New Year's Resolutions
17.2% of Americans said they made New Year’s resolutions in 2017. I did a scaled-down version of that study by asking people around campus what they thought about resolutions, and everyone seemed to be in favor of the idea. After all, what’s not admirable about trying to improve your life? Seeing people around you work to enhance their everyday routine is refreshing, and I think I can speak for a lot of us when I say we’d be happy to root them on. But the idea of resolutions is often where our approval stops. My quick campus poll came to a unanimous consensus about actually achieving these goals: it never happens. Making resolutions seems ridiculous if you never end up changing anything long-term. Of that 17.2% I mentioned before, only 9.2% said they were successful in keeping up with their goals so far—and January isn’t even over yet. When you look into the research and polls and studies, there’s one common theme: a gradual decline in productivity and motivation as the months go by. By July, you’re usually back where you were last December. So what’s the point of even setting these goals in the first place?
I’ve never made any New Year’s resolutions, and I don’t really know anyone who has either. This doesn’t surprise me at all. It should, because everybody has goals, things they’d like to change, habits they’d like to break. The next natural step should be to work on these shortcomings, right? But this “natural thing” isn’t human nature. Ice cream will always be more appealing than running, spending money is easier than saving it, and doing calc homework will never trump watching The Office on my list of prefered study hall activities. Our sinful nature makes us procrastinators, time-wasters, and resolution-breakers. It’s no shock, then, that we tend to refrain from setting goals for the new year. Once you set a resolution and make it public, you’ve made yourself accountable to your friends and family to see it through. Breaking your resolution is suddenly twice as terrifying as before, and your resolve is bound to crack at the mere thought of this.
Humans are complacent and scared of failure. That’s why 17.2% is a small number and why resolutions have a reputation for being pointless. But it definitely doesn’t have to be this way. It’s true that our sinful nature is content with unproductive patterns, character flaws, and bad habits. But we are not just our sinful natures. We have a New Man in us. We’re saved by grace and motivated to live a life that God can look down on and smile at. We all know how good it feels to make good choices and work hard—the satisfaction of printing out an essay you spent hours on, the proud ache of sore muscles the morning after a workout, the energy you have after eating a healthy meal. Once we find the motivation to get off our butts and break our habits, we find that we love achievement and even thrive on it. Downfall is inevitable, of course. No one is perfect, no matter how much they may appear to be. We all fall into ruts, sometimes staying in them so long that they start to feel like home. But with a bit of help from our friends and a lot of prayer, we can get back into the swing of things again. The cycle goes on and on.
I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions as much as I believe in shortening the low points in that cycle. It’s good to have aspirations for yourself. I think it’s even better, though, to remember that you’re allowed to fall short. It’s natural to experience setbacks, but you’ll always have a desire to swing back and rise above. 2 Corinthians 4:16- “Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day.”