reason why we fail in the first place.
These goals and resolutions we’re so adamant about announcing to the world are not meaningful to us personally. Most of them, if you look closely, promotes running away from oneself while seeking the attention of others or some material payoff.
Even if some of us can’t relate with the above, our ability to focus in a loud and increasingly distracting world can pose as an obstacle.
At first, we are motivated. If it were for motivation alone, we’d be performing at our highest potential. But it’s not just that.
When the happiness overload subsides, life goes on, and then we realise that the problems we’re having cannot just be left behind.
So what do we do now?
A lot of us can say we’re masters or professionals at something, but not of ourselves. This year, resolve to build a better relationship with yourself and those around you. In other words, what I was referring to as spending quality time by ourselves in my previous article. It does not in any way mean that one should isolate themselves. On the contrary, it suggests;
- Realising that certain circumstances in life cannot be controlled. So we can stop making shallow promises to ourselves.
- Taking moments to thank ourselves for investing in ourselves.
- Having moments where we pull ourselves back to centre and work on ourselves from the inside out. Only in this way, we’ll realise that some of our desires don’t make sense.
- Being patient and sticking with our problems much longer, rather than running from them all the time. As they are what makes us who we are. Accept and be okay with them.
- Focus, focus, focus, repetition, repetition, repetition. Earlier I mentioned that doing things repeatedly also happens to be the same for habits, resolutions, goals etc. Well, identifying and removing the things that distract us the most and retraining the mind on how to focus with intent can do wonders.
When a year is ending, a lot of us are adamant about announcing to the world that it should watch out for this new and improved version of us (as if we’re devices or apps receiving updates).
Yet, a couple of weeks into the new year it almost seems like we’ve forgotten what we’ve announced.
Most resolutions initially come from us not being happy with our current ability to control the circumstances life throws at us. The predicament with this is that we don’t try to deal with them on our own. Because of our freedom, we constantly seek either approval or inspiration externally rather than internally.
If you ask me, I can’t say that I know what’s best for us. But seeing that every year has become a tradition to run away from ourselves and adversity we face, is a bit concerning.
When a brain-driven culture fails to grasp that there are certain things that it simply cannot control, it’s easy to forget that our desire to improve can go opposite of what we want and can end up leaving us in a worse situation than before.
Aim to be the same every year, and if you want to finally face your circumstances rather than running from them, start right now, not next year.
Good luck. I’m rooting for you!
Thanks for reading, have a nice day! 🖖
