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Why do anything that makes you feel bad about yourself?
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I’d like to offer a quick confession: I do not make New Year’s resolutions. In fact, I’m so put off by the custom that I recently researched who I have to blame for the ridiculous ritual. History.com tells me it’s the Babylonians. Some 4,000 years ago, our misguided Mesopotamian friends began the tradition of making resolutions at the beginning of each new year. I’m sure the Babylonians were lovely people, but I have a bone to pick with whichever one of them came up with the hare-brained idea. Here are three well-considered reasons why.
1. Resolutions ultimately make us feel like a failure
How often have you lived up to your New Year’s resolution? Me either. Had I done what I resolved to do I would have the body of a triathlete, speak four languages, work with orphans, and never roll my eyes at the things that come out of my husband’s mouth.
There was a time in my life when I believed that holding myself to a ridiculous standard was productive. It was not.
Time has taught me to be kinder to myself, to forgive my foibles, and to appreciate the mistakes simply because I learned from them. To set myself up for failure on New Year’s Eve is unnecessarily cruel.
2. Resolutions tend to be short term
Short-term goals are great if I’m planning a vacation or birthday party. It’s also fine if I’m organizing my weekly work schedule. As far as the rest of life is concerned, it’s about considering the future.
After all, you don’t fall in love with someone and ask yourself if you can imagine being with that person in six weeks. If you’re serious about a relationship, you attempt to determine how you might feel about them in 10 or 20 years.
That short-term stuff is for suckers.
If I focused on short-term resolutions and goals, I would spend far too much time fiddling with our investments. I can picture myself obsessively looking for better places to save and invest money, and making expensive mistakes along the way. Like most good things in life, managing finances is about looking decades into the future rather than days, weeks, or months.
3. Picking one day to make a resolution is illogical
My husband and I are occasionally asked how we’ve managed to stay together for so long. The answer is always the same. We haven’t been married to the same person all these years. We essentially meet a new version of ourselves every few years. Our outlook on everything, from finances to politics, has been molded and remolded by time and experience. The same is true of everyone.
How does someone make a resolution on a specific day each year when they don’t know how they’ll feel about that resolution in six or eight months? It’s both futile and unrealistic.
As Mr. Spock might say, it’s “highly illogical.”
The takeaway
I recognize that New Year’s resolutions are a ridiculous thing to get worked up over. I think what bothers me is that we’re already too hard on ourselves. If we want to set goals, we might also want to give ourselves permission to tweak those goals as needed.
Let’s say you want to pay off credit card debt this year and you’re resolved to get it done. One month into your debt payoff, your car transmission sounds as though it’s become home to an alien lifeforce and clearly needs repairs. If paying to repair the car knocks you off schedule, it doesn’t mean you failed. It just means that you need to tweak the original goal a bit.
As for the Babylonians, they weren’t all bad. Aside from being home to the Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, those Babylonians were downright progressive when it came to women’s rights, giving women the right to own property and hold official positions in society.
Their relatively enlightened treatment of women is almost enough for me to forgive them for the whole New Year’s resolution thing.
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