Resolving the New Year’s Resolution
Ah, January. The grey, frayed no man’s land part of the year. It’s like a dejected child at the end of a party - bleary eyed, bloated and on a sugar crash. It is the Bounty of the months: slightly gristly and only enjoyed by psychopaths. Yet it is a tradition to increase this feeling of unease by obsessing over a New Year’s Resolution, a bargain based on self-resentment. The whole self-sabotage of choosing how to be a better you each year smacks of desperation, sadness. Its one redeeming feature is that it is less pointless than Brexit (almost).
Nothing spells gloom like the stale smell of Tupperware radiating from the office microwave as the first wave of diet soups do their (literal) rounds. It’s nauseating watching suspicious green liquids spread like mould in the office fridge. Must we punish ourselves by juicing everything? I find a New Year’s resolution is like facing the wrong way on the train: a slightly disconcerting, uneasy way of travelling forward.
I hate the commercialism of the New Year’s resolution. You can’t just decide to lose weight, you have to buy into it. The adverts promise that if you subscribe to this or purchase that you will unlock happiness. You’ll be able to peel back the plastic film of your past ‘worse’ self to emerge all flush and raw like the vacuum-packed replicants of Bladerunner 2049. It’s punishing. What troubles me is the unpleasantness of it all. Each year we are pushed to choose from the selection box of Top Ten New Year’s Resolutions with the same gaudy advertisements that encouraged us to buy hordes of Quality Street in December. New Year’s resolution is the ploy of marketing companies who have stuffed you silly one season and swear to smooth and tuck the next.
Some resolutions are admittedly good: giving more to charity, learning a new language and putting more effort into sustaining friendships. But posting online about your ‘natural’ gift for Italian whilst ignoring the Duolingo owl is not how you imagined the bilingual life to be.
A resolution is not merely a test of the will - it makes gladiators of us all in the battle for superiority. It becomes its own currency, a new talisman. Yet victory is fleeting and comes in the opportunity to exhale with derision when explaining the complex variations of the burpee. If you haven’t chosen a New Year’s resolution, you become a heathen exiled to the fringes of society. Lighting your way with the soft glow of the Instagram app, you’re left to pick your way among the carcases of discarded Nutri-bullets, towers of rotting Jamie Oliver books and the blades of broken gym cards. Navigating this Mordor of months is enough to make the most erudite of narcissists wince at the bags under their sleep-deprived eyes.
The most popular New Year’s Resolution is the wish to get fitter. By that nebulous term we mean to be smaller, to take up less space. Emerging into the New Year already wanting less of you to be in it is damaging. Instead, read that book on your bedside table, try and call your parents at least once a month. Just don’t get tunnel vision or stifle your real feelings with the sound of the Nutri-bullet. Change can be quiet – nature does it each season. And perhaps this year a moment’s reflection and taking stock before we move into 2020 may be a better way of beginning again.
Written by Esther Bancroft
A recent graduate of Bristol university, Esther has returned to the pen to write a little bit about a little bit of everything. When not staring at a screen trying to be creative, she likes to buy books without reading them and paint pictures of the sea - which is her healthy obsession.