An earlier version of this article was posted on the CIROS Mag website in January 2024.
Written by Daria Aron
Right before the end of the year, and probably at the beginning of every year, you may have thought about your New Year’s resolutions or been bombarded with content about them. I know I was either watching videos about them or just people around me going “This year I will try to…” about a certain element of their life they consider undesirable. But within all of these lists of ways we can better ourselves, have we stopped to think why we treat the beginning of the calendar year as a fresh start?
New Year’s Resolutions 101
New Year’s resolutions are goals you set out to fulfil in the new year. These can be about absolutely anything, from health to financial plans, in personal or work lives. Notably, in recent years New Year’s resolutions have become increasingly seen as ‘big goals’. It’s not enough to say that you’d like to spend less money on takeout, but that you will not have any takeout for a few months if not the entire year. Before going into why resolutions fail so much, it is worth discussing why New Year’s resolutions are formed in the first place. Drive Research indicates that 62% of individuals felt pressure to make such resolutions, from people around them or the media. It is worth mentioning that younger generations tend to make resolutions more than older generations. Millennials and Gen Z’ers in the UK are more likely to make resolutions than older generations, with a proportion of more than 90%. Despite the increase in resolution-making, one study shows that only 9% of Americans keep their resolutions throughout the year, and 23% of adults who have made resolutions will drop them by the end of the first week of January. It’s a bleak image of the success of resolutions.
While some fans of resolutions will argue that having such a goal in place helps with one’s sense of self-efficacy, I argue that the aforementioned pressure is the biggest factor driving the making of resolutions. Hundreds of years ago, forms of resolutions would be made by ancient Babylonians, the Romans and even early Methodists where they would promise something to their respective God. Nowadays, while not of a ‘holy’ nature, resolutions are driven by secular and individualist reasons, one which is driven by the idea of insufficiency. As the new year approaches, society indoctrinates us with the idea that we are never enough in one way or another, and that we need to pick something that is ‘wrong’ with us, to fix in the New Year. This is not helped by the shame culture where nothing we do is acceptable to all and therefore we must be shamed into changing ourselves to fit the right narrative. In order to achieve this, the lovely businesses and industries whose only resolutions are to make a profit, capitalise on this culture by enforcing these same shaming narratives in order to get their two cents from us.
The Industry
For 2025, 43% of UK resolution-makers want to work on their health in the new year. This percentage encompasses anything from exercising more, to eating healthier or just tracking their health. The Mecca that is the health and wellness industry has clocked this trend for years. Think of all of the sales and promotions around December 31st from gyms, wellness shops or other similar businesses all enticing you to be a better, fitter, healthier version of yourself in the new year. In the US, January has the highest proportion of gym sign-ups in the entire year with around 12%, but of these, 80% will stop going to the gym within the first 5 months of the year, and even in the months people are still going to the gym, they go less than people who join at other times of the year. This is attributed to the motivation behind these memberships – one psychologist stated for the New York Post that the pressure from the ‘new year new me’ message is leading people to superficially get better, but not follow through. Setting goals at other times of the year tends to be more ‘thought-out’ and is less subject to external pressure.
I’d like to give a personal homage to the wellness industry, whose main goal is reportedly to help individuals be the best versions of themselves. It is an industry, like any other, which tries to appeal to people’s weaknesses and insecurities, in order to sell their product. January is a very crucial time for this industry. Gym memberships are on sale since “you should start the year by being more active!”, and diets or ‘lifestyles’ are presented in order to get your life back on track because clearly, your life wasn’t on track before. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve had the ‘hard 75’ AKA the deprivation-and-intense-gym-schedule diet recommended to me in the past month, I could pay my tuition fee for both of my degrees. Nonetheless, every January we have to work on ourselves again, refocus, and regroup, despite possibly being fine before. What’s the beginning of the year without someone telling you “maybe this year you should work on …”. Maybe this year I’ll work on being content with my life.
