The Paradox of New Year’s Resolutions
And why we always fail to stick to them
By now, a few weeks into the New Year, many people have probably put aside their New Year’s resolutions. Auguring new promises and possibilities, the New Year also entails the prospect of failure and disappointment.
Surely, we are all more than familiar with the typical resolutions: quit smoking; exercise more, spend less; keep the house cleaner; call Mom and Dad more often, and tweet less. Find romance, stop being angry. Go vegan.
And, of course, there is an implicit resolution underneath all of these: this year, I mustn’t give up. This year will be different.
It seems a universal practice: we should make resolutions. Everyone agrees that it’s a good idea to set goals, make plans and act on them.
Plans, enacted little by little, lead to progress; progress leads to change, and change to a happier life: something we should all want — or so we’re led to believe.
As our gyms are filled with more ‘resolutioners’ — as cigarette packs are thrown out, lattes forgone, and parents phoned — we behold more and more anxious people, endeavoring to persevere.
Some of us, surely, have already broken our promises, perhaps thrown away with the thought, ‘it’s okay, I’ll start afresh tomorrow… or next week.’ (…Or next year).
But I am not here to tell you whether or not making resolutions is a good idea. It all depends, and it depends on more than we usually allow — but more on that later.
For now, let us assume that we have a good reason for our New Year’s resolution. But we might take up the question: why then?
The Marking of the New
On New Year’s Day, the year is fresh, like a new notebook on the first day of school before anything has been written, or the blackboard after it has been wiped clean.
A fresh action is to be followed by a healthy reaction, so we fondly hope. Perhaps by virtue of this newness, we think — we believe — we may apply ourselves to the resolutions we have devised. ‘I shall now be a successful deviser of my betterment’, we expect.
It seems that the turning of the new year is an asset. It is like a ladder to use as we climb out of the ditch, or the hand of friendship extended in the dark. It is something that attains prominence, whereas the rest of time simply marches on.
The ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, saw life as a story of constant change. He said, famously, that ‘you cannot step twice in the same river’. It flows constantly, and brings an endless stream of new water. So also we shall change, stepping into the river — or the New Year — afresh, and as someone slightly new.
Or so we hope.
For yet, on the other hand, no matter to what we aspire, there will continue to be that subliminal me — the one who has felt the need to change and generated the plan — which inevitably carries over with me into the New Year.
We look for change, and feel excited by the prospect, but what we often don’t realize is that we depend on the enduring presence of the prior me that had felt the need and generated the resolve.
If this prior me did not carry forward, how would I even know that it is myself that has changed? Indeed, we wouldn’t want it to be someone else!
How paradoxical: I want to have changed, but not to such a degree as to have lost myself in the process. Indeed, the entire reason we even wanted to change in the first place was because we wanted something better for ourselves, for me, in the future.
It is quite necessary, as well as inevitable, to have brought this me along so as to be the one that is changed.
The Persistence of the Old
But here’s the rub: perhaps my old me finds itself in unfamiliar territory entering this uncertain year of fresh resolve, and it once again wants the familiar cigarette or the leftover mince pie. The comfort of the familiar.
Better the devil you know than the great uncertainty of what you haven’t yet figured out how to accomplish. Perhaps the only resolutions that are easy to fulfill are the ones that don’t really occasion any great change.
We had the best of intentions — to make a significant change in our lives — et voilà, a new me (sort of). But we are somewhere between a brilliant idea and the reality of the ancient peasant treading on foot, one step at a time across the endless moor.
The Old and the New, Together
The advent of the New Year offers the prospect of changing the topography.
Maybe we can leave the endless moor and step onto the ‘yellow brick road’, and maybe we will even get there, by and by. It’s a matter of finding the road and summoning the initiative to take it.
And, self-evidently, the bigger the change, the more noteworthy the occasion has to be. After all, it promises more, and we see ourselves as less likely to give up. It emboldens us, whereas an ordinary day might not.
As scientist Carl Sagan put it, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, but here this might be best understood as an “extraordinary change requires an extraordinary occasion”.
Nevertheless, we must regard it as an unknown thing, yet to be determined, whether even the most extraordinary occasion will persuade our ongoing selves to persevere.
The Takeaway
So it’s a New Year. ‘Now what?’ you may ask.
One has to find their way, which entails not only having in mind the change we want to implement, but also our own self — the one who seeks the transformation.
It is only insofar as we can see the old and the new as evolving, together, that change can be well-grounded. If it is not, it would not endure.
We can’t expect to change overnight — literally, in this case. But rather, we must learn to let ourselves discover what we want to find, incrementally — with determination, but without undue haste.
What that will entail cannot really be envisioned, as yet, anyway. We may have a plan, but there is no real guarantee.
The only thing that is certain, however, is that it is the beginning of a new year, brimming with new promise and resolve. Newness and certainty, freshness and hope, entering into the reckoning as the New Year unfolds.
