By: Em Li
Two days before winter break, my third-grade teacher waltzed into class, sang our special call-and-response to quiet the room of rowdy eight-year-olds, and began handing out worksheets. With that, I was first introduced to the concept of New Year’s Resolutions. I remember sneaking around, trying to copy resolutions from my classmates’ worksheets, and making fun of my elementary school nemesis’ handwriting. Still, most of all, I remember feeling a deep confusion about my teacher’s gleeful passion for what, to me, was just another assignment standing between me and recess. I thought New Year’s Resolutions sounded an awful lot like promises, and back then I didn’t place so much gravity on making them – I had given countless such promises to “clean my room”, to “give the TV remote to my sister after 10 minutes”, to “leave the Halloween candy bowl alone”, but most of these vanished into the void.
Similarly, the New Year’s Resolutions I made that day were quickly forgotten. As I grew older, the New Year’s Resolutions activity followed me throughout much of elementary and middle school, and I became more and more aware that others shared my propensity for poor commitment. Soon after, I had become a full-grown skeptic of these resolutions, and it was quite lucky that none of my high school teachers built the activity into their curricula.
To this day, I’ve wondered about the reason why New Year’s Resolutions are still so widely practiced. If changing your lifestyle was so important, wouldn’t you just implement it immediately instead of waiting for an arbitrarily numbered date? If there’s so much significance to starting the new year off right, why are many resolutions abandoned? In other words, what practical purpose does the New Year’s Resolution actually serve?
If there are usually no significant changes to lifestyle following these resolutions, perhaps it’s more about the intentionality. Does the intent to do better have value in and of itself? Well, in any other context, we can usually easily come to an agreement that intentionality doesn’t replace action. For example, if I saw an injustice happening to someone and wanted to help but walked away because I wasn’t sure exactly how to help, does that change the reality of what happened to the person? Just because I have an idea of what should be done doesn’t necessarily mean I end up doing good. So, intentionality without action doesn’t have much meaning to its name.
Maybe then, it isn’t the intentionality intrinsically, but an associated downstream effect. Making these resolutions each year offers an opportunity to reflect on how we’ve lived out our lives thus far, and to make changes based on what has or hasn’t gone well. In effect, these resolutions allow us to envision taking control of our lives by changing our own behaviour—this renewed belief in self-determination can be compelling in a world where too often things happen to us instead of being done by us.
Thus, the magic of New Year’s Resolutions lies not in the resolution itself, but in the faith that we can control our own destinies. While knowing that, what’s stopping us from finding other opportunities to reflect and take charge throughout the year, instead of limiting its benefits to one day in the year?
Sincerely,
A New Year’s Resolution Skeptic