“Auld Lang Syne,” we sing as we clink champagne flutes and bid each other a happy new year; “Old Long Since” — when translated — suggests one final recognition of and reflection upon the year past. And yet, even before the cheers die down and the clock strikes 12:01 a.m., we turn our attention to the year ahead and make our New Year’s resolutions, pledging to change ourselves for the better.
The notion of making New Year’s resolutions itself is not fundamentally malign. After all, this tradition is far from new, with some believing it to date to the 17th century and others dating it back even further, to the tune of 4,000 years ago. There is truly nothing as effective as a major benchmark in time to inspire honest self-evaluation, and when coupled with genuine hope and ambition for betterment, the tradition holds the potential to spearhead a new year of social and personal prosperity. Making and keeping New Year’s resolutions can, among other things, boost one’s sense of self-efficacy, garner motivation to continue to work all year-round and inspire other friends and family to do the same.
While resolutions suggest the need to work on oneself, this need is a notion that should be realized within a spectrum of change and betterment. Change need not be instant and concrete — rather it should be viewed in terms of the gradual bettering of one’s habits and attitude. Resolving to go to the gym more or to take better care of one’s body, for example, is a ‘doable action’ that provides reasonably achieved benchmarks of success. Resolving to be skinnier or more muscular, on the other hand, merely creates a new channel for insecurity and comparison, and leaves one without any formal plan to achieve their goal. Lacking a plan, one is left only with the lingering image of who they wish they could be — an image that is both painful and discouraging.
Unfortunately, we live in a world that encourages quick and low-effort solutions. With the rise of social media and short-form content, there has been an immense decrease in attention spans and a favoring of instant gratification. Keeping resolutions requires effort and attention, the very qualities that social media usage depletes. A growing inability to keep resolutions, however, is not in and of itself a solid argument against making them in the first place. A more sinister consequence of the overuse of social media — therefore contributing more to the tradition’s latent malevolence — is the greatly negative impact it has on people’s self-esteem. Social media promotes social comparison, the skewing of one’s self-image and the equating of likes and comments to genuine validation. In particular, social media imposes balefully superficial standards onto its users, often highlighting inalterable body parts as new sources of insecurity. This past summer, for example, tens of millions of TikTok users encountered videos of people showing close-ups of their faces from different angles and professing that they had “bad facial harmony,” a quality that was virtually unheard of before the trend, yet compiled into becoming another aspect of oneself to obsess over. “Now I have to worry about facial harmony?,” one such user commented under a video with over 32 million views. “We are our own worst critics,” another lamented.
Change should be viewed in terms of the gradual bettering of one's habits and attitude, not in instant and concrete differences in ourselves. It is healthy to recognize what aspects of one’s character need work. The world in which we are prompted to make New Year’s resolutions, however — where we are asked what and how to change in the months to come, is one that suggests that change should be immediate and instantly gratifying, proposing that the aspect of oneself most worth changing is some abstract, arbitrary quality like facial harmony. Therein lies the danger of making New Year’s resolutions.
I have neither the ego nor the nerve to challenge a potentially 4,000 year-old tradition, but it is paramount that we as a society remain aware of how exactly we are changing, and try to adjust accordingly. After all, the lyrics of “Auld Lang Syne” propose a question — should “acquaintance be forgot?” In other words, these lyrics question the lens through which we should view the year past. We must uphold that same spirit of inquiry when we look into the future and make our resolutions. What values are we resolving to aspire to? Ultimately, if the answer is anything short of constructive and holistic, it may be time to hold off on the resolutions and focus our attention on challenging the values of immediate, material change itself.