This external pressure, in this day and age, we can thank social media for. Fun fact, an average person consumes up to 74 gigabytes of information a day from the media. Surely, that has an impact on most aspects of our lives, including what we buy and believe. If we are exposed to ‘naturopaths’ that capitalise on some symptoms we have which they contextualise to be harmful, and then present a way we can better that, I would argue the next thing we do is buy whatever can help us. And guess what? Social media algorithms are made to do this, over and over again, so it’s not just one of these specialists we’re exposed to but even hundreds each day. Even scarier, is that a lot of the times when health goals are created 65% of Americans consult the internet before they approach a medical practitioner. Now, putting that in the new year’s context, as we tend to have more free time during the end of the year, we might be on our devices more. Social media creators know this and change their marketing and content purposefully to keep you engaged and sell whatever it is they want to sell (to see more, search up “holiday marketing campaign” on your favourite platform). During an already consumerist-heavy time, creators also capitalise that many consumers are willing to spend more money around the holidays, and use strategies to get us to give them this money.
One last note on consumerism as a whole. Let me paint a little picture: imagine you feel that your muscles are very tight all of the time. You start getting content on your social media platforms that yoga is a great way to address this, so you decide to start doing it. First, you buy a mat and start doing some routines online, but the yogi (the yoga teacher) tells you that you need a proper personalised routine from her, which you need to pay for. Aiming to better yourself, you buy a membership, but to do the yoga, you also need to buy a ball, a block, proper apparel and whatever else the yogi tells you before you even start. By the end of it you have spent hundreds of euros on equipment for an activity you don’t even know will help you or you like. I will let you decide how you feel about that.
So, New Year’s Resolutions: Yay or Nay?
When I think about New Year’s resolutions, I personally think about failure. Although pessimistic, I feel that the content I have consumed has seldom presented New Year’s resolutions as successes, but always as things people feel that they need to change about themselves, and within weeks or months they give up or forget about them. Failures. But why do we give so much weight to New Year’s resolutions, and not as much to other goals during the rest of the year? Take Dry January – the idea that in the month of January one should not consume alcohol (or other substances). Great idea if you want to do exactly that, take one month off from consuming certain things, but the typical morale behind Dry January is that you start the year fresh, sober, and rejuvenated, but how can one sober month help the rest of the year? Also, if we want to get particular, do you fail Dry January if you have some drinks in the early hours of January 1?
Going back to the central question – why is it that if something is done in January it holds more weight than if it is done in the rest of the year? At the end of the day, it is just a month. We, as a society, have allowed it to gain the status of such importance in that it is the first month of the calendar year in which we must fix ourselves from the damage that we caused in December, where we ‘let ourselves go’ since it’s the holidays. December means we can drink and eat more, spend more, and let go of our typical goals. January means we need to repent for December. Personally, I’m not a fan of the social pressure dictating what I should do in either of these months.
I would hate to end this before mentioning financial resolutions. I look more favourably upon them because they typically lead to less spending and less caving to consumerism. One such resolution that is trending is Project Pan, which focuses on stopping the endless buying of products which we may already have 10 renditions of at home, and aims to encourage consumers to first use up their products before buying more. This started as a trend directly related to the beauty industry, but I think it can be used for many parts of our lives. It is an antithesis to consumerist resolutions. Other financial resolutions, which are on the rise in countries such as the UK, focus less on attacking personal characteristics, and while they may attach financial insecurities, I would argue that’s a little bit better for us long term.
So, what’s the way forward? I have (very proudly) titled New Year’s resolutions as a ‘fad diet’ since a fad diet is always a too restrictive and not sustainable way of eating, leading to an imminent failure. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes thinking about setting resolutions can be a helpful reflection of things in our life we are unhappy with, and how we can improve them. But resolutions (or many other time-bound constructs), tend to set goals which are not achievable as they differ from current behaviour too much, are too restrictive and are not sustainable, leading to failure. If you like them, do your thing, but I see them as a toxic, social construct which doesn’t actually add anything to our lives. I think reassessment should happen throughout the year. Setting goals and attempting to meet them shouldn’t be bound by weeks, months, or years. If we want to improve ourselves or a portion of our lives, we should actively and constantly work on that, while also enjoying ourselves. This may be a high ask but perhaps this can be a long (loooong) term goal we can work on, without time boundaries.
Edited by Sol Zeev-Ben-Mordehai and Carmen Rueda Lindemann, Illustrated by Aneri Patel