The New Year New Me Fallacy

You unwrap your new journal or planner. It’s a heavy-paper moleskin or leather-bound beauty with raw pages. Only the best to plan your resolutions. New year, new me, you say.

The Magic of the New Year

Sure, climate change has triggered record-breaking highs, genocides are a thing again, and bread is now the price of a firstborn child.

Everything around you gives you reason to ignore the thrill of a fresh start, but you can’t. This year will be different, you know it. You’re finally going to write that book or lose those 20 pounds. This year you’ll be nicer to strangers and visit new cities. Because 2024 is your year.

Yet here we are.

New Year’s Blues

Fifteen days in and you haven’t started the book. Your new running shoes still have the tags on them. The motivation of the new year has fizzled, and it turns out, you haven’t changed a bit.

And maybe it’s for the best. You still have to brainstorm ideas for the book and you’ve got three birthdays coming up this month, so this is the worst time to start that diet. You’ll get to it next month. Or in the summer.

Even worse is when you give your resolutions a try. You schedule your writing time, and you sit down at your desk, coffee mug loaded, and fingers poised over the keyboard, ready for that lightning idea to get a move on.

But nothing happens.

The words aren’t coming to you. In the silent absence of keyboard clicks, you think maybe your idea isn’t that great after all.

Or when it took three hours to work up to getting to the gym. Now you don’t know where to start. Dudes with biceps the size of your head and gals with abs chiseled of stone make it look easy. You wonder if you have any business being here at all.

I’m right there with you. By now, I should have hit the gym eight times, finished reading two novels and been in the process of editing my third blog post. Instead, I’m struggling through the first with the dignity of a beached whale.

Lottery Success

The problem is that the new year magic makes you feel above it all. Your potential floods your brain with dopamine and all you see is the rose-tinted vision of what you want with no acknowledgement of the details of getting there. It sets your expectations for a lottery success.

Let’s be serious. Who doesn’t dream of becoming an overnight millionaire? Literally every problem in my life right now would benefit from a million dollars appearing in my bank account. New lifestyle, new home, new toys. New year, new me indeed.

The problem with the lottery success is that it’s rare. That’s the point of a lottery. Many contributors, one winner. The odds of being that winner are slim. Local lotteries may have a one in a few hundred or one in a few hundred thousand chance of winning. The Canadian Lotto Max draw has a one in 33 million chance of winning.

But someone’s gotta win, you say. It might as well be me.

Does it really though?

A one in 33 million gamble on a six-dollar ticket is one thing. It’s completely different when we’re talking about your life. Do you really want a one in 33 million chance of leaving that job you hate or feeling good in your body?

RRSP Success

Let me direct your attention to what I like to call RRSP success. And before you jump me, I get it. RRSPs aren’t flashy, they’re not sexy. They’ll never beat the excitement of investing in an obscure stock today and watching the price skyrocket next month. But we’re looking at odds here.

What RRSPs lack in flashiness, they make up for with reliability. You know what you’re getting. Small contributions over a long period, with reasonable interest rates to help you achieve some goal.

New Year, New Me?

It’s time to rethink the purpose of the new year’s resolution. Not so much new year, new me. More like new year, more consistent me. Not waking up on January 1 a completely different person but making a commitment to yourself to simply do. Bit by bit. Every day.

You don’t run a marathon by clicking your heels together and wishing real hard to make it to the finish line. Instead, you put one foot in front of the other until you get there.

Here’s the secret. Accomplishment is only sexy when it’s done. Before that, it kind of sucks. It’s doing the same thing over and over again until you’ve finished. It’s writing 300 words today and committing to do it again tomorrow. It’s walking for 10 minutes today and aiming for 15 tomorrow.

More than that, it’s giving yourself opportunities for tiny victories so you can stack them like Pokémon. If getting ready to go to the gym in the morning is hard, pack your bag the night before. That 80,000 word story won’t write itself overnight, so today you’ll write just the first 10.

The Choice to Try Again

Here’s another secret. The magic of the new year isn’t in the date, or in the idea of a fresh start. The magic is in the optimism that convinces you it’s worth it to try again. So if you’re like me, disappointed in your sameness of self, and considering forgetting about those resolutions because you’ve wasted the first 15 days of 2024, then I have some great news for you.

You’ve got 351 days left.

Don’t fall into the trap of allowing your disappointment in your inertia to drive you to accept defeat. Every day you decide to try again is a success. Every day you think about that goal and do something to get even one inch closer is a good day.

The magic of the new year will fade. When it’s gone, the only thing left is you. I promise that’s enough to guarantee that when January 1, 2025 rolls around, and you say new year, new me, it’ll be true. Think about your most daunting new year’s resolution. How can you get one inch closer today?