Ranting On...New Year's Resolutions

I find that with people, you fall into two camps: those who make New Year’s resolutions and those who don’t.  This is of course axiomatically true (it’s a yes or no question-we all fall into one camp or the other), but I’ll go a step further: I think that you can tell a lot about someone when they say they don’t make New Year’s resolutions.

Most people, as a whole, are comfortably happy and unhappy in their own lives.  If they don’t like something about their lives, they either change it early on or get used to it.  It is rare that anyone actually decides randomly one day that they want to make their lives different.  Even the most ambitious or Type A of people don’t have that sort of sustainable drive.  I’m someone who basically has had a bucket list at every step of my life (I cannot remember a time in my life when I didn’t have 4-5 goals that I was working on simultaneously), but like everyone, I’m also someone that cannot always get the oomph, especially if it’s a hard or long-term goal.

Which is why I love New Year’s resolutions.  LOVE.  It is the only time of the year where people as a collective group embark jointly on a set of goals.  Suddenly everyone is finding love, losing weight, saving money, paying off their credit card bills, going back to school, cleaning their houses, and volunteering.  Even if you don’t stick to it (and study after study after study shows we unfortunately do not), it’s still a start.  Usually one part of the habit sticks-you bring your lunch to work or you actually like your Zoomba class or something beneficial becomes commonplace in your life.

And yet, we all have a plethora of people in our lives who say “I don’t make New Year’s resolutions,” and this drives me crazy.  It’s not just that people aren’t making resolutions, it’s the fact that they are discarding those who do and say with great pride “I don’t make resolutions.”  This is wrong for a few different reasons:

First, New Year’s resolutions don’t work in part because you don’t have a support system, and they work better when you do.  The more people making the jump into the online dating pool, the more likely you’ll find that perfect match.  The more people looking for a gym buddy, the more likely you are to start going.  Looking bigger picture-the more people paying off their credit cards, the less collective debt we have as a society.  The more people eating right, the less health problems we have as a country.  We talk about wanting to take care of larger financial and health-related implications, but then we discard the only time of year that socially encourages such things?  That seems like some mad hypocrisy.

Additionally, I find that people who don’t make New Year’s resolutions by and large complain just as much throughout the year about their problems and wanting to fix them.  I am very supportive of helping people when they are down-and-out (I’m deeply impassioned and emboldened by the ACA and am stunned by Congress’s apathy toward the unemployed in the latest budget negotiations), but I’m also a deep believer in personal responsibility, especially with your own goals.  I want to support my friends, and I feel I do, when they step forward toward a goal, but it’s hard to do that when you just want to complain and not want to do.  Make a New Year’s resolution-in fact, make ten.  Put the list on your desk and on your fridge and next to your nightstand.  And even if you only do one, that’s still something you did to improve your life.

Because that’s really the point of New Year’s and the resolutions.  It’s not about an arbitrary change in the clocks or drinking until midnight or even selling calendars.  It’s about acknowledging the past year and saying how you’re going to make the upcoming year an even better one.  This is what New Year’s can be about if you let it.  And that’s why, though it makes me feel like Pollyanna, as I get older I find that New Year’s Eve has slowly become my favorite holiday.

I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you what your New Year’s resolutions are.  I’m focusing on losing a last bit of weight (I’ve lost quite a bit in the past six months, but have about fifteen pounds left to go), dating more, writing more (both in my personal life and of course here), and doing more OVP watching and book-reading.  Share yours in the comments!!!