New Year's Resolutions Are As Silly As Cheap Self-Help Talk. Here's How We Can Fix That.
A friend of mine who works as a trainer at some local gym cracked a joke on New Year's Eve. It goes like this: "The gym is at its busiest when it's January." He's right. I was going to be part of that new crowd, too. It's been a routine of mine to get myself into shape for about three-to-four months before I ultimately go back to full sedentary mode again (I love my doughboy sweatpants cycle though).
People like me annoy the average fitness person and I understand. A study by CouponCabin in 2012 says that 80 percent of gym members who join in January quit within five months (four percent of new members quit within a month). Fifty-six percent of gym goers complain about New Year’s resolutioners and that includes my buddy. This time, I refuse to be a statistic, at least for now. We'll see how it goes.
This piece isn't about fitness or any of that. The holiday weight will shed itself. It's just that, that conversation got me thinking about the whole "new year, new me" syndrome that people go through at this time of the year. Oh, I'll quit smoking. Or Time to finally lose that weight. Or It's time to really save this time. Sure, we'll keep telling ourselves that. While New Year's resolutions can serve as a good guide for our goals or for how we're going to handle the myriad transitions we want in particular aspects in our lives, they're all pretty frivolous, really. The data validates how fragile they can be, too.
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According to Forbes Senior Contributor Mark Murphy, citing multiple studies, 80 percent of New Year's resolutions are abandoned within a month. Our year-starter goals, just like those gym memberships, are usually dropped between the breaths it takes to say "It's just hard to find the time" and "I'll try again next year." There's going go be excuses and we can't really shame people for it.
Resolutions fail for a lot of reasons: two of them being, we just might have never been that emotionally attached to them, and the fact that we just make resolutions because everyone else is doing it. We may argue that it's in the motivation, too. Maybe we don't need to change as much as we think we do, no matter what self-help gurus or our bosses or tech billionaires with generational wealth tell us.
Yeah, the burn
I think there's something to be said about the corporate-y and nihilistic and almost-absurdist aspects of self-improvement in the tech age, best reflected in the evolution of self-help trends of the past decade. Alexandra Schwartz published this piece in The New Yorker I really liked back in 2018, which summed the dread perfectly. In "Improving Ourselves to Death," Schwartz writes:
"In our current era of non-stop technological innovation, fuzzy wishful thinking has yielded to the hard doctrine of personal optimization. Self-help gurus need not be charlatans peddling snake oil. Many are psychologists with impressive academic pedigrees and a commitment to scientific methodologies, or tech entrepreneurs with enviable records of success in life and business. What they’re selling is metrics. It’s no longer enough to imagine our way to a better state of body or mind. We must now chart our progress, count our steps, log our sleep rhythms, tweak our diets, record our negative thoughts—then analyze the data, recalibrate, and repeat."
To further my point, I just want to dissect the idea of self-improvement, which is adjacent to New Year's resolutions. We've been told that there's always something to optimize within ourselves. It's reflective of the times. There's always a secret we need to find out. Our companies call themselves data-driven and we've effectively turned ourselves into naked data, too. They want more. We want more. Everybody wants more. More product, more work, more growth. The world might be ending and people are dying and a recession is coming but we have to be more, have more! We're growing ourselves to death at the same rate we're expediting (god, what a corporate buzzword; add "efficient" in there somewhere, too, for good measure) some humanely detached goals in our actualization. Given, humanity is at its best when it focuses on progress. But somewhere along the way, we tend to sacrifice the human aspects of existence in our ramped-up quest for development, both in a personal and collective sense.
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Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
We're taught that optimization is infinitely tied into our value as people. We'll go for self-help books instead of reading something that actually has redeeming social qualities. Our brains are turning into mush with each 10-, 15-, 30-second clip. Nobody is patient anymore. We live in a state of constant distraction around our little worlds, all for the sake of the "more" and the inevitable targets we just have to hit. When we consume things outside of the optimization scale, we get branded as useless or as lazy or as crappy people living crappy lives. Becoming aware of this suddenly gets labeled as "wokeness" or whatever fictitious, stubborn, out-of-touch, old-people gibberish used to shame the discourse.
All I'm saying is that it's okay to indulge in things that are outside the stratosphere of self-improvement and New Year's resolutions.
The author James Clear once said: "Rome wasn't built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour. You don't have to do it all today. Just lay a brick."
This is also not to say that self-improvement is pointless. It obviously is an essential part of living. But we do have to dial our notions of it down a little bit. Moderation is a key word here, as with everything. That goes for New Year's resolutions, too. Listen, we can't just expect to break down the wall of ennui with one mighty strike. Every little dent we make is infinitely important to how we can build ourselves better.
New Year's resolutions are cool. Goals are great. Murphy also happens to have this other study called "Are SMART Goals Dumb?" Here, 15 percent of employees say that their goals help them reach great accomplishments. That's good to know.
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Short-sightedness, however, can set us back more than we think. Goals aren't meant to be conquered in a year (of course, some of the little ones can). They're meant to be conquered throughout a lifetime. That's where real improvement lies. Resolutions like these exist because we want some drastic change to be made in our lives, to go from point A to point Z in a matter of 12 months. It's a "manifest destiny" thing and we want it right this second. We don't have the capacity for patience anymore, but we can make it a habit to, um, exercise it a little bit. Great things take time and that includes the parts of ourselves we do want to change.
They say that it takes 21 days to build a habit and three months to turn it into a lifestyle. I say, it takes a lifetime to be the best version of what we can truly be. Outside of the usual self-help playbook is where we can truly thrive. Self-improvement can be fraudulent at times, if we measure it the same way we measure data accuracy. Wanting perfection kills and self-obsession is as futile scrolling through hours and hours of worthless content online.Â
Maybe the real New Year's resolutions are the small habits we can pick up along the way—the beauty and struggle in between the trying. They're simply vehicles for self-improvement. So yeah, I'll go to the gym and get my membership. Ronnie can start quitting her cigarettes. Krissylyn can start saving P200 a day. But if we stumble from time to time, we shouldn't feel as bad about it as we've been taught. It sounds like I'm bracing for failure. No. Well, maybe a little bit.
The only real time we fail is when we don't move an inch. Bullshit targets and timelines be damned. Knowing that only nine to 10 percent of us are going to stick to our resolutions by the end of the year (based on data), we can take comfort in the fact that we tried and that we're going to try again and again... and again... and again... We're only human, for crying out loud. Sometimes, the best we can do is just try stuff. The self-help-branded commodification of ourselves is no way to live.
“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things."
- Epictetus
Ride it out
Pick up a novel, watch real cinema, go to a museum, talk to fun strangers, get a therapist, do a little more good in the world, or acquire random stupid knowledge; go for it the way you would chip away at these usual new year goals (help! I'm doing self-help talk now!). The self-help guru matrix seems inescapable, but it really isn't. It's simply about striking a balance between objectives, enrichment, nourishment, and refinement.
Weirdly enough, there's a philosophical reason to working out beyond the aesthetics that's motivated me over the years. Greek Stoics like Epictetus would draw inspiration for the lessons they'd surmise from sports. He says that athletes are the "archetype of self-improvement." So that's been my mantra ever since (and my own justification as a die-hard sports fan). We could learn a thing or two from them, he explains, if we want to be better people in a holistic sense. Athletics test the physical and mental limits of our bodies. They help us achieve some semblance of harmony in our approach to life. Plus, they're just a good way to keep things tight.
So here we are, about to hit the damned treadmill again for the first time. Time to get fit, folks. Don't run from the grind. All that sports talk, yada-yada-yada. Happy freaking new year to us. Check with me again in a few months.
