by Steven Ogle, CLE Austin
As long as I can remember every January 1st people have begun the New Year with a promise of a better year. It’s a way to re-write the wrongs we didn’t from the previous year. The tradition stems all the way back to the Babylonian era. The Babylonians made promises at the start of each year that they would return borrowed objects and pay their debts. Doing the right thing and giving back does seem like a worthwhile idea. Sadly, in our modern times it has became more about ‘self’ with improving physical well-being topping the list of most popular goals for New Year’s resolutions.
In a 2007 study by University of Bristol’s Richard Wileman involving 3,000 people, he found that 88% of those people failed to maintain their resolutions. The biggest factor as to why many resolutions fail is because many are setting unrealistic and unattainable goals. It’s a factor of long term vs. short term. If you are setting your goals in a short-term mindset, but really needing it to be long term, you’re already setting traps for yourself. You are basically giving it the “Groundhog Day” treatment by looping the same thing over and over again. We need to break that habit. In order to do that, we need to break our mindset. It’s like we’re treating a New Year’s resolutions as we would a diet, which is funny considering what’s topping the list for New Year’s resolutions goals. Diets also don’t seem to last, we need to change and get a new way of going about it.
I’m not fond of how we have changed the meaning of the word resolution. Resolution is a noun that Dictionary.com defines as “a resolve; a decision or determination: to make a firm resolution to do something”. It’s luckily not too far gone like the phrase ‘let it go’. Let it go, which has been short-handed by Urban Dictionary as Let Go, simply means “To let your frustrations, anger, etc. go and not let it stress you out as it has been doing.” Seems powerful, right? Well, I couldn’t find the Dictionary.com’s definition of let it go because of the song from Disney’s Frozen. I could only find Urban Dictionary’s let go definition because the original phrase has been almost completely ruined.
I say all that because just like re-thinking “let it go” we have to do the same for the phrase New Year’s resolutions. It’s stuck in a traditional mindset. We need to break the tradition, which repeats itself over and over. In this way we can hopefully have a longer lifespan and we can not only have a resolution, but a New Years ‘Revolution.’
