New Years' Resolutions

I love New Years' resolutions. Why? Because they're stupid, naturally. It says something about the human psyche that we make them in the first place. Think about the timing for starters. We conform our resolutions to the beginning of the year, yet rarely the problems they are supposed to solve actually begin at the beginning of the year. Rather they begin at any point of the year. Lose weight, get out of debt, find love, etc. None of these ideas are more likely to come to our conscious mind at exactly the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day. We put them off until then though under the premise that somehow the very fact that there is a marker delineating the beginning of the year that we are more likely to go through with the resolution. Of course we don't hold onto them at any better rate than any other "promise" we make to ourselves during the year. Why should we? Dates hold no significance in this sense to our psyche. It's just foolishness. And besides, we're always frightfully vague about what we want to do, as if by simply saying we want something a lot it will come true. We want to lose weight, but we don't eat better. We want to get out of debt, but we keep spending money. We want to find love but we keep sitting at home doing nothing.

New Year's becomes a point at which we can bullshit ourselves over. Instead of the fact that we didn't plan out how we are going to accomplish the goals we want to, we bullshit ourselves into believing in this curse of the New Year's Resolution that because we asked for it, it won't come true. Of course, in the end, we are just bullshitting ourselves.