The New Year’s Resolution. A seemingly innocuous and, on the face of it, potentially beneficial concept. It has become painfully apparent to me, however, that the heady whispers of betterment flung about at this time of year are at best optimistic, and at worst farcical. Not only that, but there’s every possibility that the whole idea, coupled with the inevitable fervent cries of ‘this is my/your/his year!’ is actually rather a destructive one for well-meaning resolutionists, as it were.
Why take such offence to this particular idea, you might ask? In this age of teeth-grindingly peppy catchphrases, is this one really worthy of its own special castigation?
It is not the phrase in itself which is the problem; if it were, I’d probably have had to write about the odious ‘grab something to eat,’ (you’re not a bloody hunter-gatherer, you imbecile). Rather, it is the hopeless optimists (or unabashed con artists) who take refuge in its ambiguity that are the problem.
When you think about it, a year gives people far too much leeway. January is perceived as something of an ordeal. Thirty-one days of near-constant darkness and incessant flood warnings, without the cheery prospect of Christmas to ease the pain; something to be endured, then, as opposed to made use of. After that comes February, which is plagued, albeit to a lesser extent, by the same problems. It isn’t even really a month either, since it’s only 28 days long.
Thanks to the forgiving length of the year, however, all those people who woke up with a throbbing hangover and a case of frostbite on January 1st and airily declared that they were going to better themselves immeasurably in the coming 12 months can rest happily (and lazily) in the knowledge that a year is long enough that they needn’t bother joining the gym, or giving up the fags, or parting ways with whatever other unseemly proclivity it is that troubles them, until a more affable month arrives. Like March.
Of course, by the time March actually rolls around, they’ve completely forgotten that this is, in fact, their year. They’ve abandoned even the faintest notion of joining a gym, and the wastepaper basket is still full to the brim with shiny boxes adorned with pictures of cancerous lungs.
The reliance on the year as a defining time-period in this way is horribly misguided. The Mayan and Aztec civilizations who constructed early calendars put forth a rough determination of the length of a year (the time it takes for the Earth to rotate around the Sun) based on the solstices and equinoxes and other such solar phenomena. The exact length of the calendar year has been modified over the centuries by the great minds of generations; they were even kind enough to iron out certain mathematical inexactitudes with the introduction of such natty developments as the Gregorian calendar and the leap year.
My point is that while much serious thought has been donated to determining the duration and most suitable measurement for a year, for very significant reasons, at no discernible juncture in history did one of humanity’s great thinkers conclude that 365 days was, in fact, the ideal length of time for fat people to wean themselves off curry chips and Haribo Starmix. So why must we place such incorrigible faith in the turning of the year as the supernatural key to self-control? It simply doesn’t make sense.
My personal biases, of course, do not form the sole basis for my disgruntlement; the numbers speak for themselves. A neat little website called ‘Statistic Brain: Research Institute,’ tells us that 62% of those surveyed on the subject make New Year’s resolutions at least some of the time; of these, 24% report being uniformly unsuccessful in all their attempts, while 49% report “infrequent,” success. The survey also tells us that a quarter of resolutions will fail inside the first week of their life, and that only 46% survive past the 6-month mark. These statistics hardly make for encouraging reading.
To conclude, then, let us resolve to abandon this halfhearted, self-destructive tomfoolery in favour of immediate, incisive action. Rather than relying on the vast expanse of a whole year to find time to solve our problems, let’s start tackling them in a week, or even a day. Let’s approach our collective back-monkeys, not with vacillation, but with determination and poise. And let’s do it in March.
Happy 2016, folks.
General 