Happy new year! Here we go again…
Each year, immediately following Christmas and continuing into the first week of January, we are inundated with articles and posts about new year’s resolutions. How to make them? How to stick to them? Are they helpful? I even saw an article offering suggestions for 65 potential new year’s resolutions — on everything from budgeting to mindfulness and from fitness to relationships.
Many of the articles about resolutions are full of questions and advice about why resolutions fail. Are they too vague? Are they too ambitious? Are they focused on the outcome instead of the process? Do you have appropriate motivation? Are you unconsciously sabotaging yourself? Do you have sufficient accountability? And my favorite… are they SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound)? This is the kind of gobbledygook language from my work life that I don’t need to bring into my personal life, thank you very much.
But what is it about this tradition of resolutions that makes it so inevitable every year? The Babylonians were the first civilization to leave records of new year festivities, some 4,000 years ago. Their years were linked to agricultural seasons, with each beginning around the spring equinox. Over a 12-day festival to celebrate the renewal of life, known as Akitu, in order to curry favor with the gods for an abundant harvest, people would promise to repay their debts and to return borrowed objects.
The Romans continued the habit, but changed the date. The Roman year originally had ten months, starting in March around the spring equinox. Around 700BCE, two more months were added, but not until 46BCE, when Julius Caesar proposed a reformed calendar, was January established as the beginning of the year, marking a shift away from agrarian cycles.
Roman new year festivities included the worship of Janus, the god of beginnings and endings, after whom the month of January is named. For early Christians, the first day of the new year became the traditional occasion for thinking about one’s past mistakes, resolving to do and be better in the future. Jews do the same over Yom Kippur, their day of atonement, following the celebration of the Jewish new year on Rosh Hashanah. In 1740, the English clergyman John Wesley, founder of Methodism, created the Covenant Renewal Service, most commonly held on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. Also known as watch night services, they included prayers, hymns, and resolutions for the coming year.
By the time the phrase “new-year resolutions” first appeared, in a Boston newspaper in 1813, the pledges were losing their religious gravitas — and also their seriousness. It was as common to make resolutions as it was to mock them for their low success rates.
Yet the making of unrealistic promises has remained a popular tradition. According to recent research, while as many as 45 percent of Americans say they usually make New Year’s resolutions, only eight percent are successful in achieving their goals.
Nevertheless, this dismal record doesn’t seem to stop people from making new resolutions year after year. Psychologists, life coaches, and others seem to believe there’s science behind the practice. Apparently, something called the “fresh-start effect” makes people better at setting goals around “temporal landmarks,” such as the start of a new year.
Even Mondays prove to be better than other days of the week to turn over a new leaf. A 2021 survey conducted for The Monday Campaigns found that while 11% of people report Monday is “a day to dread,” many people view Monday positively, as an opportunity for a “fresh start” (40%) and a day to “get my act together” (18%).
With respect to new year’s resolutions, the survey found that 86% of individuals who made a resolution in 2021 believe that recommitting to it every Monday would help them maintain their goals. Since a large percentage of resolutions fail because people simply forget about them (23% by one estimate), I suppose this weekly reminder may, in fact, be helpful.
One of the freshest takes I’ve seen on new year’s resolutions this year reflects the collective stress we’ve been through over the past three years. Beginning with the onset of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, followed by the 2020 election and the insurrection at the Capitol, then the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the collapse of the stock market, and the slow drip anticipation of a recession, which may not even come, we’ve all had about enough.
Shunning big goals and high hopes, Erin Monroe took a different approach to the new year. Given all that people are going through, she announced “I think we need to set some expectations.” Filming in her trademark pink bathrobe with a cup of coffee, she posted a video on TikTok proclaiming, “I don’t need 2023 to be my year; I need it to not be a soul-sucking drag through earthly purgatory. I need 2023 to come in, sit down, shut up and don’t touch anything.” She added, “I need a palate cleanser year.”
The message resonated with viewers. Within two days, the video had 1.8 million views and thousands of comments. The New York Times picked up the story. “I feel this in my soul,” responded one viewer. “I just need 2023 to simply ‘be,’” wrote another. “Yesssssss” and “Same girl !!!” commented others. The video now has more than 2.7 million views since she first posted at the end of December.
Monroe wasn’t surprised. “I think people just want some relief, that they feel like they can take a deep breath,” she said. “People are saying I need a year where I can just get myself in order.”
But as refreshing and hilarious and enjoyable as I found Monroe’s take, it’s just not me. As much as I sympathize with this feeling of exhaustion, it’s not in me to succumb to such low expectations. Every optimistic bone in my body tells me to set a higher bar, pushes me to expect more.
So how to balance a healthy suspicion for resolutions with an optimist’s need to make next year better than the one before? A piece in Forbes, of all places, offered a possible approach to my dilemma. The four reasons to make resolutions, even if you don’t keep them, they wrote, include Intention, Hope, Responsibility, and Inspiration. I like all of those words, and they are good reasons to do almost anything. The best resolutions express our intention for improvement, our hope for a better future, our responsibility to ourselves and others to be the best that we can be, and an inspiration for those around us.
I also found a post from author Shawn Achor that suggested a few new year’s resolutions specifically for optimists. Achor claims that only two things motivate a brain: seeing that the finish line is close and seeing progress. So, if you focus resolutions on areas in which you have seen progress in your life that you want to build upon, you’re more likely to recognize that success is closer than you thought. Accordingly, the key to next year is focusing on the good things in this year. I think Achor is onto something.
Researching all of this reminded me of a portrait of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez published in GQ last fall. With the recent chaos around electing a Speaker of the House, she’s been on my mind.
Few people have goals for this country as big or as bold as AOC. It would be understandable for someone with dreams for a future free of misogyny, racism, and homophobia to be discouraged. Fighting against powerful corporate interests, the gun lobby, and QAnon conspiracies and defending herself against personal attacks and threats of physical violence must be exhausting and frightening. “Others may see a person who is admired,” she told GQ, “but my everyday lived experience here is as a person who is despised.”
Somehow, in the face of all of this, at the core of her broader political ideology and world view is that the reality we wish for may be closer than we think. “The world that we’re fighting for is already here,” Ocasio-Cortez told GQ. “It may not be all here, it may not be the majority of what’s here, but it is undeniably here.”
This brings me back to new year’s resolutions. When your guiding principles are fundamentally shaped by optimism and a belief that the dreams you have for yourself and the world around you are within reach, you don’t really need a resolution. You only need to open your eyes to what’s already around you that’s working — and keep building on that.
I don’t want to make my dreams more manageable or SMART-er. If anything, they should be bigger. And everyday, not just Mondays, I want to think about what I’m doing — with intention and optimism, with responsibility and inspiration. Is this getting me closer to the world I aspire to see? Is this contributing to my health? My happiness? The well-being of others? Forget about counting steps or watching calories, I’m trying to save the world. If I’m going to fall short of my resolutions, I better aim high.
