New Year’s resolutions: The ritual of trying

Three days before Jan. 1, I laid down in bed and stared at my ceiling. As the blades of my fan spun around, slightly shaking the room, I thought about what my New Year’s resolutions would be for 2025. 

Every December, during Winter Break’s inevitable period of boredom, I devise a list of unrealistic goals for myself for the upcoming year. Last year, when I appeared to be at the height of a health kick, I wrote down, “practice Ayurvedic medicine” and “do not eat processed foods under any circumstances.” I remember rushing to the Whole Foods health aisle, scouring the shelves for ashwagandha, black seed oil and brahmi. Those three-month supply supplement bottles have been sitting on my desk shelf for almost a year now, mostly untouched. 

When I was 16 years old, I wrote that for 2023 I would “work on self-awareness.” When I told my mother, she was perplexed. 

“Do you think you need to be more self-aware or less self-aware?” she asked me. 

“I think it depends on the situation,” I told her. “Sometimes I think I’m too self-aware, but other times I definitely need to be more self-aware.”

She sighed at that and wished me the best of luck. 

This year, however, I am attempting to be more realistic with my resolutions. I have come up with 15 practical goals for myself, all of which I think are relatively achievable. I tried to be specific with each one, so as to not be misguided by the vagueness of a goal. I decided to focus on my personal, academic, physical and financial well-being. I am going to try to read 30 books, call my grandmother weekly, finish a screenplay by the end of the school year, walk 10,000 steps every day and put half the money I earn each month into a Roth IRA or an S&P 500 index fund. 

I shared my 2025 resolutions with a few of my friends and they all agreed that my goals seemed achievable and realistic. Then, they shared a few of their goals with me. One of them resolved to listen to one new album a week and spend less time on social media. Another said she was going to make the dean’s list and try to pass the Bechdel test at least once this year. My best friend said she wasn’t going to have any resolutions this year besides attending a CorePower yoga class twice a week.

“I’m not even going to make a list because my goals change every two hours. There’s no way I can keep up with all of them — I’m just setting myself up for failure,” she said to me over a text message.

In a sense, she is right. Every January, millions of people across the world — myself included — tell ourselves that this will be the year we establish order in our lives. We deceive ourselves into thinking that we have the willpower to withstand our wants. We are supposedly making a lifestyle change that will make us better, more satisfied people. Resolutions are steps on the path to self-fulfillment and realization. The little changes we make in our lives will ultimately help us become better versions of ourselves. 

Yet, we rarely keep our resolutions. Research suggests that only 9% of Americans complete the resolutions they’ve made and 23% of people give up by the end of the first week, and I am no exception. Despite it hardly being 2025, I have already begun lapsing on a few of my resolutions. I’ve promised myself I would walk 10,000 steps a day, which I usually achieve in Ann Arbor because of the walkability of the city. But during Winter Break, when I’m at home in Dallas, this seems like a Sisyphean task. Why would I change out of pajamas and into running shoes to mindlessly stroll around my neighborhood? As much as I adore the fresh January air and the opportunity to observe my neighbors and their happenings, the comfort of my house, where I can watch television and doze off on the couch, beckons me more. 

It’s an inconvenience for me to change my routine to accomplish this goal of mine. For me, and likely many others, resolutions are unattainable because they require an actual change within ourselves. I have to force myself to overcome the wonted comfort of my current life. I need to put forth a sustained effort to improve myself. That’s just too much to ask when I could easily continue sustaining myself the way I always have. 

What leads so many resolutions to fail, I think, is this desire to remain in the placidity of our lives. From my own resolutions and those shared with me, it’s clear that most of them are fairly attainable. At most, they require small lifestyle changes that ask of us a few hours of our weeks, like promising to go to yoga biweekly or journaling every night. Yet, it is so hard to do these things. It’s not the actual activity itself that’s difficult — I thoroughly enjoy the static repetition of Vinyasa flows in a dimmed studio after a long day — it’s that I have to go and actually do it myself. Our minds are fickle things: They tell us to give into our senses, to skip out on what’s good for us, despite our subconscious knowing otherwise. 

With resolutions, we tell ourselves that we always have more time, especially in the earlier months of the year. I could start on my goal of walking 10,000 steps during Winter Break, when I have ample time to do so. But couldn’t I just start on it when I’m back at school, where I’m forced to walk anyways? How awful would it really be to push it off by a few days? I have the whole year, don’t I? It’s this mindset of thinking we always have more time that kills resolutions. The first time I skip walking, I think to myself, “Oh, it’s just this one time. I won’t do it again.” The next time it happens, I think, “It wouldn’t be the end of the world if I don’t walk. I’ve already missed it before and the year has just started.” And then I’ll taper off on this goal, telling myself each time that it’s fine if I miss one more day before I give up on the resolution altogether in the next few weeks. 

And when I do give up on these resolutions, I’ll tell myself that it was inevitable. I’ll say it was an unrealistic goal and make excuses on why I couldn’t do it. I’ll cast them as silly promises I make to myself each year, as a game to see how long I’d really last before I give up. But really, it’s me coping with my own inertia, my own lack of action. I know very well that I can follow through on my resolutions. But I’ll probably let my senses win, as they do every year.

Yet, despite the fact that I recognize the inherent failure that comes with New Year’s resolutions, I will continue to make resolutions for myself every year. I don’t necessarily think I’m setting myself up for failure. Instead, I find it somewhat admirable that I know what parts of me I need to improve in myself. It’s more about the ritual of making a resolution, the naive optimism of my December self thinking I can do better, than about the resolution itself. And though I never complete all of my resolutions, I try to, at least for a while. For a brief period, I try to better myself, as do many others. There lies a genuine earnestness in our collective drive to do better, and that should remain year after year, even if we give up eventually.

Statement Columnist Riya Kommineni can be reached at riyakom@umich.edu.

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