With the end of yet another year approaching, most of us are gearing up for celebrations to welcome the next one. Some people will party with their friends, others will watch fireworks and some will just stay home with no other human being in sight. But something that a noticeable amount of these people have in common, regardless of their way of celebrating (or lack thereof) is that they will be making new year’s resolutions.

New year’s resolutions can range from small things to drastic life changes. Maybe your goal is to pet your dog a little bit more than you did this year. Perhaps you want to start that passion project that you’ve pushed back for months on end. Or, like a lot (and I mean a LOT) of people, you set out to “be better” this upcoming year. You’ll wake up earlier, you’ll go for that walk at 5 am, you’ll cut back on the sugar and caffeine. You’ll finally turn your life around.

Except that you won’t.

Not likely at least.

Saying that might just stem from me being a stone-cold pessimist, but I have never met a person who actually followed through on a new year’s resolution for more than a few months, if even that. Not once have I seen someone actually make it to June or July on their resolutions, May only a handful of times. I’m sure there are some who are able to actually follow up on their resolutions, what with there being over 8 billion people in the world and so forth, but it is not very likely given the number of people who make resolutions and give up on them in a few months. I’m not a mathematician and I barely know how to do what others might consider easy mathematic equations, but I know how statistics work.

I also know how human beings work. Or, at least, to an extent. Even if you happen to be extremely motivated, chances are you’re aiming too high and wide, making it near impossible to actually reach your goals. You’ve set far too many resolutions, shooting blindly into the dark and hoping that at least some will hit the target. You’re hoping that at least some will succeed. And if you have a reasonable amount of goals, altogether they would require far too much work to keep up with. You have a life to live, remember? You can’t spend all of your time worrying about your resolutions or adjust everything else in your day to keep up with your resolutions. Life simply doesn’t work like that. You’re setting yourself up for failure.

And once you do fail, how’s that going to feel? Horrible, right? You set out to become the bigger, better and more mature version of yourself and yet you’re still just… the same. It hurts. Setting any goals and then failing to obtain them is painful. Especially so if you’ve failed in the past, but really want to reach it this time. Then the resolutions will just work as reminders of your previous failures, won’t they? And besides, when you’re setting your resolutions, don’t you usually start observing the things that you feel are lacking or wrong in your life? Such a positive note to start the new year on. How insanely fun.

On top of being quite negative, resolutions are also terribly annoying. Everyone’s always blabbering on and on about them, asking each other what their resolutions are going to be and marvelling at the vague, over-the-top changes they’ve set out to make in their lives. I don’t want to set resolutions, and frankly, I don’t care about the resolutions people set. They affect me in no shape or form, yet people insist upon telling me. And knowing that most of them are going to fail and feel bad about failing and complain about not being able to keep up with their resolutions, I’d rather not hear about them at all.

And besides, what do we know about the year ahead of us? If you’ve set out to go out more but then yet another lockdown begins, how are you going to keep up with your resolution? You’ll have to wait another year to start over. Maybe you promised yourself to see your family more often but one of you has to move halfway across the country or even further away. Do you think you’ll be able to keep up with everything regardless of how life moves along? Or, to end on a more positive note, do you think you’ll actually reach your full potential with your resolutions? I think that some resolutions really do limit how much you can accomplish and what you can do. The more dead set you are on resolutions, the more you tend to miss out on life. If you want to make changes in your life, absolutely go for it, but don’t limit yourself by setting goals that require too much of your attention or too much effort. And why wait for new year’s eve to make resolutions? You can start making changes today. Just take one small step at a time.

So, throw your resolutions to the bin, let life take you where it goes.

Happy holidays everyone!