I’ve commonly heard the statistic thrown around that only 9 percent of Americans keep their New Year’s resolutions. With that number sitting so low, I wasn’t surprised when many of the people in my life told me they had no resolution for this year. One of my friends actually adamantly opposed the idea of the resolution.
“If you want to make a change, just do it,” she said. “Don’t wait for New Year’s.”
I know that this is a common position to hold these days. I held this position myself for a long time. I’ve recently realized that I do not care to make any big changes during New Year’s. I don’t really feel like making any big changes at all.
Most of the literature I’ve read about habit-making would advise us to make our changes slowly. James Clear’s bestseller Atomic Habits touts the tagline, “Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results.” I think that most resolutions fail because people use them to try to make huge changes in their lives. These changes are often along the lines of exercising more, losing weight, becoming more organized, or some other big, vague hope that’s likely to lead to failure. Oberlin students are especially busy people, and I know that many of us feel like we just aren’t doing enough.
The New Year’s resolution is a chance to focus on adding a strange element to our lives that we otherwise wouldn’t have considered. We should be using our New Year’s resolutions to do something unproductive, unconventional, or uncomfortable. If we use the New Year to add a little bit of whimsy to our day-to-day, we’ll end up living more well-rounded, interesting, meaningful lives.
I have often made overly ambitious resolutions. Something about New Year’s makes me believe that I can change just about anything that I don’t like about myself. I’ve written out long lists of aspirations to reach starting Jan. 1. Wake up at 5:30 a.m. Meditate for 10 minutes. Make my bed. Go for a run. Stretch. Read for an hour. Go to school. Finish all of my homework the day it’s assigned. On and on, I have lists like these dating all the way back to elementary school. New Year’s resolutions began to feel like an annual ritual I performed for the purpose of shaming myself. Inevitably, I would fail at my impossible goals, and then I would spend the rest of the year feeling guilty about it. This cycle obviously applies to more people than just me. If only 9 percent of Americans are keeping their resolutions, that leaves 91 percent feeling sick with themselves about falling short of their ideal selves. The problem here isn’t the tradition of making New Year’s resolutions; the problem is the culture surrounding that tradition.
Americans are particularly obsessed with productivity, efficiency, and individualism. If you want something, you have to work for it. This is a core value of the American Dream. After all, the American Dream promises that, as long as you work hard for what you want, you’ll get it. You are the only person standing in your way. However, there is a sinister message being passed along the underbelly of this story: If you struggle to get what you want, you’re lazy, undisciplined, or stupid.
Imagine that somebody’s New Year’s resolution is to exercise more and eat healthier, and they aren’t able to meet that. Their immediate thought might be to beat themself up about it. Consider, though, that they have a nine-to-five office job where they sit in front of a computer all day. Every day on their drive home, they pass by 15 different fast food places that have optimized their food so that it is as addictive as possible. Even just looking at this typical example, the cards are stacked against this person. In the world that we live in, it is profitable for companies to create an environment that is actively hostile towards long-term resolutions for personal improvement. If we want to make healthy, productive choices for ourselves, we have to gradually chip away at all of the traps that are purposefully set in place by our society. Because New Year’s resolutions typically call for an overnight behavioral shift, they’re not suited for these arduous, uphill battles. Instead, we should be using New Year’s resolutions as an opportunity to take on small, innocuous, and, most importantly, pointless challenges.
I started thinking about trying something like this for New Year’s back in the fall. I got into an argument with a friend because she didn’t believe that I could go without meat. She believed, to my chagrin, that meat-eating was a core part of my identity. I told her I would go vegetarian until the end of the semester. It turns out that being vegetarian is a lot easier than you’d think (though Thanksgiving was not the easiest holiday to test that theory with). I’m not vegetarian anymore, but being vegetarian for a few weeks taught me some interesting things: Some restaurants aren’t that good if you can’t get a burger; you can make chili with just beans and no meat, and it still tastes great; and I would struggle to go vegan because eggs and yogurt are about 65 percent of my diet. I don’t think I would say that it was productive for me to go vegetarian, but the point of the resolution wasn’t to be productive. If I had tried to go vegetarian because I thought it was healthier, I think I would have failed in the first week.
We’re often being told what is best for us. It’s why most people’s resolutions sound exactly the same. However, there are so many ways to live your life, and most of them aren’t going to fit into your idea of perfect American productivity. There is no way to predict what choices will be the best choices for you. If you don’t take on new, weird challenges, you might get sucked into believing that your life has to be regimented and planned in order for you to be happy. New Year’s resolutions don’t have to be tools that perpetuate that philosophy. You are more than a machine. You can use your resolutions to remind you of that.
