The Folly of New Year Resolutions

David Aikman

The turkey has been digested, the gifts put away (or put on, if they are clothes), and the wrapping paper thrown out. After the Christmas gustatory extravaganza, it’s time for a few days of slow movement, of writing thank-you letters, and self-congratulatory exhalation. Christmas has been survived once more and life can continue its uneventful way forward.

But no. Within a week of Christmas many people find themselves practicing yet another ancient cultural ritual, the challenge of New Year Resolutions. The end of one year and the beginning of another always offers two opportunities: to look back at the previous twelve months and ponder the ups and downs of that period; and to look ahead to the next and wonder what can be done differently then. By the office water cooler, over coffee in a friend’s office, on the phone late at night with a close friend, conversations year after year turn to the subject of New Year Resolutions.

“I’ll exercise more.” “I’ll eat fewer carbohydrates.” “I’ll watch less TV, read more books, stay in touch with old friends” are typical Resolutions. The fundamental premise of them all is that, in some way during the previous twelve months, the speaker consistently demonstrated a vice—failing to exercise, being too lazy to write letters or e-mails—that has rendered the Resolution necessary.

The folly of the whole idea of a New Year Resolution is that, by mere virtue of having a new numerical designation, the New Year will endow the speaker with the willpower for self-transformation that, quite obviously during the previous twelve months, he or she failed to exhibit. Does 2007 magically change the 2006 couch potato into the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the local gym? It’s doubtful. Health clubs notoriously experience a surge in membership in January that has become a trickle by March.

Still, people go on making New Year Resolutions, sometimes the same ones year after year. Why do we repeat this folly, when empirical evidence shows that statements of a desire to change, in and of themselves, almost never cause people to change their behavior in actuality?

English essayist Samuel Johnson is famously quoted for having said, of second marriages, that they constitute “the triumph of hope over experience.” That, surely, can also be said of New Year Resolutions. They amount, in a way, to a belief in magic—that the new number of the year will change the emotional and psychological makeup. They also, of course, constitute a less vicarious attribute: a belief in hope. Hope, of course, is what Christians have traditionally called “a theological virtue” (as in “faith, hope, and charity”). Yet it has its limitations. Perhaps, as talk about Resolutions comes around again, one should ponder another Englishman’s aphorism about hope. Francis Bacon said that hope “makes a good breakfast but a poor supper.” Exercise may not be needed after all.  

Dr. Aikman is a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum and writer in residence at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. His website is www.davidaikman.com.

11 Responses (comments are closed) • Provocations, Character and Ethics, Society, David Aikman, Thu 04 Jan 2007