Imagine this: it’s Jan. 5, and you’re at the peak of health. You work out twice a day, eat healthy food, and are the paragon of discipline. Everything’s golden. Flash forward two months, and you’re sitting at home with a bowl of chips, watching TV, when you receive a notification. It’s an email from your gym. The subject line might as well read, “You wasted your money.” The email asks if you want to cancel your membership. In that moment, failure washes over you. The promises you made? They’re left in the dust, right next to that gym membership card and your brand-new running shoes.

New Year’s resolutions (NYRs) are akin to participation trophies. When you inevitably stop trying to improve yourself, you tell yourself, “Oh well, I tried, guess I have to wait until next year.” But the same thing happens next year, and it’s an endless cycle of hope and disappointment. The act of giving up is almost as much of a ritual as the resolution itself, intentional or not. Who decided that Jan. 1 was the ultimate reset button for a new life? This year it’s just another Wednesday, except this one comes with a countdown, a new calendar, and oh-so-many expectations.

Yet there has been no cosmic shift, no fairy godmother, no pumpkin carriage, nothing at all to indicate that you are now a new person. The New Year gives you that hit of motivation; you are so excited to reinvent yourself, so ready to do it all. This year, you’re going to learn a new language—no, make that two—and write what may be the best novel to have ever existed. On top of all that, you are never going to touch processed food again.

You’re buzzing with motivation and excitement, and everything is going so well. Life happens—you can’t figure out the accents in that new language. You have writer’s block. You don’t have time to shop and cook. The next day is that much harder to get to whatever it is you were planning on doing, so you take a break. And that break never ends. The motivation will run out, and the perfect vision of your NYR is a distant, foggy memory, more theoretical than real.

The issue is that you’ve committed to huge changes. You’ve bitten off more than you can chew. The truth is your NYR is unrealistic. Just thinking about what you want to do this year doesn’t mean that it’s actually going to happen. Intention is nice, but it requires action.

Some protest that NYRs provide hope and a fun way to set goals. Maybe they do, in the same way that setting off to New York with nothing but a dream and a dollar in your pocket provides hope. You’ve gotten there, but what then? Hope without action is just a daydream but with better marketing.

Good habits aren’t just going to come to you with enough positive thinking. It’s like a houseplant; you have to water it every day, and even then, it looks like it’s on the brink of death some days. You just have to keep trying, and eventually, that plant will flower. Commit to small, unglamorous changes that will, with time, get you where you want to go.

If you make any goals for 2025, choose something like getting eight hours of sleep every night. Choose something that is realistic, simple, and healthy. Instead of a wildly romantic “New Year, new me” take on 2025, how about a tamer, more realistic, and most importantly, more compassionate approach: “New day, slightly better me”?

Or better yet, instead of making an NYR on Dec. 31, write down everything you have accomplished this year. Put that list somewhere you can look at it every day. Big or small, we all have things to celebrate.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the movie-makeover montage-style transformations that we envision for ourselves in the New Year. You can’t just skip over the work and get to the good part, nor can you forget to celebrate the little wins along the way. Instead of trying to fit into a cookie-cutter mold of an ideal life, just try to do a little better every day.

– Noor Alameri
Artwork credits: “New Year’s Resolution” by Gavin Wang