TemplarKnight’s Opinion on New Year’s Day and Resolutions

We are now solidly into 2024. It is starting to get to the point where we write 2024 more often than 2023 and then have to awkwardly turn a 3 into a 4. So now is the perfect time (or well past it) to discuss New Year’s Day and the Resolutions that have fallen out of fashion.

So, it seems to me that New Year’s as a holiday has fallen out of fashion. Most of the time when I ask, “What are your resolutions?” I get a haughty “I don’t DO resolutions. No one keeps them, and if you need to change something, you should do it NOW and not wait for some arbitrary day of the year.” They say this in very much the same attitude that someone bragged about having such a disdain for television that they literally turned their TV so it faced the wall. 

New Year’s Eve is just an excuse to stay up late, and New Year’s day is just to sell gym memberships. However, I don’t see it that way. I personally want to reclaim New Year’s. 

People talk about New Year’s being an arbitrary day of the year. ”August 13th is no different from January 1st. Just another day in the calendar, which is a manmade construct. People who treat it as something special are gullible sheep people.” I get where they are coming from and if you seriously need to make a lifestyle change, doing it today is better than waiting until later to do it. However, people largely are incapable of doing a 180 on their behavior at the drop of a hat. 

A good example of this is the Ice Bucket challenge from years ago. People dumped ice on themselves and challenged others to do it to raise awareness and donations to ALS. People came out of the damn woodwork to call out the challenge as stupid and that you should just donate anyways. However, due to the challenge, donations skyrocketed. Then people came out and said that almost none of the donation money went to actually cure ALS, because again, they did not know how charities work. Yes, we SHOULD be donating to worthy charities on the regular. Yes we SHOULD be making positive changes to our lives whenever we need to. But we don’t because most of the time we are just trying to get through the day without it hurting. 

So I say, make New Year’s a day like Thanksgiving. At Thanksgiving, you are supposed to reflect on the things that you are thankful for. Mainly Turkey Legs. On New Year’s Eve, you should treat it as a time of reflection on the past year. What do you wish you could change from the last year and make goals to make it better in the New Year. 

So now that we have established when you should think about your life and what to change, let’s sit down and discuss a new way to Resolution. 

Years and years ago, I saw how almost all my resolutions ended in failure. Largely due to them being vague or totalitarian in nature. I had to eat better, lose weight, go to the gym every day, give up sodas forever, etc. I ended up giving up after a period of time. I tried making my resolutions more specific, like getting under a specific weight. I tried making them easier, like losing 10 pounds. Mostly for naught. Usually I would not remember my resolutions until the next new year. I then had this idea, that came from a very simple source:

Base my Resolutions on Achievable one time goals that are either pass or fail. Accomplish this one task, and your resolution is done. I don’t have to constantly be the best version of myself. I can fail, I can pick myself back up, I can try again the next day. I can lose focus and pick it up at a later date to complete it then. Staying constantly focused for a long period of time has never worked for me, I do better with concentrated efforts in a short period then maintaining a pace for a long period. 

The bonus is you can leverage smaller victories into overall improvements. For example, say your ultimate goal is to pay down or pay off your credit card debts. Make your resolution to pay off one card. From there you can use that to start paying off the others. Little victories, short term goals, use them to steam roll into your long term goals.

They don’t always work out the way I want them to. I pay off one credit card, but then make no further headway and end up maxing the card out again cause I am overall just bad with money. So if anyone wants to set up a GoFundMe to help with my financial woes, that would be a kindness. 

I would say my most successful resolution of all time would be the year I decided to go on a date. I had been single for 8 years, and the biggest part of the problem was me not getting out of my own way. I would convince myself that most women would say no or I just didn’t have the motivation to put myself out there. I would say I needed to wait until I was in shape enough, or in a better life situation, or any of the number of things to stop myself from just asking a lady out. So I made it my goal one year to go on one date. At the start of the year, I was functionally homeless due to house hunting, so I was living with my parents in my old room(which had been converted into my mom’s scrapbooking room, so I had about 6 by 10 amount of space to call my own.) So I didn’t make any plans to start actively dating until I had a place to stay. Well, about 2 weeks after we closed on the house, I successfully got my one date. And that date was with the woman who is now my wife.

Yeah, every other resolution I had that year failed horribly, but not all resolutions are made equal. So with all that being said, I recommend that if you are having problems sticking with your resolutions, or if you have given up on the concept in general, give my method a try. 

Next Time: TemplarKnight’s 2024 New Year’s Resolutions.