DV Expose: Why New Year's Resolutions Are Stupid

You’re never gonna keep them

Honestly, does anybody ever actually follow through on something they have to verbally promise to themselves? If your New Year’s resolution was that goddamned important, you’d just do it – you wouldn’t loudly announce it to friends and family just to show how determined you are to follow through.

Telling your resolution to others might hypothetically make you more likely to stick by it (so as to save yourself the embarrassment of admitting your failure to others), but New Year’s resolutions are way too widespread for this to be the case:  everyone makes New Year’s resolutions they don’t keep, so nobody gives a shit if your promise to lose weight or watch less TV falls through after a few weeks. Therefore, the act of making a New Year’s resolution is ultimately meaningless:  if nobody gives two shits about whether or not you keep it, you’ve got no real reason to persevere, so the resolution falls through and you’re still a fat, TV-addicted sack of shit – and if that’s going to happen no matter what, why even kid yourself by making a resolution in the first goddamn place?

They’re either too big or too small

When you hear the statements, “I resolve to check my answering machine more often,” and, “I promise to enroll myself in Alcoholics Anonymous and stay off the booze so I won’t hurt my friends and family more than I already have,” in the same sentence, something is wrong.

The public nature of the New Year’s resolution means you’ll hear all manner of them at any given party. Ranging from the stupid, small-scale resolution which has only been made because it’ll be so easy to keep, to the enormous, life-changing resolution which would have undoubtedly been attempted anyway because of the intense effect it’ll have on the person’s life, all resolutions are equally meaningless.

I don’t mean to suggest that promising to quit smoking or drinking are meaningless pursuits in and of themselves – they definitely aren’t – but if you find yourself running over puppies and getting DUI’s on a weekly basis, or coughing up anywhere from one to two lungs due to nicotine addiction, the specific time of your resolution probably has very little to do with your decision to make it. No alcoholic has ever been born who, after years and years of binge drinking, suddenly and finally found the urge to put the bottle down purely through the power of the New Year’s resolution. If you’re a drunk piece of shit who really wants to find help, you’ll eventually find help, and the Earth going around the Sun one more time has fuck-all to do with that fact.

New Year’s Resolutions are only interesting from December to March

Notice how you never hear people asking each other how they’re doing with their New Year’s resolutions in the middle of summer? That’s because nobody gives a shit about New Year’s resolutions when it isn’t fucking New Year’s Eve. We pretend we’ll change, and for a month or two we’ll pretend we are changing, but when the chips are down most people will revert to their natural state of being:  laziness. We don’t talk about resolutions six months after they’re made because most of us – especially the douchebags who made resolutions they didn’t keep – simply stop caring once the well of optimistic bullshit finally dries up. The fatass who resolves to lay off the Oreos may initially stay away from his favorite chocolate treat, but you can bet dimes to donuts that he’ll be licking the center of Double Stufs by July.

Don’t be a wimp

The New Year’s resolution exists solely to provide a means for wishy-washy people to publicly announce their intentions to improve themselves. Society tells them to make promises, so they do.

Honestly, how fucking pathetic is that?

What sort of person cares so little about their well-being that they actually have to wait for societal prompting to make some positive changes in their lives? Who could be so indifferent to themselves that they aren’t already trying to make certain parts of their lives better, or improve upon certain aspects of their personality? Do these people have any free will at all?

We’ve all met a few of them – the office dullard, the hard-partying bro, the scenester chick – people who genuinely consider New Year’s a time for renewal and rebirth, rather than the reality that it’s just another goddamned day in a long line of goddamned days. They make a sort of effort to improve themselves on January 1^st because they make no such efforts at any other time of the year.

Don’t be one of those people.