New Year's resolutions have always confused and frightened me.
Every year it seems almost everyone is overcome by frantic shame and guilt, fuelled by the ever present desire to be a better version of oneself. Of course, I understand the basic premise of the New Year's resolution. We live in a society where we are chronically overworked at the same time as we are being told we can always do more to make ourselves and our lives better.
The ugly part of this is that being better always comes with a ‘‘should'', and ‘‘should'' makes people feel bad. If there is something you should be doing to make things better, that implies what you are currently doing instead is wrong, or not enough, and that you need to stop doing what you want to do, or what you can do, in order to do something else.
This isn't a sustainable way to live. To my mind, living is a process of ornamentation. Simply being alive means you're doing quite a number of things right, and if there are areas you feel could use some improvement then adding to, or slightly altering, the way you currently do things seems more positive and practical than implementing huge lifestyle changes.
I know I personally am a creature of habit, and forcing myself to do things that don't work into my routine can be really difficult and can make me more stressed than I was to begin with. But, I also know that at the end of every year I do take note of what is and isn't working in my life, and I think it's pretty normal to reassess your goals, and your needs and desires. A lot of the time, though, I don't want to disappoint myself by setting impossible and upsetting goals, and more than that, all I really want is to make myself feel a little better with each year of my life.
Almost two weeks into the new year my only non-abstract resolution is to floss my teeth a little more frequently; mostly I just want to take better care of myself. And, for me, that means not setting concrete goals but instead looking out for myself when I notice parts of my life that don't feel as good as they could be. I think it's important to realise it isn't possible to have a totally perfect lifestyle. The only thing you can really do is find a way of living that is as comfortable for you as possible, and that is different for everyone, and more challenging for some than others.
Setting goals can be helpful, and so can being strict with yourself, but feeling strung out and shameful about what you aren't doing isn't going to help, and it's going to make the first few months of your new year a lot less fresh and exciting. Taking note of what you are doing and what you are achieving already is going to make it easier to see what more you might want to achieve, and it's going to make you feel good.
Quite often the things we are told we need to improve are things that are either enough on their own (our bodies, our minds), or are societally near-impossible to change (our material wealth, our working lives). Remembering your resolution probably isn't going to instigate structural change is a good idea; there's only so much you can control. The New Year is a good time to decide you want to be happier, but you don't need to feel bad about yourself to get there.
Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
